http://tweetscan.com/

You can search all messages on Twitter. Search on “winer” and look at the hundreds of people saying horrible things about him. And the sycophants are there too. Maybe dave ought to look at what the wider world says about him, not just his sycophants.

We have proof of that already. Skip down to “oh, you’re Bill Kearney. my god” in this IRC transcript of Winer’s keynote at OSCOM five or six years ago. Winer gets a tough question from Kearney and collapses into Jell-O on stage, claiming falsely that Kearney sent him a death threat and resorting to the plea to the crowd that he should be left alone because he’s recovering from heart surgery.

My take is that Dave is extremely sensitive to any think remotely critical. He is primed to over react,

Of course, after he does react he needs to make that behavior ok for himself and anyone that witnessed it which leads to “re-invention” of the facts to justify the behavior.

The guy wants to be a social animal but he won’t suffer “fools” and he tends to dismiss anyone that he doesn’t feel the need to extend courtesy to… and that list must be quite long.

You can be so sensitive that you simply come off as an asshole… but there’s a whole complex set of coping mechanisms i place that simply drive people away . He can exhaust a well meaning friend with unpredictable mood swings over small conflicts.

Only a Robert Scoble… self-deprecating, professional climber and social hanger on (tho’ Scoble is working his assets to an extreme: affability) can maintain a long term relationship with Dave.

Steve Gillmore also passes the muster but I suspect that Steve’s intellect and ability to defend himself AND stand by Dave in all extremes of political attack make them bunker-mates.

When Steve edited XML world Dave was probably the ONLY XML driver that Steve thought was straight-forward and using XML to make someone life better… both true.

Anyway. Dave is sensitive. My brother had a very similar nature. Very talented but essentially flawed human who never bonded and died at a young age… lonely, horny and not too often laid. (Of course that gender identity issue didn’t help things either).

Why do I blog anonymously… because it allows me to tell more than I would ever consider if you could tie my words to my kids. They appreciate the thought.

Winer behaves cowardly when he deletes dissenting views and either quits or shuts down online communities where he can’t control the conversation. He didn’t even give Reddit a chance to succeed as a user-moderated community of Scripting News readers.

I don’t know that cowardice explains his particular brand of assholery better than narcissistic personality disorder, but it’s true that he turns turtle in a fight.