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Aaron Swartz
Born	November 8, 1986 (1986-11-08) (age 23) Chicago, Illinois, United States
Occupation	Software Developer and Writer
Website http://www.aaronsw.com/

Aaron Swartz (born November 8, 1986) is a writer, activist, and programmer. He is currently co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

At age 14, he was a co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification. Since then he has become a member of the W3C’s RDF Core Working Group, co-designed the formatting language Markdown with John Gruber, and has been involved in many other projects.

Swartz was the founder of Infogami, a startup that was part of Y Combinator’s first Summer Founders Program. Previously, he attended Stanford University for a year, leaving to work on his company full-time. Infogami merged with reddit to form not a bug but failed to take off.

In late 2006, reddit was sold to CondéNet (the online arm of Condé Nast Publications and the owners of Wired) and Swartz moved with his company to San Francisco. In January 2007, Swartz was asked to resign from his position at Wired Digital.^[1]

In September 2007, Swartz, together with Simon Carstensen, launched Jottit, a website service quite similar to Infogami. Jottit was launched from bitbots.net, a project by Swartz and Carstensen. Swartz is also the creator of the web.py web application framework, based on the Python programming language, which is used by Jottit (and previously reddit).

Swartz is an active blogger and has written a number of widely read essays on his blog. Two of his more well-known pieces are “Who Writes Wikipedia”,^[2] an article examining the contributions to Wikipedia articles written during his candidacy for the Wikimedia Foundation board election in 2006, and “HOWTO: Be More Productive”,^[3] an article on personal productivity.

Swartz currently lives in Cambridge, Mass. He works on Open Library and watchdog.net and is on the board of Change Congress.

Publications

• Swartz, Aaron. “MusicBrainz: A Semantic Web Service”, IEEE Intelligent Systems, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 76–77, Jan/Feb 2002.
• Swartz, A. and Hendler, J. “The Semantic Web: A Network of Content for the Digital City”, Proceedings of the Second Annual Digital Cities Workshop, Kyoto, Japan, October 2001.

References

1. ^ A Chat with Aaron Swartz
2. ^ [1]
3. ^ [2]

External links

• Personal website
• Infogami.com and Infogami.org
• reddit
• web.py Web frameworks
• not a bug
• Jottit
• bitbots.net
• watchdog.net
• “Undergraduate Overachiever”, Wired, September 12, 2004
• Aaron Swartz at the Internet Movie Database
• Video interview/discussion of Swartz by Will Wilkinson on Bloggingheads.tv
• Video debate/discussion involving Swartz and Dean Baker on Bloggingheads.tv