The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz Page #2
"How could you ever have such a terrible idea?"
Me and my other brother would be like,
"Oh, you know, yeah Wikipedia is cool, but..."
"we had that in our house, like, five years ago."
Aaron's website, theinfo.org,
wins a school competition
hosted by the Cambridge-based
web design firm ArsDigita.
We all went to Cambridge when
he won the ArsDigita prize
and we had no clue what Aaron was doing.
It was obvious that the prize
was really important.
Aaron soon became involved with
online programming communities,
then in the process of shaping
a new tool for the Web.
He comes up to me and is like, "Ben, there's this
really awesome thing that I'm working on."
"You need to hear about it!"
"Yeah, what is it?"
And he explains to me what RSS is.
I'm like, "Why is that useful, Aaron?"
"Is any site using it?
Why would I want to use it?"
There was this mailing list for people who are
working on RSS, and XML more generally,
and there was a person on it named
Aaron Swartz who was combative but very smart,
and who had lots of good ideas, and
he didn't ever come to the
face-to-face meetings, and they said,
"You know, when are you gonna come out
to one of these face-to-face meetings?"
And he said, "You know, I don't think
my mom would let me. I've just turned fourteen."
And so their first reaction was: "Well, this person,
this colleague we've been working with all year
was thirteen years old while we were
working with him, and he's only fourteen now."
And their second reaction was:
"Christ, we really want to meet him.
That's extraordinary!"
He was part of the committee that drafted RSS.
What he was doing was to help build
the plumbing for modern hypertext.
The piece that he was working on, RSS,
was a tool that you can use to get summaries
of things that are going on on other web pages.
Most commonly, you would use this for a blog.
You might have 10 or 20 people's blogs you wanna read.
You use their RSS feeds, these summaries of
what's going on on those other pages
to create a unified list of all the stuff that's going on.
Aaron was really young, but he understood
the technology and he saw that it was imperfect
and looked for ways to help make it better.
So his mom started bundling him on planes
in Chicago. We'd pick him up in San Francicso.
We'd introduce him to interesting people
to argue with, and we'd marvel at his horrific eating habits.
He only ate white food, only like steamed
rice and not fried rice 'cause that wasn't sufficiently white
and white bread, and so on...
and you kind of marveled at the quality of the debate emerging from this,
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