Eye on Winer

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?

You can now watch Jason Calacanis’ onstage incident with Dave Winer at Gnomedex. On the Flash video, skip to the 450,000-byte mark to see Calacanis squirm after Winer throws a hissyfit from the crowd. Their exchange:

Winer: This is conference spam! You’re spamming us right now.

Calacanis: How am I spamming you Dave?

Winer: This is spam. Look at the screen. Look what’s on the screen, Jason.

Calacanis: I’m talking about the issue …

Crosstalk, laughter

Chris Pirillo: Let him finish!

Unknown: He’s the speaker. You’re not.

Calacanis, who recently compared his life as an entrepreneur to being a samurai killing people in each village he visits, gets a deer in the headlights look as his friend Winer sparks a round of heckling from the Gnomedex audience.

Seeing the video took Winer right back to his hurty place, as you can tell by reading a Twitter chat he had last night with Robert Scoble and Intel blogger Josh Bancroft (some of which Winer subsequently deleted):

Josh Bancroft: Morbidly curious? Want to watch the whole Calacanis/Winer blowup about conference spam at Gnomedex 2007? http://tinyurl.com/22ttxw

Dave Winer: @jabancroft, what did you think of it? could it have been resolved without a flamefest? how can we do this better in the future?

Dave: why not be part of the solution, upgrade the discourse, don’t sensationalize. that’s what they do on CNN. let’s do better. what do you say?

Josh: @davewiner I tend to agree that it was conference spam, and that the “flamefest” came from clashing strong personalities.

Dave: Really, it came from clashing personalities — maybe you should check that out and see if your impression is accurate. I don’t think it is.

Josh: @davewiner I’m pointing people to the (presumably unedited) video, so they can decide for themselves. No sensationalism intended.

Dave: I sat out the first two days. How do I know? I drove from Seattle to Berkeley. So the flaming, such as it was, was one-way.

Josh: @davewiner this is the first time I’ve seen the video of the session available.

Dave: People-bashing is just plain wrong. These conferences should be about ideas. When the people become the target, it goes off the rails.

Josh: @davewiner You’re reading a lot into my motives, Dave. Dangerous. I’m not trying make the flames come back.

Dave: That might be the core principal of the civility crusade O’Reilly was on. Making people the issue is wrong. Stick to ideas.

Josh: @davewiner If anything, I’m hoping to help it all come to an end, now that anyone can watch the video and decide for themselves what happnd.

Dave: I feel I’ve given enough. How do I resign from that position?

Josh: I apologize if my wording was inflammatory. Wasn’t meant to be. I’m sorry I even mentioned it/picked at the scab.

Dave: I don’t think people get how utterly EXHAUSTING it is to be objectified and villified as a form of entertainment.

Josh: I think you underestimate how many people are on your side. I respect and look up to you. I’m sorry you’ve gone through all this.

Dave: @jabancroft, then why didn’t you say that? Look at what you actually said. I want to opt out of being bashed in the future.

Robert Scoble: @DaveWiner: I totally agree with you about how it feels to be objectified and vilified. It’s the downside of putting myself out there.

Scoble: People forget there are people on the other end of their blog posts. Or, worse, they attack for business reasons.

Scoble: But, on the other hand, I get so much goodness in return that focusing on the assholes is just unfair to the good people.

Scoble: I’m reading feeds right now and can’t keep up with the good people. The smart people. I love blogging for that. Hell with the haters.

Josh: @Scobleizer @davewiner I just love you guys so darn much, I want to give you all a big Internet Hug.

Dave: Actually, I’d like to scratch that last comment. It’s been a relatively bad last hour. I wish I could relive it. Time for a walk.

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?

From the Twitter streams of Dave and Colby Palmer tonight:

Dave Winer: Eric Rice is a dork. Is that conversational enough for you Eric?
Dave Winer: Hope that’s “conversational” enough for Eric Rice.
Dave Winer: I’m ragging on Eric because when Calacanis was running his campaign on me, trashing my good name, Rice jumped on and scored a few points too
Dave Winer: I really dislike opportunists who join web mobs. Rice is a big offender there. Mr Judgment. Loves to hit a man when he’s down
Dave Winer: We have a word for that where I come from: Coward.
Colby Palmer: @davewiner -don’t get me wrong Dave- <3 your brilliant work…but maybe piling more trash on the heap doesn’t add gloss to a “good name”?
Dave Winer: @colbyworld, are you a PR person? because only PR people worry about stuff like that. some of us are just people, and aren’t image-obsessed
Colby Palmer: @davewiner No, and with respect, I don’t want to flame. I’m just sick of the sniping/infighting. I’d rather see advances of real thought.
Colby Palmer: @davewiner This includes @spin and @jasoncalacanis…not to single you out, but your “good name/eric rice is a dork” rant was hypocritical.

I’m not sure I’m on board with “hypocritical”, but it sure was something. I must have missed it, but what did Rice do, exactly? Besides not getting enough of his digital slobber on Dave’s electronic knob, I mean.

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.

Dave Winer’s starting to squirm under the increased scrutiny he’s getting here and elsewhere since he heckled Jason Calacanis at Gnomedex.

Back from Mozilla. The meeting was great, no agreement, but typically, someone is flaming, and the weirdos love it. Thanks Jason!

We live in a new age, where everyone is tracked by paparazzi, and every word is analyzed for a negative soundbite. The age of Rove.

@chrisbrogan, well, when you lead a 45-minute discussion, and the whole thing is summarize by 1 quote, out of context, that’s rovian, imho

As you can see, he continues to blame Calacanis for the consequences of his own actions, ignoring the fact that this situation has occurred a dozen times before. The pattern’s as clear as lather, rinse, repeat — Dave abuses Somebody, Somebody responds in kind, Dave forgets Step 1 ever happened and plays the injured party for the latest iteration of sycophants on Scripting News who haven’t figured him out yet.

This morning, he fans the flames further:

A sacred line

Today I got a brief note from Jason Calacanis requesting that I not mention him on my weblog. This requires a public response. The answer is no. Jason, you just crossed a sacred line. I decide what belongs on this blog. If I worked for you I would resign, just like the editor of PC World did, when they tried to control his editorial. Geez, I hope you don’t do this to the editorial people who work for Mahalo.

The longer this goes on, the more clear it becomes that Winer has an ulterior motive for trying to bring down Mahalo. The new search engine is the first product of Calacanis’ entrepreneur in residence gig at Sequoia Capital, a VC firm where his job is to burn money bootstrapping new dot-coms into existence.

As a couple of old Scripting News posts show, that’s Winer’s dream job:

June 2, 2005: “I think I would like a teaching job somewhere, where I could work part-time as an entrepreneur in residence, at a VC firm, perhaps.”

June 29, 2004: “Yesterday I posted a note saying I’m looking for work. I’ve gotten a bunch of interesting responses, not with offers, but with ideas about what I should do next. Someone said I should be an entrepreneur-in-residence at a VC firm. Interesting idea. Yesterday I had dinner with a friend who’s well-connected in financial circles in Boston and Silicon Valley to talk about something like that.”

The father of modern-day content distribution who helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS couldn’t find a VC firm crazy enough to hire him. Does anyone doubt that Winer’s takedown of Mahalo is fueled by resentment?

This post is a reader-submission from an EoW friend that we’ll call “Tom”

Remember Ted…

Dear Ted

Your geeks are taking both of us for a ride.

I was subscribing to your feed, generally reading all your updates, and now I see the feed moved.

I was going to post a note saying that it would be better if you redirected to the new feed, but then I saw that your new feed isn’t RSS, to which I ask – why??

Do you want to lose subscribers?

Because that’s what happened. I can’t read your feed anymore Ted. I’ll survive, but I will miss your posts.

So it’s odd that today, a mere 7 months later, Dave is suddenly the bastion of syndication fairness…

Edit all docs and specs accordingly. Everywhere it says “Atom is better” remember “Users don’t care.”

Facebook is doing the same thing, and I’m pulling back from endorsing them until they take the religion out of their docs. I won’t help propogate the myth that one format is better than the other. Users don’t care.

If you must answer the question “What’s the difference between RSS and Atom?” just say they’re different flavors of the same thing. Even better would be to find a way to avoid raising the question at all. Test your reader against all formats with significant installed bases, and do what you can to keep the number of formats to a minimum.

What makes this even more amusing is that the issue here isn’t Facebook supporting RSS over Atom but simply that they mention Atom in their documentation. Apparently in Dave’s world it is now a sin to even mention Atom without also paying tribute to RSS.

(I should point out that in every official Facebook document I was able to find the company was careful to use “Atom/RSS” but something had to set Dave off)

EyeOnWiner adds: isn’t it curious that Dave’s argument against mentioning ATOM is that “users don’t care” but as soon as someone actually starts using ATOM, the users do care. Specifically, Dave cares. He ignores the possibility that some users feel the same way about ATOM that he does about RSS.