Eye on Winer

Rafe Needleman has posted some linkbait on a CNET site nominating the five most hated people on the Internet. The contenders to the title are Dave Winer, Michael Arrington, Jason Calacanis, Loren Feldman and Owen Thomas, a list he creates by narrowing the criteria to “technology personalities who are active contributors of original content.” From the piece:

Dave Winer He was a big contributor to the inventions of blogging, RSS, and other key Web technologies. But to call him prickly when it comes to his place in the tech firmament is an understatement. Typical story: I wrote a how-to piece on RSS but neglected to mention his contribution, and then Winer posted a blog item in which he equated me to Dan Rather on 60 Minutes during the GM exploding fuel tank story. When I at first contacted him privately in an e-mail, he publicly demanded an apology. Winer’s secret: Be smart, and then be abusive. See also: The Winer Number. Where to find him: Scripting News. Twitter: DaveWiner.

The piece, like Winer’s pitiful blog post this weekend fishing for compliments, is built on a ludicrous premise. Winer isn’t well-known enough to be considered one of the Internet’s most hated people. He’s a middle-aged software developer years beyond his last significant accomplishment who’s sinking into obscurity with piddly little hobby projects like FlickrFan and NewsJunk. His fame exists entirely within a clusterfuck of blogging early adopters and hack journalists. Like Calacanis and Arrington and Robert Scoble, he manages to attention-whore very capably inside his bubble, but it’s a tiny community. Most people even inside the tech world wouldn’t know who the hell he is. Steve Jobs could crap out a celebrity bigger than any of those dopes.

Even if you took at face value every one of Winer’s overstated accomplishments — the inventor of RSS, father of blogging, originator of teabagging, and so forth — how many comparable accomplishments would make someone famous? Are the lead authors of the Atom format famous? The creator of FTP? The developer of JSON?

Winer’s a childish and abusive asshole, and I can’t blame Needleman for seizing the opportunity to point that out. But one of the most hated people on the Internet? Are you fucking kidding me, dude? Chris Crocker and Numa Numa Guy and the 2 Girls with the 1 Cup are famous on the Internet. Plug any of them in alongside “Dave Winer” in Google Trends and tell me again that Winer’s famous enough to be among the net’s most-hated.

Back in 2005, Dave Winer got into a bizarre raging argument with other bloggers at the BlogNashville conference while he was moderating a panel on blog civility. That’s not sarcasm. The topic really was civility. Stan Brown, one of the people in attendance, described Winer’s meltdown:

As others have noted, he (Winer) got into a ridiculous exchange with John Cox that got really heated and went on and on and on to the point that people in the room began to get really uncomfortable. At that point, someone wondered if Dave was trying to conduct some kind of encounter group. As others have noted, his treatment of Robin Burk was totally out of line. He was rude quite often. About a third of the way through, he took a deep breath, slowed everything down and mentioned we still had another hour to go. I was actually feeling sympathy for him at this point. It occurred to me that perhaps he was taking medications that he had forgotten to bring with him on this trip.

That’s the back story for today’s gratuitous insult against Nashville on Scripting News, in case you were curious. Winer’s hatred has grown from one roomful of bloggers to the entire city.

Given this, it’s funny to read the recent weblog post by Rex Hammock, a friend who’s been coming to Winer’s defense for years and years:

I know that most of the people who read this blog are not from Nashville. However, my style of blogging has always been to keep it personal. And one of the most personal things about me is my love of a place I call home, Nashville, Tennessee.

Hammock’s attempt back in ’05 to rationalize Winer’s obnoxious behavior at BlogNashville is still a pungent example of asskissery:

From what I’ve observed, Dave is a designer of (a visionary of?) and defender of common grounds. … Like Real Simple Syndication (RSS), one of Dave’s earlier battles for common ground, we’re now struggling to discover the protocols of what I would call Real Simple Values.

Dave Winer today:

I wrote the first howto for demoers at DEMO in 1991.

And unlike some people’s howtos, this one is still on the web.

Yeah, a lot of the ideas that people claim as theirs now were in this piece, written 17 years ago.

The massive ego was too much for commenter Barry Kelly, who responded:

Dave, *incredibly* few ideas are original. You *really* need to get over your paranoia and arrogance in this respect — it’s becoming really, really wearing; it seems that I can’t hear you on a podcast or read more than 5 posts from you without you claiming ownership on this or that idea.