A few days ago, Dave Winer, one of the true pioneers of the Internet age marked the beginning of his fourth decade of blogging. Just saying that is amazing.

I became a blogger because of Dave. Let me quote from my 2004 book, We the Media, to explain. Context: I was then a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News when I got the call that changed the trajectory of my work. This is the beginning of Chapter 2, entitled “The Read-Write Web” —

I still remember the moment I saw a big piece of the future. It was mid-1999, and Dave Winer, founder of UserLand Soft­ware, had 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.

I clicked the button. Up popped a text box containing plain text and a small amount of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the code that tells a browser how to display a given page. Inside the box I saw the words that had been on the page. I made a small change, clicked another button that said, “Save this page” and voila, the page was saved with the changes. The software, still in prerelease mode, turned out to be one of the earliest weblog, or blog, applications.

Winer’s company was a leader in a move that brought back to life the promise, too long unmet, that Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, had wanted from the start. Berners-Lee envisioned a read/write Web. But what had emerged in the 1990s was an essentially read-only Web on which you needed an account with an ISP (Internet service provider) to host your web site, special tools, and/or HTML expertise to create a decent site.

Writing on the Net wasn’t entirely new, of course. People had done it for years in different contexts, such as email lists, forums, and newsgroups. Wikis—sites on which anyone could edit any page—also predated weblogs, but they hadn’t gained much traction outside a small user community, in part because of the techie orientation to the software.

What Winer and the early blog pioneers had created 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. Just about anyone could make the news.

What is remarkable to me is how consistently Dave has pursued his mission over these decades — creating and contributing to key technology, evangelizing open communications, and so much more. Today, he’s deeply and productively engaged in the movement to reclaim the user-controlled Internet from the centralized behemoths that have taken so much control away from us. Human communication is at stake — which means our future is at stake in all kinds of ways.

Dave’s blog is a daily testament to staying power and creativity. Kudos to the man who has done so much for so many.