Last week, a guy who has been “deeply involved in the software industry” (so he says), wrote a nice little puff piece about how Dave Winer invented Twitter. It’s been a while since I’ve seen Dave digitally fellated quite this enthusiastically.
Jonas Luster really broke down how silly the whole thing was and really touched a nerve with Dave. As one might expect, Dave’s little friends came rushing to his defense.
When it comes to innovation, there are only two options: do it first or do it better.
What Dave likes to do, is take an idea that has already been pretty well developed, and then toss a crappy implementation around it and promote the hell out of -himself- it. This pretty accurately describes his role in blogging, RSS, outlining, real-time status updates, vlogging, and pretty much any other technology he insinuates (or allows others to insinuate) that he came up with.
Dave’s “influence” on technology is largely myth. His influence on people who write about technology, though, is real.
Take one of the quotes Mr. Carpenter used to try to illustrate his piece (emphasis mine):
[The instant outliner] connects IM, weblog publishing (a weblog is essentially a published outline), RSS (if RSS items are brought into the outline), and outlining in a new way that radically improves team productivity.
Listen, a weblog is not “essentially a published outline”. Using an outliner to publish a weblog is a cute little hack, but the “essence” of blogging looks nothing like an outline, if we’re going to be honest with ourselves.
I have no doubt that Dave will continue to do things second (or third, or fourth) and pimp the hell out of them, finding meaning and inspiring qualities where none actually exist. That’s just “how he do”. It’s his shtick.
Tags: Brown-nosing, Twitter
There’s a lot of high quality brownnosing on Friendfeed, where Winer linked to Luster’s post and said “At least this creep had the guts to use his real name. Most of them don’t.”
Stay classy, Dave.
“BTW, in case it isn’t clear I’d like a chance to practice my craft on whitehouse.gov.” (http://twitter.com/davewiner/status/1138008751)
What does this mean? He thinks he should get to blog there? Or run whitehouse.gov on an instance of Radio?
Whatever he meant, you can bet it’s stupid.
He’s doing his “make bold claims but never actually say anything” with today’s “This land is your land” post. Until it comes out he’s got a vision for NewsJunk-as-Whitehouse.gov — but somebody had to suggest that first, instead of him actually expressing a single “this is what I’d do” or “this is what I mean by two-way”.
Whatever he meant, you can bet it’s stupid.
Seconded. Further evidence of the stupidity of the forthcoming idea is this comment Dave posted: “NewsJunk is the core of the idea I have for whitehouse.gov.”
JunkHouse? NewsHouse? WhiteJunk? JunkFan? DavesWhiteJunk?
Someone needs to register daveswhitejunk.com and point it here.
Where the hell does he get the idea that because the U.S. is a democracy, he should determine what is on a government website? Hey, know what, Dave? Sure. Sure, your voice should be heard, just as much as my opinion affects whose face is on the $5 bill. Or what color uniforms letter carriers wear. Hey, what if we just blogged on the exterior walls of the actual White House?
Frankly, I don’t care that the White House has a blog, but I’m glad it’s basically a clearinghouse for press releases and like information. I wouldn’t want a major government website to operate a news aggregator.
Dave got eyeonwiner.com
You dolt.
LOL
He’s had that domain for a while, Andrew. Dave likes to cybersquat the names of people and publications he’s mad at.