UserLand Software
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
UserLand Software is a U.S. software company founded by Dave Winer in 1988. UserLand sells Web content management and blogging software packages and services.
In 1992 UserLand developed Frontier, a scripting environment and a companion language called UserTalk for the Macintosh. After Apple took most of Frontier's market by bundling its own scripting language, AppleScript, with new systems, UserLand ported Frontier to Windows. The Frontier kernel was made open source under the GNU General Public License on September 28, 2004.
During the Web boom of the 1990s, Frontier became the technology behind Manila, a content management system that allowed the hosting of web sites and their editing through a browser. UserLand ran a free Manila hosting service, EditThisPage.com, which quickly began being used mostly to run weblogs, which Winer helped popularize. UserLand also ran one of the first Web aggregators, My.UserLand.Com, which allowed users to follow numerous weblogs from a single web page using an XML format created by Netscape and Winer, called RSS. After Netscape abandoned its My.Netscape RSS project, Winer continued to promote and develop a version of RSS that he later called "Really Simple Syndication." Other developers promoted a competing version of RSS based on RDF).
In 2001 UserLand combined My.UserLand.Com's aggregator and Manila's blogging functions to create Radio UserLand, a lower-cost client-side tool that let blogs be uploaded to UserLand's servers as part of the annual software license fee. Radio Userland is a client-side weblog system incorporating an RSS aggregator, which was one of the first programs to both send and receive audio files as RSS enclosures (see podcasting). UserLand was an early adopter of the RSS syndication method, merging Winer's Scripting News XML format with Netscape's original RSS. When Netscape ceased development, Winer and Useland continued to promote the hybrid format, defining it as Really Simple Syndication. (The earlier name RDF Site Summary no longer fit, since Winer had convinced Netscape to remove RDF syntax from the RSS format. RDF supporters created what they called RSS 1.0, inspiring Winer to rename his version RSS 2.0. The "fork" in the RSS definition created years of animosity in the developer/blogger community.)
Userland's proselytizing for RSS included developing XML feeds for the New York Times company.[1] The original feeds used a variation on standard RSS, and the feeds were only publicized to UserLand Radio bloggers. The Times later broadened its support of RSS, but the original relationship is still visible in Times RSS feed addresses, such as http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/userland/HomePage.xml
UserLand is the owner of the open-source software Frontier, the kernel for both Radio, Manila and Dave Winer's OPML Editor, which uses the UserTalk scripting language. Frontier was once a popular Macintosh scripting solution and content management system in its own right, and Manila began as an application bundled with the scripting language.
