Eye on Winer

No one’s been a bigger blogfriend to Dave Winer than Robert “Naked Conversations” Scoble, his former employee at LuserLand. Scoble, a college dropout who bounced around bad jobs until he found fame as a blogger at Microsoft, has managed to keep his friendship with Winer out of the death spiral for a decade. Even when Winer publicly embarrassed his wife earlier this year.

If you read ValleyWag, you know that Scoble’s company PodTech is in man-the-lifeboats mode. Anyone who can get out is getting out. So with this in mind, check out Scoble’s blog yesterday, where he predicted that Mahalo, Facebook and Techmeme will combine forces and defeat Google in four years.

This is clearly insane. The idiocy of Scoble’s rant drove mild-mannered search guru Danny Sullivan to profanity.

Want to be like Robert — and Jason Calacanis — and keep equating SEO with spam? Then fuck off.

I don’t think I’ve ever used the F-word in any of my writing, and my apologies for being so crass. But I’ve had enough of people trying to advance their own personal agendas (Jason hoping someone will care about Mahalo; Robert hoping someone will watch his videos) on the back of an industry that is full of plenty of people who do good work.

Valleywag’s Tim Faulkner was even less kind:

All he’s assembled is evidence, on video, that he doesn’t understand tech, doesn’t understand video, and doesn’t understand himself. He’s an expert, in other words, on exactly none of his three favorite topics.

The only possible explanation for Scoble’s actions is that he’s auditioning for his next job. And it’s interesting that he’d go after a gig with Mahalo, considering the smear campaign that Winer’s been waging against its founder Jason Calacanis.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 3:22 pm and is filed under Dave, Friends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.