Edit This Page

"OK, I will explain why this piece is so important. The summer and fall of 1999 is when blogging software first emerged. Prior to that time, web publishing existed, but you had to know some code to have your own page on the web. There were people doing a kind of proto-blogging, but they were geeks. What Dave Winer is talking about in this piece is how we can make the leap from the “read only” web – a web that most people can only read – to the “read-write web”, a platform where the average person is both an author and a user of stuff others author. The key moment is in the title: “Edit this Page”. If every page can be easily edited by the users, then the users can be publishers. And the static web gives way to something much more exciting and participatory and social. For example, if we combine the ease of self-publishing with domain expertise – people who know a lot about a given area, like the mortgage industry – what do we get? We get not only niche blogs by experts, but also a different power relationship between them and the professional media. Dave later summarised this as: The sources can go direct . All this was being sketched out in May 1999, before anyone realised what a force blogging and social media would be."