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 W3Cs RDF Core Working Group, co-designed the formatting language Markdown with John Gruber, and has been involved in many other projects.

Aaron 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 joined reddit, another company that was involved with Y Combinator’s inaugural session, and 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.

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.