Eye on Winer

Hippies tend to stop hating corporate America when it makes them assloads of cash. That’s why it’s not surprising that we get this little glimpse into how principled Dave’s stand against “commercial” conferences may be:

Let’s hope it’s not too commercial, and we can have some good meetings and schmoozes and get some great work done.

Alternate theory: If they want to be overly commercial, go for it, then every blogger should get a free 1TB Seagate drive.

This after saying he hopes that companies will send him all sorts of free stuff throughout the year so that he doesn’t have to pay for the hatchet-jobs he does on them throughout the year if they he happens to misunderstand them.

The comment was styled as a snarky aside, but I’d guess that they have more truth to them than Dave himself even realizes. Dave’s not really anti-Commercial, he just wants to be the one getting bought.

Continuing on his quest to moderate every conference in existence, Dave gives us another reason why conferences “suck”:

This morning after a bit of processing, it struck me — don’t know why I didn’t see this before, but the problem with most conferences is that except for the people putting it on, we don’t have enough to do.

This is why Dave loves his “unconference” format so much… it gives him the right to interrupt anyone, at any time, to shout them down. Especially when he’s the moderator. He gets to decide when someone else is done talking, which means that he’s always engaged, always looking for a way to do the greatest good… which, in Dave’s world, is defined as “whatever Dave wants.”

if you want to have a truly useful conference that everyone gets something out of, structure it so that everyone has something to do at all times.

This is a trivial statement, but it’s also not helpful. People always do have something to do at a conference… sometimes it’s called “listening to someone else talk.” Dave doesn’t really consider that an option, though. What he really meant was this:

if you want to have a truly useful conference that everyone gets something out of, structure it so that everyone has something to do that they really want to do at all times.

But when you say it like that, it’s like saying “If you want to have a really popular restaurant, just make sure that everyone can find something on your menu that they love.” It’s an admirable goal, but glaringly obvious and basically impossible.

(There’s so much crap in the alleged apology that I hardly know where to start, so I’m going to get the low-hanging fruit first.)

Dave whines that he is invited to conferences. Really.

Wired quoted Calacanis quoting TIm O’Reilly saying some pretty nasty stuff, explaining why I’m not invited to his conferences. He wrote this piece in 2000.

The problem with the O’Reilly piece is that is isn’t true.

After he wrote the piece I was invited to speak at E-Tech and OSCON and to participate in an Open Source Summit. I accepted all the invites. Nothing disruptive happened at any of them. You can ask the people who were there. I think Doc Searls was at all of the events.

First of all, I think Dave’s post makes O’Reilly’s point even more strongly. Okay, so there were some conferences he attended that he didn’t act anti-social. Nice work. But there are still all of the ones he has, which was the point of the quoted O’Reilly piece: that “you never know what you’re going to get.”

Besides… an axe-murderer isn’t going to show up to trial and say “Ladies and gentlemen of the Jury… I’m not an axe-murderer… look at all of the people I haven’t hacked to bits!” Which is basically what Dave’s doing here. “But I went to some conferences where I didn’t berate someone else that I didn’t agree with!”

Congratulations, Dave, apparently you have a smidge of impulse control. Maybe you ought to work on getting a little more.

I don’t have Jason Calacanis in my feed reader… so today was the first I’ve seen of any of his posts, when I got caught back up from an extended weekend. I saw Dave’s posts first, and (silly me) I expected Calacanis’s posts to be vicious and personal, as Dave claims they were. Fact is, though, that Jason’s post makes a lot of sense and I’m not really sure where Dave came up with this “personal” thing, except that he always says that when someone disagrees with him.

New EoW poster Bullshit Mancuso mentioned Weblogs.com in his post yesterday, but I found this quote from Calacanis’s post even more interesting:

The irony of all of this, for me, is that I’ve been at many events like Bloggercon, which Dave ran, in which he talked about HIS projects like Weblogs.com–a service he sold for millions of dollars.

This raises an interesting point… there’s no such thing as a “non-commercial” project, unless it’s specifically incorporated as a not-for-profit, and even then things could still get muddy.

All said, I’m not shocked that Dave was a jerk at the conference. Why he’s allowed to attend them any more is beyond me. There’s a positively enormous body of evidence that he’s an anti-social asshat who will ruin your conference if he’s not getting enough attention. I think it’s time for conference organizers to make a stand: don’t invite Dave, don’t allow him to attend, and when he pisses and moans on Scripting.com, point to all of the conferences at which he’s rudely interrupted speakers, and shouted them down, because they said something he didn’t like.