There’s an A-List cage match going on at Gnomedex this weekend between Dave Winer and Jason Calacanis. Calacanis was giving a speech on his new startup Mahalo, a human-powered search engine that will crush Google by creating spam-free search results compiled by thousands of quick-fingered Guatamalan orphans who won’t be missed by anybody if they disappear.
Winer, though they are ostensibly friends, heckled him from the audience and called the speech “conference spam.”
After a little back and forth on their blogs — in which Jason was like “don’t front me bitch” and Dave was all “oh no you di-in’t” — Calacanis announced that he’s been dropped from Winer’s friends list:
I’m sad, but somewhat relieved, that Dave told me our friendship is over. He informed me of this in his third berating session of me in 24 hours, this time at the end of lunch. I’m not interested in having someone berate me like this, and I’m certainly not interested in having him berate people at the TechCrunch20 conference.
Winer likes to shut people up at conferences by claiming they’re just selling something, as beret-wearing continuous partial attention blowhard Stowe Boyd points out:
I remember the mess at one of the Bloggercons, where Winer wouldn’t let Bob Wyman, then of Pubsub, speak because Winer thought it was commercial speech, although Bob had only said a few words. He also browbeat the indominable Chris Nolan when she stated unequivocally — in a session on “Making Money With Blogs” — that yes, she did want to make money blogging, and not use blogging as a means to make money some other way. But he kept telling her “No, Chris, you don’t want to make money that way.” And she kept responding, “No, Dave, I do.” He just wouldn’t accept what she was saying. It went back and forth a half a dozen times, at least.He melted down again not long after at some blogging conference in Tennessee, I think, with Glenn Reynolds this time.
He’s a loose cannon, held in high regard for his contributions, but a powder keg. I had an actual pain in my stomach when he showed up that this year’s Reboot, although he actually didn’t attack anyone in public.
Winer has strong but totally misguided anti-commercial impulses, especially in conferences where many or all of the attendees are interested in commercial applications. Making money isn’t an intrinsic evil, and commercial speech is sometimes sensible and desired.
It’s weird that anyone takes Winer’s anti-commercialism seriously, considering that he sold Weblogs.Com for a couple million, has a mancrush on venture capitalist John Doerr and chased the buck as hard as anyone. (Remember when he secretly took $5,000 from Adam Curry to make his blog a default subscription in Radio Luserland?) At Gnomedex in ‘05, Winer gave a speech on the OPML Editor, a project that’s only non-commercial in the sense that it has no commercial value.
Winer doesn’t explain what climbed up his backchannel and made him so mad at his Palacanis, but it probably was this use of his name as a verb:
I’ve gotten dozen folks telling me not to give getting “Winered”* a second thought. From what they said Dave has a habit of yelling at people at conferences including Blake Ross last year, Microsoft employees at the search champs event, and many others.
The best part of this fight — they sat three seats apart at Gnomedex while posting the blog entries that turned them from BFFs to FU2s.
I love the way Dave gets all personal, and then hours later bitches that his ‘opponent’ is making it personal. When will people learn that Winer doesn’t have friends, just people he hasn’t yet made into an enemy.
Curry actually paid $10,000 for his Radio Userland placement.
To me, Winer’s greatest sin is not the antics he himself commits but how he tends to drag people I respect down with him. Scoble was the first blog I read and I suspect 90% of the blogs currently in my feed reader were links I got from reading his blog. Plus, the guy puts his phone number on his Blog for gods sakes…bottom line is that I had a lot of respect for him. But each time he stands up for Dave he loses more and more credibility to the point that, if given the chance to meet him at a conference, I think I’d probably just pass.
Which is why I’m so disappointed to find I’ve lost respect for Jason Calacanis as a result of all this. The truth is, if Jason really wants to claim he’s never heard of Winer behaving this way towards anyone in the past than I have to call him a flat out liar. Given that fact I consider it pretty low for him to complain now because he’s the victim after watching Winer eviscerate so many others in the past.
If you condone the bully as he beats up other kids you lose the right to complain when the bully turns around and beats on you.
Calacanis is far from perfect, but Dave’s actions in this situation smack of utter hypocrisy. Dave responds to Calacanis’s post by declaring it a personal attack, while in his post that set this issue off, he says his ‘friend’ is “ranting,” “spamming” the audience, and that his presentation is “a joke.” Is this not personal? And what of the reported heckling?
Off topic, but how shitty must his blogging software be when such dead-simple blog features like “next” and “previous” buttons break when he’s not at home to attend to things:
This reminds me of another bug I observed periodically for a good six months, until I finally unsubscribed from his feed, where posts from several years ago would appear. I feel sorry for him — he’s spent so much time kvetching and picking fights for the last five years or so that he’s lost most of his programming skills.
You’d think a heckler would have the stones to handle a little criticism himself, but that’s never been Winer’s MO. Can you imagine how he’d react to a friend heckling him onstage?
The criticism over this latest stunt is getting to him. He deleted this comment on his blog from somebody named James:
What was the occasion when Winer was speaking and had a total hissy fit when someone in the audience merely chuckled to himself in response to Winer’s offering an opinion as fact? There’s a video of it somewhere.
That was at BlogNashville, where Dave acted like an ass while running a panel on blog civility!