A toast to Dave Winer

Dan Gillmor offers a toast to Dave Winer on his 50th birthday for seeing the future.

"I still remember the moment I saw a big piece of the future. It was mid-1999, and Dave Winer called to say there was something I had to see.

He showed me a web page. I don’t remember what the page contained except for one button. It said, "Edit This Page" -- and, for me, nothing was ever the same again...

What Dave and the other early blog pioneers did was a breakthrough. They said the Web needed to be writeable, not just readable, and they were determined to make doing so dead simple.

Thus, the read/write Web was truly born again. We could all write, not just read, in ways never before possible. For the first time in history, at least in the developed world, anyone with a computer and Internet connection could own a press...

Dave just celebrated his 50th birthday, and has been feted by many for that milestone. I add my good wishes here, with my certainty that he has many more years and achievements yet to come."