Bullshit Mancuso « Eye on Winer

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Dave Winer Admits He Didn’t Create RSS

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Catch it before he edits it out. Dave Winer admitted today in a blog post that he didn’t invent RSS:

… we pulled a fast one on Netscape in 1999 by throwing in the towel on our syndication format and using theirs instead.

For years, Winer has puffed himself up with the claim that he’s the coinventor of RSS, and a lot of bloggers and journalists bought it. His claim is based on the false premise that because Netscape incorporated some of his suggestions in RSS, he invented it with them. By the same logic, the guy who introduced the BLINK tag invented HTML. You can’t invent something that existed before you got involved in it. You can popularize it, as he did, but it’s bullshit to call yourself its coinventor.

Dave Winer did not invent RSS. The format was created in 1999 by Ramanathan V. Guha and Dan Libby at Netscape. Winer invented ScriptingNews format, an early stab at syndication that died when he switched to RSS.

Posted in Dave | 1 Comment »

Michael Arrington vs. Dave Winer

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

Michael Arrington appears to have seen the light about Dave Winer, from the looks of this comment he made on TechCrunch:

Dave: just stop. you’ll do and say anything to get what you want. even lie. even delete previous messages and reverse your opinion.
http://eyeonwiner.org/archives/2008/dave-winer-is-loren-feldmans-puppet
http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/davefeldman.png
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/13/the-rules-apply-to-everyone/
you have no integrity. you have no core ethics. it’s just all about you all the time.

This latest blowup began when Winer questioned Arrington’s integrity because TechCrunch is one of the suggested users recommended on Twitter. Winer sent a direct message to TechCrunch writer MG Siegler telling him to “stop fucking with RSS” because of an article arguing that RSS is dead. (Note that the article was by Steve Gillmor, not Siegler — Winer is a fucking genius.)

As you can see, Arrington is using Eye on Winer as a resource to document Winer’s hypocrisy. We compliment him on his good taste. They were best bros going back to the early days of TechCrunch — Arrington once served as his lawyer — but Arrington seems to have figured out why so many people in tech will never work with Winer.

If you know anyone else who hasn’t learned this lesson, send them to us.

Tags: dave winer, eye on winer, mg siegler, michael arrington, steve gillmor, TechCrunch, Twitter
Posted in Dave, Ethics, Friends, Lawyers, Twitter | 6 Comments »

Dave Winer’s Obsession with Twitter Continues

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

Nice example of projection from Dave Winer on Twitter:

Twitter is a big deal now. Calacanis used to be #1, now he’s a nobody. For a guy like him the difference is huge. And the resentment real.
About 21 hours ago from web

Winer keeps going on and on and on about Twitter’s suggested users list, which gave some celebs and tech A-listers many hundreds of thousands of followers compared to his 20,000. But as he bitches and moans about how follower counts like his used to make you a big deal, he completely ignores the fact that most of the people who read him on Twitter have followers in the hundreds or lower. He was perfectly happy with the inequalities of the system while he was on top. Now he’s Che Fucking Guevara.

Show of hands: Does anyone else other than Winer give a shit about the suggested users list or Twitter follow counts? Thanks to Twitter, we have learned that a 50-something obscure software developer wakes up every single day and gets his Depends in a bunch because Ashton Kutcher and Oprah and P. Diddy have more followers than he does. It’s a sad but hilarious spectacle to watch him go ape over any system that quantifies popularity and puts him at the top — as long as he stays there — and go all jilted lover when he falls off it.

Earth to Dave: You are not famous. You are Internet famous, which only means anything when something is new. When the rest of the world shows up, as they have on Twitter, the genuinely famous show up and that’s the end of your celebrity. On Twitter now your Internet fame is worthless. Ashton Kutcher craps out bigger celebrities than you each morning.

Tags: dave winer, fame, jason calacanis, Twitter
Posted in Twitter | 7 Comments »

Journalist: Winer Knows Nothing About Media Business

Monday, May 11th, 2009

Here’s something you don’t see often: A technology journalist at a major publication who acknowledges that Dave Winer doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Jason Pontin, the editor and publisher of Technology Review, writes this in How to Save Media:

The Gotterdammerung-of-mainstream-media argument has a weak and a strong formulation. …
The strong version is most associated with Dave Winer, a grumpy California software programmer best known for helping to develop the Web-feed format RSS and for his blog, Scripting News. Winer has written, and not without glee, “Fifteen years ago I was unhappy with the way journalism was practiced in the tech industry, so I took matters into my own hands. And then dozens of people did, and then hundreds followed, and now we get much better information about tech. It will happen everywhere, in politics, education, the military, health, science, you name it. The sources will fill in where we used to need journalists. … Everyone is now a journalist.”
If media companies can’t earn money, and everyone is a journalist, it follows that “amateurs” (Shirky) and “sources” (Winer) will be part of a “decentralized” media (Winer), whose stories will be distributed by “excitable 14-year-olds” (Shirky).
This is all folly and ignorance. Shirky, Winer, and other evangelists know nothing about the business of media. True, the journalists who write about these matters for mainstream media often know as little; I didn’t understand much until I became the publisher of Technology Review as well as its editor in chief. But Shirky and Winer are disgruntled consumers and, as bloggers, advocates for an insurrection. Thus, they are to be read skeptically. Their prescriptions would be more convincing if they were less polemical and better informed by some knowledge of what publishers sell.

Winer’s been treated like an informed media expert for years, but his entire professional experience in journalism consists of writing commentary for Wired for one year back in the ’90s.

Pontin goes on to say on Twitter, when criticized over the piece, that “These people are, I think, insane. Filled with hostility, completely impractical, and, in the final analysis, dishonest.” Winer doesn’t know journalism, but at least one journalist knows him pretty well.

Tags: business, dave winer, jason pontin, Journalism, Media, technology review
Posted in Dave, Media | 5 Comments »

Dave Winer Abuses Another API

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

Dave Winer has a new link page that counts clicks on the 40 most recent links he’s posted on Twitter using the Tr.im URL shortener. He said on his blog that it’s updated 12 times an hour. Checking the statistics for 40 links 12 times an hour is 480 API requests, which is significantly more than the Tr.im API permits:

The tr.im API method trim_url and trim_simple together have a set rate limit of 48 new URLs per day, up to 10 per hour, per IP address. This is intentionally set on the low side to prevent any overwhelming malicious insertion of data into our database. trim_destination has the highest rate limit set to the same number of URLs we create per day, so that you can more efficiently determine the destinaion URL for all or any tr.im URLs. For all other methods other than these two, there is a limit of 1,500 requests per day, up to 120 per hour, per IP address.

When you hammer an API like this you degrade services for everyone else. This fact seems to be lost on Winer, even though Comcast shut his home Internet connection down for his laughably excessive bandwidth use and he’s blogged about how Twitter’s performance is being harmed by API abusers.

Posted in Dave, Ethics, Projects | 5 Comments »

Dave Winer Thinks Judges Should Cover Trials

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

Dave Winer at a UC-Berkeley event on newspaper journalism:

I said the sources would take over the news. Not enough reporters covering the courtroom? The judge will report, as will the jurors, the attorneys, the plaintiff, the defendent. It will be messier, I would have said had I had the time to complete the thought, but more truth will come out.

New York Times, same day:

Last week, a building products company asked an Arkansas court to overturn a $12.6 million judgment, claiming that a juror used Twitter to send updates during the civil trial. And on Monday, defense lawyers in the federal corruption trial of a former Pennsylvania state senator, Vincent J. Fumo, demanded before the verdict that the judge declare a mistrial because a juror posted updates on the case on Twitter and Facebook. The juror had even told his readers that a “big announcement” was coming on Monday.

Winer waited all that time to get a chance to speak, and yet he couldn’t come up with a worse example if he tried. Judges and attorneys are legally prohibited from writing accounts of an ongoing trial on their blogs or Twitter. They would risk mistrials and professional sanction. Jurors risk mistrials as well by covering themselves. Even after the fact, participants in a trial have to be careful about what they say because it could become grounds for appeal. There are many other examples where professional rules, confidentiality requirements or non-disclosure agreements would prevent citizens from reporting their own news. There’s no way in hell the public will get court news from the participants. And that’s Winer’s example of why we don’t need newspapers? The journalists in the crowd must have loved his naivete.

Posted in Dave, Media, Twitter | 7 Comments »

Dave Winer’s Head is a Bubble

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

Dave Winer’s having an envy fit today on Twitter over how the service gives new users recommendations on who to follow:

There are at least two Twitters, the Friend-Of-Ev Twitter, mostly people who put in little or no effort but have 100K-plus following… about 2 hours ago from web
…and the old Twitter for people who work to get a sizable following, sometimes for years. It’s like the banking system that collapsed, Ev. about 2 hours ago from web
There’s a bubble here. Not sure how or when it pops, but with hindsight as a guide — it will pop. about 2 hours ago from web
One of the lessons of bubbles is that few are willing to say it’s a bubble and people who say it is are thought of as party poopers. about 1 hour ago from web

Winer is, of course, not one of the recommendations. Company founder Evan Williams surely knows enough about Winer’s many emotional flameouts not to expose new users to that junk. (Probable reason for Winer’s fit: Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington are among the recommended people to follow.)

As he goes on and on about the unfairness of this system, keep in mind that when Winer was running UserLand Software, he secretly sold Adam Curry a place in the default subscription list of Radio UserLand’s RSS reader for $5,000. It didn’t come to light until Curry blogged about it — users had no idea the list contained paid links. For him to complain about Twitter’s recommendations is just brazen hypocrisy.

Posted in Dave, Twitter | 7 Comments »

Dave Winer Pulls JSON’s Pud

Friday, March 6th, 2009

Need any more proof that Dave Winer’s just making shit up as he goes along?

Dave Winer on JSON on Dec. 20, 2006:

God bless the re-inventers
Gotta love em, because there’s no way they’re going to stop breaking what works, and fixing what don’t need no fixing.
I’ve been hearing, off in the distance, about something called JSON, that proposes to solve a problem that was neatly solved by XML-RPC in 1998, the encoding of arrays and structs in a format that could easily be processed by all programming languages. …
Today I looked. I read on Niall Kennedy that del.icio.us has come up with an API that returns a JSON structure, and I figured, sheez it can’t be that hard to parse, so let’s see what it looks like, and damn, IT’S NOT EVEN XML!
As Dr Phil asks — What were they thinking?
No doubt I can write a routine to parse this, but look at how deep they went to re-invent, XML itself wasn’t good enough for them, for some reason (I’d love to hear the reason). Who did this travesty? Let’s find a tree and string them up. Now.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this is why I’m fed up with Mountain View, Cupertino, Redwood Shores and Redmond. Give me Berkeley and New York any day. Silicon Valley is made up of little boys pulling their puds, constantly making love to each other, pretending the world revolves around them.

Winer a day later, after he was told that JSON was an existing part of JavaScript syntax, not a new invention:

So JSON isn’t evil. It’s just the internal object serialization format for JavaScript. No problem. But using it as a basis for interop, when there were already good ways to achieve interop is evil, imho. I don’t think that’s what del.icio.us did, but I do see some people advocating that, and I think they’re wrong.

Winer today:

Dave, if you could go back in time, would you have used JSON instead of XML for RSS, OPML, XML-RPC, etc, had JSON been popularized at the time? The reason I ask is that most of those protocols and formats don’t use much of the extras that XML is required for (schemas, namespaces, attributes, data escaping, etc). Simple key/value/dict/array/string/number structures would be sufficient in all those cases. If you could take a do-over, would you?
Great question! And if you look at how I use XML, you know the answer is yes. I have no love for XML, I thought it was over engineered, and too much was promised for it, but everyone wanted to do it, and that convinced me. …
That’s what I like about JSON, it has a low-techness to it, no fuss, no pretension.

So now JSON’s the format he would’ve used all along, in spite of the fact he called JSON advocates “little boys pulling their puds” and thought using it for interop would be “evil.”

Posted in Dave | Comments Off

Dave Winer Saves the Newspaper Industry

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Dave Winer’s solution for the dying newspaper industry is to open up the newsroom to unpaid experts with time on their hands:

Here’s how you take the first step toward the open newsroom. Pick a story that you’re covering on an ongoing basis, something important enough that you’ve assigned one or more reporters to it full-time. Have them continue to do what they’re doing, we’re going to add to that coverage, in an experiment to learn how the newspaper of the future might work. Now pick two or three experts on the same subject, and invite them into the newsroom. They will not be paid. No benefits. They agree to the same rules governing the integrity of your reporters. For a period of four weeks, they report to the newsroom, the physical one, not a virtual one, every day, and are part of your news team. … Now, to be clear — I’m not talking about recruiting idiots or people whose opinions are (in your opinion) worthless. I’m talking about respected experts, the kinds of people your reporters call to get a perspective on the news the people they quote. Instead of having them talk to the readers through the reporter, I want them to go directly. Their writing should be as readable as the reporters’ so I would choose experts who express themselves well.

So in other words, they need to let people like him come in and write for them for free. And offer snacks and excellent networking.

Newspapers are saved! Saved! Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen, Jim Romenesko and the rest of the journalists, unclench your buttholes! Long live the newspaper!

In all the years he has been blogging, has Dave Winer ever identified a problem for which Dave Winer was not the solution?

Posted in Dave, Media | 1 Comment »

Bit.ly Shortens Team by One Dave Winer

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

Dave Winer’s collaboration with Bit.ly didn’t last long:

As you may know I participated in the intial design and rollout of the bit.ly URL-shortener. It was one of the most instantly successful projects I’ve ever participated in, up there with the release of Radio 8 in 2002 and MORE 1.0 in 1986. Sometimes the time is right for a product, and the execution is great and the communication is crisp. Everyone gets it, and it takes off like a rocket. Bit.ly is one of those phenoms. They’re getting ready to grow a real business around it, and I want to go on to do other things. So we worked out a deal that leaves me satisfied with how things turned out and am no longer a shareholder. I wish the company and the team the very best. Onward!

Bit.ly launched only seven months ago, so the decision to part ways with Winer this early suggests the working relationship wasn’t going so hot. With Winer’s copiously documented inability to work with others, that’s definitely the safe bet. But the Bit.ly crew is making nice about his exit as well.

Here’s John Borthwick, the founder of the company that runs Bit.ly:

Dave is moving on from his day to day involvement with bit.ly — I want to thank him for his ideas, help and participation. It was an amazing experience working with Dave. Dave doesnt pull any punches — he requires you to think — his perspective is grounded in a deep appreciation for practice — the act of using products — understanding workflow and intuiting needs from that understanding. I learnt a lot. From bit.ly and from from me — thank you. A pleasure and a privildege.

Here’s Andrew Kortina on the Bit.ly blog:

We had the pleasure and privilege of working with Dave at bit.ly — he helped design and create bit.ly and he worked with us during the first phases of its development. Thank you Dave for your help, ideas and your passion for making great, truly wonderful products. Best wishes and please look after your puffer fish.

Startups occasionally snuggle up to Winer, presumably to exploit his Scripting News audience, which is heavy with tech reporters and Web 2.0 bigshots. Mike Arrington cozied up to him when launching TechCrunch, as did Loic Le Meur with Seesmic and Adam Curry with PodShow (now known as Mevio). The smart play is to do what Borthwick has accomplished here, which is to get away from Winer after the initial hype fades and before the inevitable moment where he completely loses his shit and attacks his partners.

Posted in Dave, RSS, Twitter | 2 Comments »

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