After seeing some other comments I went and looked into it. It seems Winer is the one who thinks he invented RSS.

Reality seems to say multiple competing XML formats for content syndication existed around the same time. Someone took some features of Winer's format and combined it with an existing one and called it RSS. Shrug

And on inventing blogging I read up thanks to wiki [1], as usual, and lo and behold! The claim his blog is one of the oldest is sourced! To an interview in which he claims it about his own blog, and then discounts it a sentence later.

I have no opinion on if this guy actually influenced as much of tech history as he seems to think, but history has either been very unkind to him, or he promotes himself beyond the facts.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogging

[2] http://news.cnet.com/2008-1082-985714.html

The article you link to clearly says that RSS used some of Winer's scriptingNews syndication format.

That would be a neat trick, since RSS was created at Netscape a full year before Winer got involved.

http://www.rssboard.org/rss-history

Over time, the number of Internet technologies Dave Winer didn't invent approaches zero.

To clarify, I don't have a dog in this hunt. I was just responding to the original comment about "who is this Dave Winer guy?"

The first blogger I ever encountered was, of all people, Bruce Campbell. He was doing regular, personal updates to his website way back around 2000.

The term "blogging" came a good time after this.

A couple of sources on the history of blogging. Bernstein's reminiscences of the personalities show that little changes...

http://tawawa.org/ark/p/jorn-barger-community.html

http://www.markbernstein.org/Jul09/Flames.html