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.
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 also sells Manila, a content-management system and server for hosting large numbers of weblogs or other websites.
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.
