“Working the web since 1995, Derek Powazek is the creator of many award-winning websites, a couple of which still exist.” (source)
Does this sort of construction grate on anyone else? I’ve been looking at it for a while, and I don’t think it’s actually grammatically wrong–the “working the web” modifier doesn’t dangle–but the sentence flow is right off. The “modifier” doesn’t justify what follows, for example, which would be the expected outcome of a sentence that starts like this ("Working the web since 1995, Derek Powazek is ; it stands pretty much alone, unmoored.