Am I A Hypocrite?

Sure. Of course. I am a totally f*cked up human being.

Of course, he only admits that because it’s easier than admitting that he doesn’t like the Twitter SUL only because he’s not on it, and that his fervor comes from jealousy and hurt-ego more than any principled stand he’s taking.

That’s pretty clear if you look at his explanation for the difference between Twitter’s SUL and his. I also found it amusing that he calls Twitter the only game in town — this from the guy who ran (is running?) a competing service.

Dave, Dave, Dave. Why not just go ahead and admit to yourself, and everyone else, that the real issue you have with Twitter’s SUL is that you see follower counts as a Twitter scoreboard and you’re pissed that the owners of the game you’re trying to win keep helping your competitors?

An asshole, is someone who thinks that people who say things that offend them should be tortured and killed.

These people are so stupid they need to be slapped in the face to wake them up. They need to have their mouths washed out with soap and be sent to bed without dinner. They need to be sent into hard labor and allowed to die of starvation.

…or, even worse (emphasis supplied)…

If you think Obama is Hitler you deserve to meet with others who agree with you, starving and freezing and dying in a cattle car, sitting in each others’ excrement, on your way to a concentration camp and its ovens and gas chambers, along with your children.

Want another definition of an asshole? Someone who sees a disgusting post like that in Google Reader and clicks the “like” button. Like these folks:

10 people liked this – Alberto Serafin Lopez, Anil Dash, Claude LaFrenière, Evil Poet, Fred McHale, Josh Fraser, Lloyd Davis, Mats Lindholm, jcator, px

… 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

A commenter by the name of Allan Donald read Dave’s post on rebooting journalism and pointed out a small caveat that Dave seems to be over-looking. He did it deferentially and respectfully.

The really interesting, actually valuable work newspapers (rarely, in their end times) did was to uncover the sources who didn’t want to talk, and to drill out the information that didn’t want to be free.

These people are never going to have blogs, or their blogs are only going to present a spun version of their truth. Who is going to force them to speak? The decentralised weight of thousands of bloggers?

And, of course, he’s right. Information that wants to get out will find a way to do so. It’s uncovering the “secret” information that makes reporters so useful. Dave, of course, doesn’t agree:

Did reporters really force their sources to speak? What form did this forcing take? Examples? Did they extort them in some way? What’s the source of this power?

This is a pretty classic Dave technique. Ask a lot of questions hoping that even one of the answers will be unacceptable. Problem is, Allan’s answers were pretty spot-on. At this point, Dave has an opportunity to interface with someone who clearly knows what he’s talking about and maybe refine some of the suck out of his idea. If you take him at his word, he likes to do this. Instead, we get this: “I don’t see why the power you’re talking about is limited to newspapers.”

Of course, Allan didn’t say that it was. In fact, he said the opposite: “There’s nothing inherent in printing on paper that means a online publication can’t one day replicate this authority+attention trick.”

Allan continued to press his point, but Dave had had enough:

Right. But blogs weren’t started “tomorrow” — that’s the whole point of the piece you’re commenting on.

No one that I know is “seeking to replace” newspapers. Your whole point of view is very weird, it’s as if you’re inventing something or someone to disagree with, and stating positions of no one that I know (I don’t think they actually exist) and then proving them wrong.

I think this thread is over. Thanks.

None of the points Dave made in that last comment are actually relevant. One of the main arguments I took away from Allan’s comments was that nobody seeking to replace newspapers is the problem — because right now bloggers don’t perform the same role that reporters do (or should). Allan’s point of view is “very weird” to Dave because it was something he hadn’t considered, but his blog is a perfect example of it.

If Dave were a reporter his local newspaper and wrote a long piece about the poor service of a local BMW Dealership, my guess is that he’d have gotten a hell of a lot stronger reaction than he did in his blog post on the same topic. Or think about all of the times Dave has told someone at a business “I’m a blogger” (which I still get a chuckle out of picturing) — really powerful stuff, right? No. Why not? For all the reasons Allan mentions.

It’s been said before, and its true: Dave knows of no problems for which he is not the solution.

Of course

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.