Dave amended his post on the Wired piece to add:
These mob attacks are fun for you guys, but they’re not fun for the people who get ganged up on. Some people take advantage of that, and use it to build flow and page rank, and distract people from issues they don’t want to talk about. Publications like Wired should be counted on to slow things down and check the facts. If we have more of that, we’ll have less of the bad stuff.
So, since we know Dave reads us here at EOW… allow me to ask a direct question:
Dave, exactly which facts are you claiming that Wired got wrong?
From where I’m sitting, everything they wrote was right on the money. They quote Calacanis, who says he didn’t kick Dave out of TechCrunch20. Dave has already agreed with this. Wired then quotes Calacanis who quotes O’Reilly. Note that it was not Wired citing to O’Reilly as fact, they provided the same quote that Calacanis provided to them.
Even if we assume that simply providing the quote gives it some imprimatur, the quote itself is 100% accurate. O’Reilly never states or implies that Winer has been disinvited from all conferences, only from one specific conference.
Then Strange, the author of the Wired piece, does his own writing, in which he describes Winer’s reputation for being a loud-mouthed jerk (my words, not Strange’s) and then does a little finger wagging at Calacanis for seeming to pretend not to know that Winer is an opinionated hot-head.
So… again… where, exactly, did Wired go wrong? Aside from maybe reading a little too much into Calacanis’ statement.
PS: We’re now back to Dave disliking mobs after a spell of him really liking them.