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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 »

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 Finally Comments on Radio Payola

Saturday, April 11th, 2009

To be honest, Dave’s Apology to Radio Users it was more than I expected, but it was framed in a very misleading and dishonest way. He did his spinning over at FriendFeed:

One more thing — it’s pretty obvious Arrington attacked me as a response to a piece I wrote the day before about Twitter giving flow to various friends, like TechCrunch. I went out of my way to say TC didn’t do anything wrong. Didn’t want to make it personal, cause it wasn’t. And then Mike comes back with this. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

Problem is, Arrington’s piece makes explicitly clear why Dave was being singled out, and it wasn’t because he called out TC. It was, in essence, the same reason that we called him out a few weeks ago.

What’s great is watching Dave try to explain that Curry’s feed was appropriate and should’ve been included anyway. He calls the $10,000 payment a “gratuity”. One of two things is true: he thought Curry’s feed belonged there but let a friend pay him $10k for it anyway or he had no intention of including Curry until he got the payola. He can’t have it both ways. He’s either a jerk of unimaginable proportions or he’s lying through his teeth. Not that those two things are mutually exclusive.

Dave’s “apology” is also incredibly weak on its face. After spending weeks bitching and moaning about not being included on Twitter’s suggested users list (what, does anyone actually believe this is about some deeper issue?) and making all sorts of insinuations about Twitter and the folks who got suggested user list spots he glosses over a much more egregious and ethically bankrupt action of his own with “I apologize for that.”

I’m not sure that Arrington’s comment about Winer’s lack of credibility is quite accurate though, as it seems to imply that this is a new phenomenon. Dave hasn’t had any for quite some time — it’s a side-effect of having no integrity, actually, something I imagine is just a product of his up-bringing.

Tags: Hypocrite, Mike Arrington, TechCrunch, Twitter
Posted in Attacks | 1 Comment »

Dave Gets Truthy on the AP

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

Via an email earlier this week:

In his most recent post Winer makes the following claim:

Financially, things are looking terrible at AP — as at other news organizations. There’s a general downward trend in the economics of news, and that’s amplified by the downturn in the economy. If we could see AP’s balance sheet, we might conceive of something desperate ourselves…

In the comments, an astute reader notes:

You can read the AP’s balance sheet, Dave, and it’s not at all in bad shape as you claim.

link

In fact, revenues were up and the AP is in the black, despite it being a non-profit and only needing to break even. AP makes money selling content, not something many people can claim.

Dave’s response seems worth an EoW blog post, IMHO.

So what was Dave’s response?

Then there must be something else they saw that made them freak.

The strong reaction was observable. The reason for it, not so clear.

Which is basically his way of saying “I’m still right, even if my facts are wrong.”

Thanks for the email!

Tags: AP, Google, Media, Newspaper
Posted in Dave | Comments Off

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 »

How Dave Loses Arguments

Friday, March 20th, 2009

It happens all the time. Dave writes something, someone thinks about it and decides he’s missing something, they comment, and Dave takes issue with them not patting him on the back to tell him how smart he is, and a lively debate ensues. The most entertaining feature of these debates is that he’s terrible at it because he refuses to accept that maybe he missed something.

This thread, which was pointed out by a commenter on the last post is as perfect an example as there is.

(more…)

Tags: Debate, Journalism
Posted in Dave | 4 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 »

Surprise! Nobody Cares About Frontier!

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

This is truly shocking:

had hoped to lead a discussion at this year’s OSCON about porting Frontier to Linux . . . it runs on Mac and Windows, but I really want it to run on Linux — so I proposed a session at OSCON to discuss this and see if I couldn’t recruit people to work on this. Unfortunately, yesterday I got the rejection email. I kind of expected it, because O’Reilly doesn’t seem to like me these days, or whatever — I don’t know

Basically he wanted a conference to give him a session to try to recruit people to port a niche, sparsely-used, archaic novelty application to Linux. As though there aren’t enough of those. Shocking when such a panel wasn’t immediately instituted. I’m sure it’s because O’Reilly hates Dave.

I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that nobody would show up to such a session.

Tags: O'Reilly, OSCON
Posted in Projects | Comments Off

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

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