"I'm an oddball," says Mr Dave Winer, and few would disagree. As a matter of fact, some would add a few spicier terms as well ("Winer", a programmer once sniffed to me during an interview, "lives up to his name".) Mr Winer is one of the best-known programmers in the world, gets e-mails from Bill Gates, and, to the exasperation of some and the delight of others, always says what he thinks.
"It's totally OK to be a chief executive and a writer," says Mr Winer, whose daily, often deeply influential DaveNet and Scripting News columns have tens of thousands of readers and subscribers, including many of the technology industry's leading figures and pundits.
"I wear both hats and I've gotten comfortable doing that."
Mr Winer is unusual in that he is passionate - no, obsessive - about the Web as a communications medium. Rather than simply create the content creation and management software that allows anyone to become an online publisher, which is what his company, Frontier, does, he also writes nearly every day, often at length, about technology, about people, about music, about an amusing website, about the death of one friend, the birth of another friend's baby.
But especially, about technology; his opinions on what's good and what's silly, wasteful, churlish and infuriating. He chastises, he cajoles, he often unleashes a flurry of e-mail from some of technology's biggest names.
Journalists keep an eye on his columns because they regularly flag important issues and meaty story ideas. Love him or hate him - and he attracts strong feelings one way or the other - this burly, bearded figure whose bespectacled face grins from his website cannot be ignored.
Talking to him is like finding yourself on the back of a bull - several tons of brawny will carries you at speed in a dozen directions at once, an experience both exhilarating and exhausting. He will stop politely to hear a question but one answer leads to at least five new trains of thought and you're away again in a rush of opinion. One of the first things he does - after making a few of his trademark, direct, sometimes abrasive comments on people and companies in the technology industry - is to note, almost gleefully, that everything is on the record. In a four hour, rapid-fire, constantly swooping and gliding conversation poolside at his Woodside-home, only once does he ask that a remark remain private.
Dave Winer takes saying what he thinks very, very seriously, because he takes communication very, very seriously. That's one of the reasons that Frontier now hosts nearly 6,000 websites created by people using his software. In particular, he is interested in weblogs, highly personal sites that people fill with links to stories, websites and ideas of interest and surround with their own commentary. Mr Winer's site has an entire section of weblogs, thousands of them, some extremely professional, some clumsily amateurish. "I just want to see a lot of publications started," he says.
Why? Because he says he believes firmly in the US Constitution's strong backing for freedom of speech; because after preparing to retire after many lucrative years as a programmer in the 1980s, he was shown Mosaic, one of the first Web browsers, and went right back to work setting up Wired magazine in the early 1990s and realised no one could edit his opinions if he put them online himself; because he believes in the small, singular voice rather than the homogenised corporate voice.
"The Internet is the end of the corporation as a viable structure for creativity," he says happily, sprawled in a chair by the pool, California sunshine beating down. "The Web is not about corporations and never has been. But the technology industry hasn't understood that." He thinks the Microsoft antitrust trial reflects this: "It's not just Microsoft that's on trial. It's the whole idea of reliance on corporations."
Mr Winer came to this conclusion around a decade ago, when he wrote an essay about how Microsoft had failed to grasp the importance of the Internet and posted it to an e-mail list. "Basically, it said it's all over - Bill Gates is not going to win this one," he says. "And then, Bill Gates responded."
That brought home to him the power of the Internet to reach everyone, everywhere, people one could never expect to reach through any other medium. Better yet, he says, it is a two-way medium that allows dialogue.
Mr Winer thinks most journalists and the traditional media have been timid about really accepting the two-way Internet street - ironically, especially those who run many of the Net's best-known news sites - because being directly responsive to readers and the subjects of stories can be terrifying. Technology journalism is often written by people who know nothing about their subject and are easily manipulated by corporate public relations, he says. He thinks journalists would have more power going it alone on the Internet.
For Mr Winer, integrity means saying what you mean and meaning what you say. That's why there are virtually no holds barred in any discussion with him - he'll argue, work through a perspective, chide you gently for holding an opinion he disagrees with. And always, there are the blunt opinions, accompanied by a large and resilient ego. "I'm hugely influential at Microsoft," he says, while making some point about corporations and programmers - and of course, he is.
But he's perfectly ready to bite that hand for what he sees as the company's various shortcomings. Bill Gates's problem is "he hasn't learned his limitations". The company "deserves the DOJ (Department of Justice)", he says, in reference to the major antitrust trial. "They so clearly were so wrong. They were just gloating." He can be scathing about Apple Computer and its chief executive Mr Steve Jobs - Mr Winer shifted from developing his company's products for the Macintosh to the Windows platform a few years ago, a decision which received much publicity since he'd always been associated with the Mac.
There's more. Web directories such as Yahoo have it all wrong, but then, so do search engines like Alta Vista and Google. He is furious and vocal about companies like Google and Amazon.com filing for patents on Web technologies. So who does he admire? "Tim Berners-Lee (the British researcher credited with inventing the Web). He is the embodiment of the Web. He's generous - and that's the key part of the Web."
Dave Winer is at www.scripting.com klillington@irish-times.ie
