In a story about a YouTube musician who pretended to be an amateur as a publicity stunt, Andrew Orlowski of The Register remembers Dave Winer’s Crying Game moment with podcaster Madge Weinstein:
This isn’t the first example of some unwritten “authenticity” rule being broken, either. You may recall a story from the infancy of podcasting, three years ago. The man who likes to credit himself with inventing podcasts, Dave Winer, was outraged at being fooled by a female impersonator.
“It’s an act!”, he gasped incredulously on air — on noticing, after several episodes, that a podcaster called Madge had a day’s stubble and an Adam’s apple. So outraged was Winer, that he demanded a directive from the podcaster on how he should interpret it: a sort of self-certificate of authenticity.
“I need to know which parts of what’s she’s doing are real!”, he pleaded. (See our story, Harvard Man in lesbian mix-up wants satire clearly labeled.)
As with Winer, this is just control-freakery, beyond anything a record company could envisage. And there’s such a mean-spiritedness about it, too.
Next time Dave wants credit for podcasting, let’s remember that Dave didn’t want podcasting to enable Ask a Ninja, Tiki Bar TV, Strongbad… Or frankly for that matter, Rocketboom (which I know he’s touted many times, despite it being scripted). Not to mention, BBC podcasts (scripted!), etc.
Pretty much everything I actually subscribe to and consume with regularity in the world of podcasting, Dave gets zero credit for for “inventing” from me. If it were up to him, those podcasts wouldn’t have happened. Podcasting would have been reserved for random stream of consciousness mumbling in an aging-hippie-drone voice, and 30 second videos shot of his new HD TV or whatever.
Crediting Dave with any of the halo of modern-day podcasting is like crediting the British with the halo of the American BIll of Rights. Mighty nice of them for that initial colonization but we don’t tend to ‘credit’ them for having lost the battle for control of the republic years later.
Dave outrage over Madge’s act was a reaction to a terrible “canned sketch”. It was not based upon his “discovery” that Madge was a female impersonator.
There’s a “Daily Source Code” (Adam Curry) or “Trade Secrets” podcast with Dave and Adam Curry complaining about Madge being a fraud: mormally Madge does politically inspired rants and this sketch was an attempt at packaged humor with another “actor” playing a psychiatrist. It was dreadfully “unfunny” and not politically inspired.
It’s worht mentioning that Dave and Adam did this final “Trade Secrets” podcast from Miami where they were meeting with Ron Bloom and financial backers about the creation of “Buku Networks” which later became “Podshow, Inc.”.
Ron Bloom and the financial backers didn’t want Dave involved. I think you could hear Adam’s struggle in this podcast as he wrestled with the conflict of starting the company and having to betray Dave’s effort to build excitement and support for Podcasting. Adam was clearly conflicted and in the end had to cut ties with Dave.
IN other words, Adam Curry is a pretty good judge of people and Dave’s colors finally surfaced in the brainstorming sessions they had in Miami. Dave and Ron Bloom did NOT see the core of the company in the same light. Ron wanted to make a lot of money and Dave wanted to destroy main-stream media and make some money. IN that order, IMHO.
Podshow is doiing rather well without Dave’s assistance. He doesn’t even mention it except when there’s some bad press to point at.
My favourite Podcasting moment was when Dave was drinking coffee, he burped crassly and he remarked something like:
“This is the beauty of podcasting; I can just burp and not edit it. Isn’t this all just so raw and cool?”
Riiiight.
Very similar to the podcast where he stopped talking, mid-sentence, and then announced that he was going to go get some more coffee. He didn’t take the mic. For two full minutes you hear his trailed-off, distant voice babbling about how great podcasting is because he wouldn’t have to edit this part out.
Dave’s view of podcasting, like most technology, is how well it works for the implementers, not the end-users.