“Dave” becomes first .blog blogger

Blogging pioneer Dave Winer has become the first person to start blogging at a .blog domain name.

His new site, dave.blog, went live yesterday as a beneficiary of registry Knock Knock Whois There’s pioneer program.

The site is one of two pioneer .blog domains — the other being design.blog — highlighted by KKWT yesterday in publicity connected to the opening of its sunrise period.

Winer is the author of Scripting News, which has been around since 1997, one of the first must-read tech blogs.

He also made major contributions to the format and popularity of RSS syndication technology.

He was an outspoken critic of Google, which had planned to use blog in a “closed generic” fashion, linked closely to its Blogger service, writing in 2012:

I played a role in establishing blogs. How does Google get the right to capture all the goodwill generated in the word blog?

Yesterday he expressed relief that the .blog auction was actually won by KKWT, a subsidiary of WordPress owner Automattic, writing:

I’m glad to say that my friend Matt Mullenweg and Automattic are consistent champions of user and developer freedom. That’s why they host .blog for all to use. They could have said “blog” == “wordpress” — many companies would have — but they didn’t. That’s very good! I wish more big tech companies had that philosophy.

Winer said he will use his self-developed 1999.io blogging software on his new domain.

His allocation of dave.blog is arguably bad news for blokey British cable TV station Dave and disgraced former prime minister David “Call Me Dave” Cameron.