Eye on Winer

Apparently two days is all it takes for Facebook to ferret-out highly publicized fake users and exterminate them from their network. My sources with Facebook accounts tell me that searches for “Newsjunk” and “John Newsjunk” are returning no results, while before they were returning one account with a picture of Teddy Roosevelt. More confirmation always welcome, facebookers.

What’s interesting is that this has yet to be mentioned on the NewsJunk Blog or Scripting News… both still prominently advertising the fake account.

Got an email from a sharp reader this afternoon, who pointed out the issue better than I could, so here it is:

Winer couldn’t figure out the Facebook API (probably because it’s not in XML-RPC or backed by Frontier), so to allow people to follow News Junk (which really is junk, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to follow it), he created a fake person:

http://newsjunk.wordpress.com/2008/06/18/how…

“It’s easy — we created a person for you to befriend, someone named John Newsjunk, who magically says exactly the same things that NewsJunk.com says through Twitter.”

Which is against the rules for Facebook (you have to be a real person). They made apps for exactly this reason, but Winer–king of give me an API dammit–refused to follow the rules. How many days before John Newsjunk gets deleted and Winer will go on a rampage?

Interestingly, Nicco Mele (Dave’s partner) seems to think this is a good idea:

We made it a person so that the status updates show up in your Newsfeed, like twitter. It was the easiest way to do that - I don’t think Fan pages talk to the Newsfeed like that and the API limits what you can do with an application. Individuals control the privacy settings and what shows up in the Newsfeed, but the defaults favor friends for inclusion in the Newsfeed. But if I’m wrong, let me know…! And thanks, we’ll make the profile public right now.

Which is a long way of saying “We didn’t like the rules, so we ignored them.”

There’s no other way to see it. When the chips are down, the only principle Dave really has is one of selfishness. Today’s write-up on the AP’s legal bullying is a prime example.

He starts, right off the bat, by giving the AP an excuse, saying that because they’re large, they can’t possibly be of “one mind” about this. It’s a cop-out. There might be some internal disagreement, but the legal strategy is unmistakable.

There’s a bizarre comment about the AP being “a not-for-profit cooperative”, conveniently ignoring that while the AP itself is not-for-profit, the entities composing the AP are decidedly for profit. To explore that a bit further, consider one of the suggested reasons for the decline in revenue for many news outlets: bloggers. Consider that the AP is a cooperative of for-profit news entities. The AP is going after bloggers. No connection here? Really?

Dave’s typical attitude towards lawyers is strangely absent, with him insisting that we should try to hear the AP’s side of the story. Why are they sending ludicrous DMCA take-down notices? There must be a reason aside from intimidation, right?

By now, if you’re like me, you’re boggling at how or why Dave is taking the side of an organization that is attempting to lay claim to the news, stop the free flow of information, and is using a bunch of lawyers to try to force it through. What gives?

…

I want to testify on behalf of the AP. I did a deal with them at the end of last year, a quiet one, that the tech community mostly ignored.

FlickrFan. The bloated piece of crap-ware that Dave laments so few people took notice of. More accurately, everyone and their brother downloaded it, realized it was essentially worthless (aside from the AP feeds) and promptly uninstalled it. The AP scratched Dave’s back, and now he’s going to scratch theirs — reprehensible, anti-social legal tactics be damned.

The rest is classic. A massive organization flush with lawyers and cash is sending threatening letters to individuals, many of whom wouldn’t have the money to defend themselves against a traffic citation, let alone a massive IP civil suit… and this is no big deal? NetFlix doesn’t give Dave an easy way to export his movie ratings and he throws a fit, but an organization trying to control who reports the news is just a big joke?

Give me a break.

Dave is a sell-out. He’s probably worried that if he comes out too strongly against the AP they’ll end his sweetheart FlickrFan deal and make the app officially pointless. I would say that was smart business if FlickrFan actually stood to make any money, but it’s really more cowardice than anything.

Speaking of which, why no overt disclosure about the nature of the relationship between himself and the AP? We know that one exists, but we have no idea what the terms are.

What the AP is doing is dangerous. They’re trying to control the news, and they’re starting by pushing people around who they don’t think can defend themselves against it. They’re trying to centralize FACTS to lock everyone in their giant trunk… but I guess as long as Dave and the AP are in bed together, we can count on him to be their Yes-Man.

Dave Winer recently launched NewsJunk, an RSS-backed aggregator of political news, with Nicco Mele. Mele, the former webmaster for the Howard Dean campaign, says they’ve been developing it for months:

I’ve been working on a new project with Dave Winer — Newsjunk.com. For the last few months, I’ve been annoyed at how hard it is to follow the political coverage. News pops up in a lot of different places, and having single source to follow what’s happening throughout the day has been an itch that needs scratching. Dave remembers the briefing books we had on the Dean campaign, a fixture of many campaigns. So NewsJunk.com started as a way to scratch the itch of the political news junkie, and a way to begin to build an open briefing book.

During the 2000 cycle, I worked as the webmaster and technical director of the Shadow Conventions. That’s actually where I first met Dave, through Edit This Page.com. Then during the 2004 cycle, I worked as the webmaster for Howard Dean. This cycle (2008) after a false start, I’m excited to be working on NewsJunk.

What’s the over/under on how long it takes before this collaboration crashes and burns? As Jason Calacanis will tell any human or puppet who asks, Winer can’t work with people. He’s never mastered the principle “you have to be a friend to have a friend.” Mele, who destroyed his rep among former Deaniacs by backing McCain, is exhibiting some weird judgment here too.

As Mele ponders how much effort to put into their joint venture, perhaps he should consider the significance of the following three facts:

1. Winer owns the domain
2. Winer runs the application on his own server at 70.85.234.142
3. Winer claims all rights to the project: “© 2008 Scripting News, Inc. NewsJunk is a trademark of Scripting News, Inc.”

Say what?

Yeah it’s irrational that all the oil is in the Middle East. Now what?

…wait, wait, wait. I mean, it’s one thing to be a little wrong, or miss some minor technicality, but this assertion is not only demonstrably false, it’s not even “almost” true.

Almost 15% of the world’s reserves are in Canada which, last time I checked, was not a part of the Middle East. According to that chart, I count over a third of the world’s reserves in places in the region of the world known as “Not The Middle East.”

Hell, if you look at the top countries from whom the US imports oil, you’ll see that the #1 country isn’t in the Middle East. It’s Canada again.

It must be nice to have it all figured out, though.

Dave has seemingly come out of hiding (or maybe he got bored with cybersquatting the domains of people he doesn’t like) and it’s unsurprising that what brought him out of hiding was McClellan’s new book that’s come out.

Now, I haven’t read the book (I doubt Dave has either), but what strikes me here is how quick Dave is to assume that everything McClellan says is truth and everything current staffers say is a lie. If you’re going to talk about bias and conflicts of interest, you simply can’t ignore that someone writing a book has a motivation to sell more books, and that means stretching the truth, reaching on some conclusions, and even lying outright. He may not be, of course, but to suggest that he’s doing this out of the goodness of his heart is a little disingenuous.

Odds are that the truth is somewhere between what McClellan wrote and what the right-wing apologists would have us all believe.

Also?

In court, if you have a conflict of interest, you’re supposed to disclose it, and if it’s serious enough, it disqualifies you.

I’m sure he means “in jury duty” because no such requirement exists in “court”. It’s the opposing counsel’s job to draw out the conflicts of interest and the Jury’s job to determine what impact they have on the credibility of the witness. The same is true of jury duty, actually, except that trial attorneys are so experienced with voir dire that they never let anyone onto the jury without asking them if they have conflicts.

Loren Feldman’s earning his Winer Number:

Want to have some fun? Trademark the 1938Media name than take those cyber-squatting domains away from DW..

By Fred Grott on May 28, 2008

Fred - I dont give a shit about anything Winer does. His career is finished, mine is just starting. His legacy will be that of a desperate old douche bag. Fail.

By Loren Feldman on May 28, 2008

Videoblogger Loren Feldman recently began mocking Dave Winer through the magic of puppetry:

1. The Dave Winer Experience
2. Happy RSS Awareness Day from Dave Winer
3. Is Obama Black or Black?
4. Dave Winer on Desensitizing Twitter

Winer responded by cybersquatting the domain names 1938media.net and 1938media.org on May 1, created an account on YouTube under the name evilmikearrington on May 5 and used it and the domains to promote his own puppet video, which shows he’d get killed in a puppet war.

One of these days, Winer’s habit of cybersquatting to fuck with people is going to bite him in the ass.

In a post today about how sites should give users back their data, Dave Winer sings his own praises in this regard, complete with a lame claim for credit:

I’ve always believed that blogging and RSS tools should export their data so users can switch tools and the products at UserLand all did this. As a result, there’s a tradition among RSS readers that they import and export OPML subscription lists. It happened because Radio UserLand, the early market leader, did.

One thing he neglects to mention, which was pointed out several times by McD in comments here: In the entire time that Share Your OPML was running, the site never shared its OPML. Thousands of users shared their OPML subscription lists with Winer’s site, at his urging, and he never reciprocated.

As for the portability of data in Radio LuserLand and Winer’s other software, there’s a reason that Robert Scoble and most other LUserLand bloggers never moved their data when they abandoned the software, leaving years of work and all of their subscribers behind. It’s a giant nightmare to get the data out, because the software’s export capabilities are non-standard, XML support is a messy kludge, and there are character encoding glitches out the ass.

Even Donovan Watts, the author of Radio UserLand: The Missing Manual and the biggest expert on the software, never exported his blog when he switched to WordPress.

Data portability requires more than some cheesy “seal of approval” Winer is thinking about giving out. You have to do the work to fully support the standards that make data portable.

Dave’s been awfully coy about Switch-a-Bit so far. At present I’m really unsure what this is going to be, but I’m having a hard time caring. What scares me is that someone actually think’s Dave’s a good enough programmer to drive a start up. Wow.

It’s also designed to scale to work for hundreds of thousands of users, Murphy-willing.

Sure thing, Dave. I wonder why he couldn’t make FlickrFan scale well for ONE user but he can build a platform which supposedly will scale well for “hundreds of thousands”.