Aaron Swartz is a writer, hacker, and activist currently living in San Francisco. He co-authored the RSS 1.0 specification, helped develop standards for the Semantic Web, and designed the metadata system for Creative Commons. He co-founded online news startup Reddit.com, which was purchased in 2006 by Condé Nast, and currently manages the non-profit Open Library Project which is building a wiki with a page for every book ever published. His writing has appeared in a variety of magazines and journals and he has been profiled in Wired and Newsweek.
Aaron Swartz has had a computer since before he was even born. By the age of thirteen he created his first web application -- programming a system with essentially the same idea as Wikipedia -- which went on to make him a runner-up in the ArsDigita Prize for web applications developed by young people.
Shortly after that he built the first modern news aggregator and co-authored the RSS 1.0 standard for news aggregation. He also joined the RDF Core Working Group at the World Wide Web Consortium, the standards body for the Web, and worked on the Semantic Web, writing popular guides as well as specifications.
He joined the founding team of Creative Commons, a non-profit dedicated to strengthening the public domain and providing alternatives to "all rights reserved" copyright, where he worked on their web site and developed their metadata system.
He then spent a year studying sociology at Stanford University, before taking a leave of absence to co-found Reddit.com, a popular technology news site. The site was receiving millions of visitors a month when it was purchased by Condé Nast, the American publishing empire.
Aaron left Condé Nast after the acquisition and begun a new project, Open Library, whose goal is to create a wiki with a page for every book. He also co-founded a new startup, Jottit.com, which makes it incredibly easy to start a website. In his spare time he maintains and mentors a number of free software projects and writes for a variety of magazines.
He has worked with Tim Berners-Lee and Lawrence Lessig, spoken at numerous conferences, including Comdex, WWW2002, and the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, taught a class at MIT, appeared in publications from the Chicago Tribune to Boing Boing, appeared twice on the front page of the Boston Globe, and been profiled in Wired and Newsweek.
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