As blogging pioneer Dave Winer\u2019s site turns 30, it\u2019s a reminder that good writing and thinking has flourished beyond the reach of social media<\/p>\n
If you log into Dave Winer\u2019s blog, Scripting News<\/a>, you\u2019ll find a constantly updated note telling you how many years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds the blog has been running. Sometime tomorrow morning the year field will switch to 30. Which will mean that every single day for three decades Dave\u2019s blog will have been stirring things up.<\/p>\n He\u2019s a truly remarkable figure<\/a>, a gifted hacker and software developer who embodies the spirit of the early internet. In the 1980s he created ThinkTank, a new kind of software called an \u201coutliner\u201d,<\/a> which computerised the hierarchical lists we all use when planning an article or a presentation, but which were up to then scribbled on paper. Like Dan Bricklin<\/a>\u2019s spreadsheet, it was a novel idea at the time, but now you find outliners built into almost every kind of software for writing. There\u2019s even one in Microsoft Word, for God\u2019s sake!<\/p>\n