Dave Winer’s starting to squirm under the increased scrutiny he’s getting here and elsewhere since he heckled Jason Calacanis at Gnomedex.
Back from Mozilla. The meeting was great, no agreement, but typically, someone is flaming, and the weirdos love it. Thanks Jason!
We live in a new age, where everyone is tracked by paparazzi, and every word is analyzed for a negative soundbite. The age of Rove.
@chrisbrogan, well, when you lead a 45-minute discussion, and the whole thing is summarize by 1 quote, out of context, that’s rovian, imho
As you can see, he continues to blame Calacanis for the consequences of his own actions, ignoring the fact that this situation has occurred a dozen times before. The pattern’s as clear as lather, rinse, repeat — Dave abuses Somebody, Somebody responds in kind, Dave forgets Step 1 ever happened and plays the injured party for the latest iteration of sycophants on Scripting News who haven’t figured him out yet.
This morning, he fans the flames further:
A sacred lineToday I got a brief note from Jason Calacanis requesting that I not mention him on my weblog. This requires a public response. The answer is no. Jason, you just crossed a sacred line. I decide what belongs on this blog. If I worked for you I would resign, just like the editor of PC World did, when they tried to control his editorial. Geez, I hope you don’t do this to the editorial people who work for Mahalo.
The longer this goes on, the more clear it becomes that Winer has an ulterior motive for trying to bring down Mahalo. The new search engine is the first product of Calacanis’ entrepreneur in residence gig at Sequoia Capital, a VC firm where his job is to burn money bootstrapping new dot-coms into existence.
As a couple of old Scripting News posts show, that’s Winer’s dream job:
June 2, 2005: “I think I would like a teaching job somewhere, where I could work part-time as an entrepreneur in residence, at a VC firm, perhaps.”
June 29, 2004: “Yesterday I posted a note saying I’m looking for work. I’ve gotten a bunch of interesting responses, not with offers, but with ideas about what I should do next. Someone said I should be an entrepreneur-in-residence at a VC firm. Interesting idea. Yesterday I had dinner with a friend who’s well-connected in financial circles in Boston and Silicon Valley to talk about something like that.”
The father of modern-day content distribution who helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS couldn’t find a VC firm crazy enough to hire him. Does anyone doubt that Winer’s takedown of Mahalo is fueled by resentment?
Only in Winer’s mind can an attempt to de-escalate be offensive.
I doubt that. it is, as your post stands now, a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy.
Mind you, that just means the reason for Winer’s resentment are different.
To me, this whole shindig seems to come from an insecure ego (Winer’s harping of RSS shows that, too, IMO).
The post just keeps growing and growing today. I have to wonder, when accepting his apology Monday did Jason Calacanis think in his wildest dreams that he’d be fending off attacks from Winer for the next 4 days?
More importantly, is there anyone else in the world who would apologize to you, have you accept that apology and then with no further action between the two of you go right back to bashing you? and then continue to do so for days and days to the point where you have to ask them to stop mentioning you on their blog?
Crazy…
I wish I had the strength to just stop watching this train wreck… but it’s like reality TV. It exposes human nature in the most authentic fashion: it’s not carefully crafted art… it’s a mumeesy glimpse into what makes us human.
Soon, Blogging may get it’s own “Dr Phil” to attempt to counsel these situations towards some form of closure.
I’ll quit reading Dave’s blog after he does his analysis of Gnomedex. I think we can probably predict his take… Gnomedex was too commercial and strayed from the principles of the Unconference: “the audience has more knowledge than any speaker could ever have so… let the speaker facilitate the audience.”
That way, Dave can mention that someone is “spamming” and the audience can then spend a good bit of time debating if the presentation is a self-serving ad.
I would never pay for such a conference but that’s probabl the only structure Dave can accept. N-way dialogue with the right to confront anyone you disagree with before they can make their case without debate.
Chris Pirillo has benefitted from dave’s interest in his show but the mutual benefit if probably over since Dave won’t recover from GnomeDex 2007. It will linger for years.