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.

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.

Winer: This is conference spam! You’re spamming us right now.

Calacanis: How am I spamming you Dave?

Winer: This is spam. Look at the screen. Look what’s on the screen, Jason.

Calacanis: I’m talking about the issue …

Crosstalk, laughter

Chris Pirillo: Let him finish!

Unknown: He’s the speaker. You’re not.

Calacanis, who recently compared his life as an entrepreneur to being a samurai killing people in each village he visits, gets a deer in the headlights look as his friend Winer sparks a round of heckling from the Gnomedex audience.

Seeing the video took Winer right back to his hurty place, as you can tell by reading a Twitter chat he had last night with Robert Scoble and Intel blogger Josh Bancroft (some of which Winer subsequently deleted):

Josh Bancroft: Morbidly curious? Want to watch the whole Calacanis/Winer blowup about conference spam at Gnomedex 2007? http://tinyurl.com/22ttxw

Dave Winer: @jabancroft, what did you think of it? could it have been resolved without a flamefest? how can we do this better in the future?

Dave: why not be part of the solution, upgrade the discourse, don’t sensationalize. that’s what they do on CNN. let’s do better. what do you say?

Josh: @davewiner I tend to agree that it was conference spam, and that the “flamefest” came from clashing strong personalities.

Dave: Really, it came from clashing personalities — maybe you should check that out and see if your impression is accurate. I don’t think it is.

Josh: @davewiner I’m pointing people to the (presumably unedited) video, so they can decide for themselves. No sensationalism intended.

Dave: I sat out the first two days. How do I know? I drove from Seattle to Berkeley. So the flaming, such as it was, was one-way.

Josh: @davewiner this is the first time I’ve seen the video of the session available.

Dave: People-bashing is just plain wrong. These conferences should be about ideas. When the people become the target, it goes off the rails.

Josh: @davewiner You’re reading a lot into my motives, Dave. Dangerous. I’m not trying make the flames come back.

Dave: That might be the core principal of the civility crusade O’Reilly was on. Making people the issue is wrong. Stick to ideas.

Josh: @davewiner If anything, I’m hoping to help it all come to an end, now that anyone can watch the video and decide for themselves what happnd.

Dave: I feel I’ve given enough. How do I resign from that position?

Josh: I apologize if my wording was inflammatory. Wasn’t meant to be. I’m sorry I even mentioned it/picked at the scab.

Dave: I don’t think people get how utterly EXHAUSTING it is to be objectified and villified as a form of entertainment.

Josh: I think you underestimate how many people are on your side. I respect and look up to you. I’m sorry you’ve gone through all this.

Dave: @jabancroft, then why didn’t you say that? Look at what you actually said. I want to opt out of being bashed in the future.

Robert Scoble: @DaveWiner: I totally agree with you about how it feels to be objectified and vilified. It’s the downside of putting myself out there.

Scoble: People forget there are people on the other end of their blog posts. Or, worse, they attack for business reasons.

Scoble: But, on the other hand, I get so much goodness in return that focusing on the assholes is just unfair to the good people.

Scoble: I’m reading feeds right now and can’t keep up with the good people. The smart people. I love blogging for that. Hell with the haters.

Josh: @Scobleizer @davewiner I just love you guys so darn much, I want to give you all a big Internet Hug.

Dave: Actually, I’d like to scratch that last comment. It’s been a relatively bad last hour. I wish I could relive it. Time for a walk.

These mob attacks are fun for you guys, but they’re not fun for the people who get ganged up on. Some people take advantage of that, and use it to build flow and page rank, and distract people from issues they don’t want to talk about. Publications like Wired should be counted on to slow things down and check the facts. If we have more of that, we’ll have less of the bad stuff.

So, since we know Dave reads us here at EOW… allow me to ask a direct question:

Dave, exactly which facts are you claiming that Wired got wrong?

From where I’m sitting, everything they wrote was right on the money. They quote Calacanis, who says he didn’t kick Dave out of TechCrunch20. Dave has already agreed with this. Wired then quotes Calacanis who quotes O’Reilly. Note that it was not Wired citing to O’Reilly as fact, they provided the same quote that Calacanis provided to them.

Even if we assume that simply providing the quote gives it some imprimatur, the quote itself is 100% accurate. O’Reilly never states or implies that Winer has been disinvited from all conferences, only from one specific conference.

Then Strange, the author of the Wired piece, does his own writing, in which he describes Winer’s reputation for being a loud-mouthed jerk (my words, not Strange’s) and then does a little finger wagging at Calacanis for seeming to pretend not to know that Winer is an opinionated hot-head.

So… again… where, exactly, did Wired go wrong? Aside from maybe reading a little too much into Calacanis’ statement.

PS: We’re now back to Dave disliking mobs after a spell of him really liking them.

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.

Yes, Dave resigned from TechCrunch20 today. I’m relieved. I don’t want folks trying to make a go of it berated by someone who made it

The event’s set up for 20 tech experts to grill 20 startups for a chance to win $50,000 and spoon with Jack Michael Arrington Jr. during one of his afternoon power naps. Winer, alongside such luminaries as Mark Cuban, Mark Andreesen and MC Hammer, could have alienated another 20 dot-com CEOs in a single afternoon.

If anyone has a cache of Winer’s Twittergram podcast feed, he ranted yesterday during the drive home from Gnomedex, saying he would not soon forget that Calacanis called out the “wiener boys” on him. An hour later it was replaced with this Twittergram about what a great day he was having. And who wouldn’t have a great day, driving alone for 798 miles and calling in XML-RPC-powered audio harangues fueled by the largest sense of personal aggrievement since Richard Nixon circa 1974?

For those who missed this fight because they have rich personal lives, Loren Feldman has posted a dramatized re-enactment of the Calacanis-Winer argument.

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.