After announcing its closure last week, Dave Winer changed his mind and kept running NewsJunk — his latest overhyped product. A look at the traffic stats on Alexa and Compete shows that he needn’t have bothered.
The site’s a dud. The latest Compete stats show that NewsJunk fell to 2,300 users in the entire month of October, even though it was the height of the presidential campaign when most political news sites were shattering traffic records.
The site’s traffic peak was 32,000 users after it got some press from Mashable and other easy marks in the Web 2.0 world who think everything Winer shits out is worth sifting through for corn. But if you compare NewsJunk’s traffic to Memeorandum, which Winer claimed as his competition, his site got killed. (And Memeorandum spiked towards Election Day, while NewsJunk entered into a death spiral.)
Winer bitched last week on Mashable about how they didn’t get the appeal of his site (them and just about everybody else on the planet):
This is a work of fiction. You should put a big disclaimer on it up front — you’re wrong on so many fronts, and you missed what was interesting technically about the product and you’re supposed to be a tech pub.
It’s amazing that Winer thinks there’s anything technically novel about the site, which is just a human-selected list of RSS items from media feeds that counts clicks. The programming and concept are both trivial. You could code it in an afternoon and still have time left over to walk the dog.
As NewsJunk suffers the same fate as Flickrfan and Share Your OPML, even with all of Winer’s pimping on Scripting News, is he completely washed up? It’s been a long time since he was involved in anything that could even charitably be described as a success.
If you read the comments, you’ll see Dave is reverting to his short-tempered asshole mode, which he seemed to have almost abandoned in recent months. He is getting testy when people ask questions with a certain ‘tone’, and quite obstinate when people disagree with his pontifications about what the news industry is doing wrong (and his solution to their problems: in short, bloggers can do it all).
Yup. This exchange today is typical Winer assholery:
BrianSullivan 5 hours ago
It’s a bit of a stretch to say you need a “mail server” isn’t it? What you need is a small portion of what a typical mail server is — basically what you need is a mail relay. Windows servers have a built in mail relay as part of the standard distribution. Why not use that?
dave 5 hours ago
Believe me there’s a reason. I’m kind of fed up with people asking questions this way. Try again if you really care.
BrianSullivan 4 hours ago
I thought the “any advice would be most welcome” indicated just that - but obviously it means something else.
dave 4 hours ago
In any case, to answer your question, I have two servers, each with a different reason why Microsoft’s IIS mail server wouldn’t be a good choice. On the first, for some reason the server was configured without SMTP turned on. When I go through the configuration process, it asks for me to insert a CD. Not only don’t I have the CD, but the computer is in Dallas, and I don’t like to ask them for help (I’d probably get the same kind of BS I got from Godaddy yesterday).
The other machine is at EC2, and I don’t want to make any modifications to the C drive, which has the OS on it. If you read yesterday’s piece, you’ll see why.
Further, if you read the Update at the top of the piece, in italics, you’ll see that the problem was solved, I managed to get my own mail server up and running. All of this a good half hour at least before you posted your comment.
I think he has a tendency to consider himself a misunderstood genius. For example:
“I’ve been writing about this for a decade, but no one actually reads my words and as a result I still have to explain myself to supposed experts in this field, including Jarvis. It’s really frustrating because I understand something the rest of you don’t — that perspective is what has to change first before you have a hope of coming up with something that works.”
(http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/11/24/pointOfViewIsEverything.html#comment-4008812)
Looking at his current flow, like the rant on stadiums related to the economy and the amazing little insights on what’s going on in Afghanistan and I simply cannot help but thing that Dave has gone over the deep end. The guy has become a babbling, incomprehensible, senile, buffoon. A shell of who he used to be.
I don’t know if I’d call it washed up. He’s just a guy who made some contributions and now, as the previous poster says, has gone over the edge. He’s the crazy uncle that comes over on christmas and talks and talks and everyone humors him because he’s entertaining in a train wreck sort of way.
He talks about topics he has no understanding of, attacks when challenged, and makes little sense the majority of the time. Washed up? Not as much as completely irrelevant except for a small group of fans that hang on his every word.