Archive for the ‘Dave’ Category

Dave Finally Gets It

Sunday, December 21st, 2008

I never thought I’d see the day… but it turns out that Dave does actually understand why sites like EyeOnWiner exist (emphasis supplied):

Sometimes it seems some bloggers just subtract, that when they post, others must negate the damage they do. One of their blog posts is an environmental disaster, like an oil spill or a nuclear accident.

On behalf of all authors, readers, and commenters here at EOW… you’re very welcome.

I smell a new tagline… “EyeOnWiner . . . cleaning up Dave’s environmental disasters, one post at a time.”

Something for Nothing

Monday, December 15th, 2008

Why am I not at all surprised that Dave has his panties in a knot about his Netflix service being suspended because he didn’t pay it.

I mean… what else is there to say? He doesn’t pay his bill and Netflix are the assholes and losers.

One has to wonder if Dave even called or if he just expected Netflix to have a special “do not suspend for non-payment” flag on his account because he’s Dave Fucking Winer.

Seems like an awfully trivial thing to throw a little temper tantrum over, no? You can just hear him screaming “Don’t you know who I am!?” Heh.

Dave Winer Invented Facebook, Twitter

Monday, December 1st, 2008

It turns out that Dave Winer isn’t washed up after all. His “River of News” led to the creation of both Facebook and Twitter, according to one of his recent tweets:

@Scobleizer — Matt is a mensch. R.O.N. was the prototype for what Facebook became & Twitter. Idiot programmers thought itwas abt format. 11:04 PM November 26, 2008 from web in reply to Scobleizer

For some reason this fact is missing from Winer’s Wikipedia entry. To the Davepole, Betsy Devine!

Is Dave Winer Washed Up?

Monday, November 24th, 2008

After announcing its closure last week, Dave Winer changed his mind and kept running NewsJunk — his latest overhyped product. A look at the traffic stats on Alexa and Compete shows that he needn’t have bothered.

The site’s a dud. The latest Compete stats show that NewsJunk fell to 2,300 users in the entire month of October, even though it was the height of the presidential campaign when most political news sites were shattering traffic records.

The site’s traffic peak was 32,000 users after it got some press from Mashable and other easy marks in the Web 2.0 world who think everything Winer shits out is worth sifting through for corn. But if you compare NewsJunk’s traffic to Memeorandum, which Winer claimed as his competition, his site got killed. (And Memeorandum spiked towards Election Day, while NewsJunk entered into a death spiral.)

Winer bitched last week on Mashable about how they didn’t get the appeal of his site (them and just about everybody else on the planet):

This is a work of fiction. You should put a big disclaimer on it up front — you’re wrong on so many fronts, and you missed what was interesting technically about the product and you’re supposed to be a tech pub.

It’s amazing that Winer thinks there’s anything technically novel about the site, which is just a human-selected list of RSS items from media feeds that counts clicks. The programming and concept are both trivial. You could code it in an afternoon and still have time left over to walk the dog.

As NewsJunk suffers the same fate as Flickrfan and Share Your OPML, even with all of Winer’s pimping on Scripting News, is he completely washed up? It’s been a long time since he was involved in anything that could even charitably be described as a success.

A Breath of Fresh Air

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

I never thought a post of Dave’s would open up in my feed reader and I would find myself sighing with relief. Today that happened: Dave wrote a coherent, reasonable, and articulate piece in which he engaged in no mud-slinging or hypocrisy.

Of course, it was about technology, not politics. Go figure.

Why Dave Winer Hates Nashville

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

Back in 2005, Dave Winer got into a bizarre raging argument with other bloggers at the BlogNashville conference while he was moderating a panel on blog civility. That’s not sarcasm. The topic really was civility. Stan Brown, one of the people in attendance, described Winer’s meltdown:

As others have noted, he (Winer) got into a ridiculous exchange with John Cox that got really heated and went on and on and on to the point that people in the room began to get really uncomfortable. At that point, someone wondered if Dave was trying to conduct some kind of encounter group. As others have noted, his treatment of Robin Burk was totally out of line. He was rude quite often. About a third of the way through, he took a deep breath, slowed everything down and mentioned we still had another hour to go. I was actually feeling sympathy for him at this point. It occurred to me that perhaps he was taking medications that he had forgotten to bring with him on this trip.

That’s the back story for today’s gratuitous insult against Nashville on Scripting News, in case you were curious. Winer’s hatred has grown from one roomful of bloggers to the entire city.

Given this, it’s funny to read the recent weblog post by Rex Hammock, a friend who’s been coming to Winer’s defense for years and years:

I know that most of the people who read this blog are not from Nashville. However, my style of blogging has always been to keep it personal. And one of the most personal things about me is my love of a place I call home, Nashville, Tennessee.

Hammock’s attempt back in ’05 to rationalize Winer’s obnoxious behavior at BlogNashville is still a pungent example of asskissery:

From what I’ve observed, Dave is a designer of (a visionary of?) and defender of common grounds. … Like Real Simple Syndication (RSS), one of Dave’s earlier battles for common ground, we’re now struggling to discover the protocols of what I would call Real Simple Values.

I’d Like To Have A Word With Dave

Sunday, October 5th, 2008

Dear Dave,
Get real. I suspect that there isn’t a single Republican on the planet who gives so much as half a damn what you think. For starters, this paragraph is pretty blatant ass-kissing:

I know some of you are honorable people, good Americans, taxpayers, people who love your families, pay your taxes, do your best to live by the Golden Rule. People who try to do the right thing, whatever that is. It’s to those Republicans that I wish to have a few words.

After all of the screeds we’ve read about your disdan for Republicans, how they’re stupid and evil, to then turn around and try to butter them up is just absurd. If you believe what you wrote, you owe those Honorable Republicans a gigantic apology for the way you’ve maligned them for simply having a (R) next to their names in the past. I suspect, though, that you don’t mean it, and that’s fine, because someone has to off-set the crazy Republican partisans, and that job falls to crazy Democratic partisans.

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Dave Winer Breakdown Pool

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

Dave’s pieces get more out-there and bizarre every day and the election is still a month away. How much longer can the descent into complete lunacy take?

Dave wrote a novel today. Let me give you the executive summary:

I have a bunch of prejudices against conservatives and republicans. Allow me to explicate them in great detail. Except, instead of calling it “prejudice” I’m going to call it “truth”. Now do you see how terrible Republicans are? (Not that I’m a Democrat, no sir!)

Republicans hate me because I’m so awesome. I’m such an incredible American and they’re all just jealous of all of my knowledge and wisdom and worldliness. They’re stupid because they don’t want to go to Europe.

In summary, I am great, and the reason that the discourse in this country is so terrible is because so many people are too stupid to know they should just listen to me. But fuck them, because they’re stupid and I’m not.

That was the gist of the article. I still don’t understand what the point of it was, if not to stroke his own ego a little bit and reassure himself that he is, in fact, superior to everyone who thinks differently than he does.

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Assorted Ridiculosity

Sunday, September 21st, 2008

First off, to respond to this comment from the comments: “Eye, didn’t you once say you don’t live in the US and are not an American?” I’ve never said such a thing, and I have no idea where you’d have gotten that.

Okay. From the links: Winer for CTO of the United States?

Dear Mr. Riley,

Have you lost your fucking mind?

Signed,

People with more than seven braincells

Despite all of the press he gets for “inventing” RSS and Blogging, relative to people with real CTO capacity and experience, Dave knows zero about technology. A golden retriever would be a better fit — at least they’re likable.

Then there’s this laughable piece of logic:if Paulson’s plan is for real, Bush and Cheney should quit to prove how serious they are about it.

Pardon?

In what world does that make sense? I will say, though, that the post seems to employ so many logical and rhetorical fallacies that he may have just created a new one.

Still Waiting

Monday, September 8th, 2008

…for some insightful, intelligent, or just not completely insane political commentary out of Dave. I suspect I’ll have to wait a while. Probably forever. Substituting for those:

  • Calling Palin a Stepford Wife is not at all sexist, right?
  • Likening a female VP candidate to a chick-flick plot: also not sexist.
  • Republicans shouldn’t get air time. Why do they get air time? Because if they didn’t it would invite some pretty serious legislation. To say nothing of the fact that, whether Dave likes Republicans or not, the goal of the media is not to promote a party, but to inform. Getting into a petty pissing contest with a political party is not exactly “journalism”.
  • Dave writes: “He assumes, like royalty, that Republicans always know what’s right”. This from a post titled Frum’s annoying wrong idiotic argument. Sad he could put that all together and not notice the delicious juxtaposition. Probably because he thinks he’s always right.

I guess, at the end of the day, we’ve not learned anything new. Like many partisans, Dave will stretch logic, consistency, and integrity to their absolute breaking point — and then some — in order to defend his party and their politicians.

I think “citizen journalism” has a long way to go.