Essay

Assignment 1: ITC213

The boom of the Web 2.0 has seen many new online technologies that bridge the gap between geographically and time-wise dispersed persons, bringing them together in aid of a common goal or objective. Two people that have helped revolutionise web 2.0 in today’s society are: David Winer and Adam Curry.

David Winer, - the protoblogger - a software engineer, is widely known by peers and web entrepreneurs alike as a father to podcasting and blogging, and making great contributions to RSS, (Winer, 2007). Winer used to create software projects to be sold to large organisations. The major works include : –

1:- Creating one of the first blogs called Scripting News, and creating the interest for people to USE and VIEW blogs on webpage Dave-Net (Oxyegen Inc, 2009).

2:- David created a Really Simple Syndication technology that paved the way for RSS news feeds, and blog updates to subscribers, (Winer, 2007). RSS was given life by David in 1997, which allows users to create their own custom home pages for subscription feeds to be fed to. RSS was improved my David to bring RSS 2.0, making 1 obsolete. RSS is a blog tool, aiding the development and usability of Blogs.

3:- David was a keen problem solver, and after being asked by Adam Curry, he developed an RSS element that would pass an address of a media file to an RSS aggregator. In David’s web-blogging tool Radio Userland, which had a built in aggregator, the components were able to be sent and received, creating audio blogging, (Wiki, 2009).

The evolution was for David, firstly after becoming so sick of Microsoft, to play his own game, and help define the Blog. Once the blog had caught on, the emphasis was on how to improve blogs, and extend the blog usability to many new different areas that were yet to be defined.

In my opinion, there were two lightbulb moments for Winer – the first was creating this blog tool for users to describe daily angst or any other daily activities they wish to publicize. The other tool was the RSS tool, that is used by websites, and news feeds, online magazines, and by blogs. David really helped emphasise and extend the usability functions of Blogs. I think David is a good manager for his work group. He has responded to Adam Curry’s want and need for audio-blogging and together they have created podcasting. David has realised that other users may have wants and needs that will help make blogging become a better tool. Winer has profiles on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Flickr, making use of other web tools that strive to bring together online communities.

Adam Curry – Otherwise known as the Podfather – was an MTV radio host for around 7 years and was one of the first celebrities to run and administer their own website (Wiki, 2009). Curry was one of the first people to create a successful podcast show, called Daily Source Code, and his heart is truly with audio-blogging and podcasting, (Wiki, 2009). Adam has spent his life as a broadcasting personality and also as a young internet entrepreneur aiding and changing the way users receive information. Adam also used his time to script and record promotions for other podcasting websites, and was heavily involved with a few of these. Adam was so into getting audio out to subscribers that he created a domain mtv.com around the time of the internet first appearing for general use, that got all mtv related information out to subscribers. Although podcasting was around before, it was Adam that synergised the way podcasts were created, (wiki, 2009). Adam brought his radio host expertise to podcasting, garnishing it with proper scripts, proper audio content and mixing this with RSS for subscribers, changing the way podcasts were going to be created completely.

Adam worked with David Winer to get podcasts and RSS to run hand in hand. Together, They synergised a way to get podcasts to download and transform to play on mp3 players, and ipods, (Wiki, 2009). It seems Adam also has a big head, since he has been caught changing the podcasting history wiki page to include more information about himself being the frontier to wikis, (Workbench, 2005).

I think Adam is a good change manager, changing the emphasis of written blogs to audio blogs and even changing the way that podcasts are created, as everyone followed suit with how to make them. I have done extra-curricular podcasting work myself, as i prefer to listen than to read, and i think it is important to synergise a set of rules to follow when creating podcasts. There must be a bench mark to follow, and it seems Adam has helped set this.

Both men have been entrepreneurs to the way users gather and follow information, David with creating the ways to do things, and Adam in setting guidelines on how to deliver the information. Each has played a major role in online community development and the development for new online technologies that are becoming or have become commonplace.

Wikipedia. (2009). Dave Winer. Retrieved 13^th September from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Winer#Podcasting

Winer, D. (2007). Dave Winer bio. Retrieved 13^th September from http://www.scripting.com/stories/2007/02/21/daveWinerBio.html

Oxygen Media Inc. (2009). David Winer. Retrieved 13^th September from http://ecommerce.hostip.info/pages/1086/Winer-David.html

Wikipedia, (2009). Daily Source Code. Retrieved 13^th September from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Source_Code

Workbench. (2005). Adam cought in sticky wiki. Retrieved 13^th September http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/2818/adam-curry-caught-sticky-wiki