Aaron Swartz (born 1986) is a writer, web developer, and entrepreneur. 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, before leaving to work on his company full-time. Infogami failed to take off and Y Combinator founder Paul Graham encouraged fellow startup reddit, another company that was involved with Y Combinator's inaugural session, to hire Swartz as an engineer. Both products are now part of not a bug. Infogami is well short of its full functionality, and has not been updated since May 2006, when Swartz apparently discontinued its Google Ads service.

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 fired from his position at Wired Digital.

In September of 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 the web.py web application framework, based on the Python programming language, which is used by both Reddit and Jottit.

Swartz is an active blogger and has written a number of widely read essays on his blog. Two of his more well-known pieces include “Who Writes Wikipedia”, 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”, an article on personal productivity.

Swartz currently lives in San Francisco.

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.