I don’t have Jason Calacanis in my feed reader… so today was the first I’ve seen of any of his posts, when I got caught back up from an extended weekend. I saw Dave’s posts first, and (silly me) I expected Calacanis’s posts to be vicious and personal, as Dave claims they were. Fact is, though, that Jason’s post makes a lot of sense and I’m not really sure where Dave came up with this “personal” thing, except that he always says that when someone disagrees with him.
New EoW poster Bullshit Mancuso mentioned Weblogs.com in his post yesterday, but I found this quote from Calacanis’s post even more interesting:
The irony of all of this, for me, is that I’ve been at many events like Bloggercon, which Dave ran, in which he talked about HIS projects like Weblogs.com–a service he sold for millions of dollars.
This raises an interesting point… there’s no such thing as a “non-commercial” project, unless it’s specifically incorporated as a not-for-profit, and even then things could still get muddy.
All said, I’m not shocked that Dave was a jerk at the conference. Why he’s allowed to attend them any more is beyond me. There’s a positively enormous body of evidence that he’s an anti-social asshat who will ruin your conference if he’s not getting enough attention. I think it’s time for conference organizers to make a stand: don’t invite Dave, don’t allow him to attend, and when he pisses and moans on Scripting.com, point to all of the conferences at which he’s rudely interrupted speakers, and shouted them down, because they said something he didn’t like.