Eye on Winer

This, to me, is one of the most infuriating things about Dave. He treats other people with no respect, no compassion, and without thinking how what he’s saying is going to impact them. He does this under the guise of “calling it like he sees it”. This is not a problem. There are a lot of crusty old people on the internet who think they know everything and believe that everyone who doesn’t agree with them is stupid.

The problem that I have with it, though, is that he’s also one of the most overly-sensitive people around. He wants the right to tell you that something you’ve done sucks, and still be your friend, but if you criticize anything he does or says, you’re suddenly being “personal” and “nasty”.

He can dish it out, but he can’t take it.

TechCrunch killed a post yesterday that mocked Dave Winer for his obsession of the moment — the size of a techblogger’s penis as measured by his ranking on the TechMeme leaderboard. Here’s the post, rescued from digital oblivion:

Techmeme Leaderboard Gets Its First Sibling: WeSmirch Leaderboard

By Duncan Riley

As we first posted about exclusively last week, Techmeme Leaderboard now has a sibling, the WeSmirch Leaderboard.

The WeSmirch Leaderboard tracks the top 100 websites in the celebrity blogosphere, based on headline mentions on WeSmirch.

The discussion since the launch of the Techmeme Leaderboard has been fairly remarkable in terms of the amount of words committed to discussing it. There has been attempts to game and hack the list, and Dave Winer has even gone so far as to commit countless words into looking at what the deeper meaning of the list really is, and as to whether TechCrunch may be secretly gaming it in some sort of Michael Arrington fueled conspiracy. As much as I’ve always welcomed informed debate, and I’ll always have a lot of respect for Dave Winer, I can’t help but think OMG, it’s a list for goodness sake!, just a list and nothing more than that, this isn’t war and peace. The list might not be perfect but it’s still a subjective tool that might come in handy at times for those tracking popularity in the tech blogosphere.

The WeSmirch Leaderboard indicates that the AOL owned TMZ is the most mentioned news source in the celebrity blogosphere, followed by People.com and Dlisted. Well known celebrity blogger Perez Hilton comes in at the surprisingly low 22nd.

Two hours after it was posted, Winer made this comment at 6:22 a.m. Pacific:

Mike, the piece wasn’t actually negative about you, read it again or get someone else to read it for you, and it didn’t say you were behind a conspiracy. You always seem to have trouble when you’re in the story, but in this case it’s totally unavoidable, you’re at the top of the list in TechMeme, and near the top in Technorati. And it looks to me like a fair amount of the stuff that appears on TechMeme is following you, so sorry, you’re at the center of this story, like it or not.

If you really don’t like it you could opt out, and that would force a fair number of people to resub to TC. I don’t have it in my aggregator, haven’t had it for quite some time, I depend on TM to find me the worthwhile stories here. I suspect that some other people don’t look either. At the same time the flow that a Techmeme link delivers is an order of magnitude greater (for me) than a link on Techcrunch.

I know it’s all mouse nuts to someone with 609K subscribers (”it’s just a list!”), but then I wonder how real those subscribers are.

And btw, other people report the same experience, they’re just scared of getting you angry, so they don’t write the posts. I’m not scared of you, I think you’ve done all you can to screw with me, and I’m still here.

Contrary to Winer’s persecution complex, Jack Michael Arrington Jr. has done very little to screw with Winer. He was quiet as a church mouse when Jason Calacanis made Winer his bitch (Winer’s words), even though Arrington and Calcanis are TechCrunch40 BFFs who bonded over a disease they’ve both contracted: money-coming-out-the-ass syndrome.

The link to the Jimmy Cliff song “The Harder They Come” on Scripting News this morning is Dave Winer’s attempt to taunt Jack Michael Arrington Jr. He started doing it yesterday on Twitter:

Dave Winer: Mike A accused me (in public no less) of spamming TechMeme (grrrr). Now look what’s on top. http://tinyurl.com/2vnfyp

Winer: Mike was wrong, and I’m sure his post was serious, and he wasn’t gaming TechMeme with a quick swipe at Technorati

Winer: But Mike does treat TM as if it were his personal property, as he does people he calls “friends” — hubris.

Winer: Reminded of a great Jimmy Cliff song (hope you’re listening Mike). http://tinyurl.com/39uljf

Pretending for the moment that they’re actual friends — people who would help each other move, donate a kidney, suck the rattlesnake venom from an assbite — is there a more pathetic reason for a 52-year-old man to renounce a friendship than TechMeme?

Interesting choice of words from Dave Winer Sunday:

It is a shame to be missing the TechCrunch conference, but I guess there’s a good reason for it, although I sure don’t know what it is. Jason got very very mad at me for interrupting his speech at Gnomedex, and scorched my earth in every way he could think to. I think a mensch would regret doing that, and would say so publicly. I would like to get that out of the way so I could have fun at the conference like everyone else. But since he made me his bitch, it just wouldn’t be fun being there listening to him present the demoers, thinking how mean he had been to me, in such a public and humiliating way.

Made me his bitch? Did Dave really just compare getting criticized by an A-list blogger to being sexually dominated in prison?

An essential element to a Communist show trial is the renunciation, where the target of the political prosecution must admit the wrongness of his views and the rightness of his government.

Dave Winer has responded to Robert Scoble’s love letter to Jason Calacanis with a modest request: His friend must renounce his view that Mahalo, Facebook, and TechMeme will crush Google:

So here’s what you should do when you say something that’s incorrect. As soon as you realize it, correct it. Maybe offer an explanation, but that seems optional. But first and foremost, fix the bug.

Everyone is telling him this, but he’s not getting the message. Simply say “I made a mistake” and every piece from this point on won’t have to guess what happened.

That was a real big mistake, but everybody still thinks you’re alright. OK, you’re kinda funny. Heh. And it was a crazy idea, and the drugs must have been very good, but we’ll get over it. That’s the problem, though. Nobody knows what to make of it. So they’re all guessing. You could settle it. Say you made a mistake.

Considering the fact that these two are 10-year friends, and Scoble’s in the midst of a Technorati shitstorm over his post, you have to wonder how he’s privately taking Winer’s kick in the ribs while he’s down. Publicly he’ll swallow his pride and accept it, since Scoble had his dignity surgically removed a few years ago in a live Windows Media Player streamcast that’s still available somewhere on Microsoft Channel 9. But privately, in the lizard brain that never forgets an insult, he has to know Winer would never accept the treatment he’s dishing out to him here. (The fastest way to make Winer come unglued is to tell him what to write on his blog.)

Can anyone recall a single time when Scoble publicly told Winer to renounce a mistake?

No one’s been a bigger blogfriend to Dave Winer than Robert “Naked Conversations” Scoble, his former employee at LuserLand. Scoble, a college dropout who bounced around bad jobs until he found fame as a blogger at Microsoft, has managed to keep his friendship with Winer out of the death spiral for a decade. Even when Winer publicly embarrassed his wife earlier this year.

If you read ValleyWag, you know that Scoble’s company PodTech is in man-the-lifeboats mode. Anyone who can get out is getting out. So with this in mind, check out Scoble’s blog yesterday, where he predicted that Mahalo, Facebook and Techmeme will combine forces and defeat Google in four years.

This is clearly insane. The idiocy of Scoble’s rant drove mild-mannered search guru Danny Sullivan to profanity.

Want to be like Robert — and Jason Calacanis — and keep equating SEO with spam? Then fuck off.

I don’t think I’ve ever used the F-word in any of my writing, and my apologies for being so crass. But I’ve had enough of people trying to advance their own personal agendas (Jason hoping someone will care about Mahalo; Robert hoping someone will watch his videos) on the back of an industry that is full of plenty of people who do good work.

Valleywag’s Tim Faulkner was even less kind:

All he’s assembled is evidence, on video, that he doesn’t understand tech, doesn’t understand video, and doesn’t understand himself. He’s an expert, in other words, on exactly none of his three favorite topics.

The only possible explanation for Scoble’s actions is that he’s auditioning for his next job. And it’s interesting that he’d go after a gig with Mahalo, considering the smear campaign that Winer’s been waging against its founder Jason Calacanis.

In a Today’s Links post today, Dave quotes a commenter (and apparent Dave groupie):

Tom Morris: “I’m getting fed up of the blogosphere taking every critical remark as an ‘attack’ on a person.” Amen.

Wait, back up. Dave is agreeing that people take things too personally? Despite characterizing every negative comment (that isn’t couched in glowing praise) about his ideas as a “nasty personal attack?” Now, when there’s actually some attacking going on, and when he’s the one doing it, people are being too sensitive? Geez.

I am simply amazed every day that his head doesn’t explode from the constant flow of contradiction. He must truly live in his own world.