In a Today’s Links post today, Dave quotes a commenter (and apparent Dave groupie):
Tom Morris: “I’m getting fed up of the blogosphere taking every critical remark as an ‘attack’ on a person.” Amen.
Wait, back up. Dave is agreeing that people take things too personally? Despite characterizing every negative comment (that isn’t couched in glowing praise) about his ideas as a “nasty personal attack?” Now, when there’s actually some attacking going on, and when he’s the one doing it, people are being too sensitive? Geez.
I am simply amazed every day that his head doesn’t explode from the constant flow of contradiction. He must truly live in his own world.
This is hysterical, Dave falls directly for the trap. Dave, while trying to run the “it’s not a personal attack, it’s just a critical remark” flag up the flagpole, compares Journalists to the Catholic Church.
So this journalist calls him a Scientologist, and Dave takes it as a personal attack! Dave can’t possibly be a thinking being, he has to be a context-free parser of some sort, because no sentient being could twist themselves in their own hypocrisy as fast as Dave.
See:
http://texturbation.com/blog/?p=353
And:
http://twitter.com/davewiner/statuses/212974692
Quoth:
>>> Winer dares to compare my profession to Catholicism?
That is the worst insult I have ever received, from anybody, ever.
I regard that as a personal insult.
Winer, for want of a more erudite insult, can go fuck himself.
From what I’ve heard, inventing RSS and then dining out for the rest of your career on being an ignorant blowhard blogging moron is the new Scientology.
So. There.
Dave Winer is clearly a Scientologist.
Pardon me for pulling one non-consequential line out of your post and making a big deal out of it but this really bugs me. The offending line is…
From what I’ve heard, inventing RSS and then dining out for the rest of your career on being an ignorant
Lets get this straight, Dave Winer in no way, shape or form created RSS . No matter how you parse it. This bothers me because there were people who actually created syndication and RSS and because Dave Winer is there every day declaring himself the “father of RSS” and because the actual inventors are content to keep doing actual work everyone believe’s Winer.
That said, a little history. In Dave’s official RSS 2.0 history (found here: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rssVersionHistory.html) he tries to make it look like he created syndication in that his first entry says…
scriptingNews format, designed by DW at UserLand. 12/27/97.
RSS 0.90, designed by Netscape, for use with my.netscape.com, which also supported scriptingNews format. The only thing about it that was RDF was the header, otherwise it was plain garden-variety XML. 3/15/99.
Note, even by his own account he did not invent RSS but what he is trying to make it look like is that he invented the idea of syndication a year and a half before Netscape came up with it. But he leaves out a few things. First, If you look at the entry Dave quotes it is very telling…
So I decided to take the plunge, and take the chicken out of the chicken and egg problem. Or is it the egg? Who knows. But from now on, Scripting News, in addition to being a HTML web page, is also an XML application. It’s a nice way if you’re nerdy to get a quick intro to what XML is about. And if you feel like really nerding out you could write a new kind of browser in Visual Basic or Java or Bongo or Filemaker or whatever. A great long weekend project. Let’s have fun!
In other words, his “scriptingNews format” was just plain vanilla XML and he had no concept of what could be done with it (aka there was no aggregator in sight nor did he think of it as a way to push data).
The second really big thing Winer leaves out is an entry that might have looked something like this…
Rammanathan V. Guha submits Channel Definition Format to W3C as a proposed standard (CDF). 3/10/97.
Or one that looked something like this…
Microsoft releases the first Aggregator as its “Channel Bar” with Internet Explorer 4. 9/30/97.
In other words, Dave was just copying Microsoft and doing it badly. If there is a “Father of Syndication” its Rammanathan V. Guha and if there is a “Father of RSS” its Dan Libby. Dave claims of “popularizing RSS” or “boot strapping the adoption of RSS” and I can’t refute that but the idea that he invented RSS is just BS.
For the record, I was half-asleep when I posted the above message so please forgive the disjointed nature of it (I actually came here right now to post the message only to discover I already had earlier this morning)
Indeed, I should leap to Dave’s defense here. If inventing RSS is a pre-requisite for being a modern-day Scientologist, then, Dave is no Scientologist.
I can see now why he’s so offended.