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?

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.

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.

Now, he’s decided to make the ability to steal and re-host other people’s tweets widely available.

If you’re still not sold on the copyright, take a look at this passage from Dave when it was about his content:

The next step is to look at the copyright issues his service raises. They are quite interesting. Scripting News, both in HTML and RSS, has a clear copyright on it. Should I have a say in publications created from my content? I generally don’t mind, but shouldn’t I have to give permission? Suppose a magazine started publishing all my writing. Would I have recourse? I am not a lawyer, but it seems clear that I would. Is Pilgrim somehow immune to copyright law? I’d love to hear the legal theory that allows him to do what he’s doing with my work.

So . . . is Dave “somehow immune to copyright law?”

In mid-January I started a project to archive the Twitter posts of the people I follow. At first I experimented with rendering the archives in an XML-compatible form of HTML, but decided the point would largely be lost, so I decided to go with OPML.

You can find the folder of archives here:

http://twitter.opml.org/calendar/

Alright, so everyone Dave follows has had their Tweets stolen and re-hosted elsewhere. Why? Because Dave feels like it.

No regard for their intellectual property rights whatsoever. Selfish, but not at all surprising.

Someone Dave follows should send a DMCA takedown notice to Amazon. That could be entertaining.

It started with this tweet yesterday, in which he announced that he was one of the most hated people on the internet. This, of course, is overly dramatic. The vast, vast majority of internet land has no idea who he is.

I can only imagine that this brought forth a stream of praise, worship, and other assorted brown-nosing. Instead of leaving well-enough alone, today Dave went back to the well, writing a pretty long post about his new mission to make people like him.

Some things just cannot be made up.

There’s so much humor in that post that I scarcely know where to begin.

There’s this idea out there that I’m rude and angry and do things to deliberately hurt people. Nothing, I mean nothing, could be further from the truth.

What he probably means is that he doesn’t do things with the sole or primary intention of hurting people. This might be true. There are plenty of examples that would make you wonder, but in most of them you can find a different primary motivation and slide the offensiveness or insult out of the spotlight, either as “unintended consequence” or “nice perk”, depending on how big of an asshole you think he is.

The problem is that people rarely stop to explore the speaker’s intent when they’ve been offended.

Much of Dave’s post oscillates between fishing for compliments and self-aggrandizement. An interesting combination, for sure, but the kind of folks that will take the bait here probably won’t even notice the puffery.

The saddest thing about this whole post, though, comes at the end:

So yes, I am one of the most hated people on the Internet, but I honestly don’t believe what people hate is me, I believe they hate what people have told them to hate.

Even at his clearest moment, he still refuses to believe that there’s something about him that people dislike. Surely it’s not him. It couldn’t be. He’s such a nice guy. Right?

Sure. I’m sure that’s it. People hate him because they just don’t know him well enough.

The real issue, in my opinion, is that Dave has a certain image of himself that isn’t particularly accurate. He thinks that he is kind, compassionate, worldly, and thoughtful. This image is basically wishful thinking, reinforced with years and years of confirmation bias.

Fact is, though, that all too often, Dave is grouchy, arrogant, over-bearing. He always has an excuse for it, to rationalize so he can continue to believe he’s a great guy.

This new mission isn’t going to accomplish anything until Dave can take ownership of the fact that there are people who strongly dislike him because of his own personality flaws and not their own misinterpretations.

Jonas Luster really broke down how silly the whole thing was and really touched a nerve with Dave. As one might expect, Dave’s little friends came rushing to his defense.

When it comes to innovation, there are only two options: do it first or do it better.

What Dave likes to do, is take an idea that has already been pretty well developed, and then toss a crappy implementation around it and promote the hell out of -himself- it. This pretty accurately describes his role in blogging, RSS, outlining, real-time status updates, vlogging, and pretty much any other technology he insinuates (or allows others to insinuate) that he came up with.

Dave’s “influence” on technology is largely myth. His influence on people who write about technology, though, is real.

Take one of the quotes Mr. Carpenter used to try to illustrate his piece (emphasis mine):

[The instant outliner] connects IM, weblog publishing (a weblog is essentially a published outline), RSS (if RSS items are brought into the outline), and outlining in a new way that radically improves team productivity.

Listen, a weblog is not “essentially a published outline”. Using an outliner to publish a weblog is a cute little hack, but the “essence” of blogging looks nothing like an outline, if we’re going to be honest with ourselves.

I have no doubt that Dave will continue to do things second (or third, or fourth) and pimp the hell out of them, finding meaning and inspiring qualities where none actually exist. That’s just “how he do”. It’s his shtick.

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.

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.

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.”