Eye on Winer

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?

Dave posted, yesterday, what he called an apology to Jason Calacanis. It was unconvincing and, frankly, not much of an apology at all.

I gave it some thought, and I decided to apologize to Jason for interrupting his speech at Gnomedex. I wish I hadn’t done it. It’ll never happen again. That’s a promise.

If the post had ended here, we’d have a real apology. It would almost sound sincere, probably about as close as Dave gets. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t bring himself to actually apologize to anyone. Too much ego. He continues…

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There’s an A-List cage match going on at Gnomedex this weekend between Dave Winer and Jason Calacanis. Calacanis was giving a speech on his new startup Mahalo, a human-powered search engine that will crush Google by creating spam-free search results compiled by thousands of quick-fingered Guatamalan orphans who won’t be missed by anybody if they disappear.

Winer, though they are ostensibly friends, heckled him from the audience and called the speech “conference spam.”

After a little back and forth on their blogs — in which Jason was like “don’t front me bitch” and Dave was all “oh no you di-in’t” — Calacanis announced that he’s been dropped from Winer’s friends list:

I’m sad, but somewhat relieved, that Dave told me our friendship is over. He informed me of this in his third berating session of me in 24 hours, this time at the end of lunch. I’m not interested in having someone berate me like this, and I’m certainly not interested in having him berate people at the TechCrunch20 conference.

Winer likes to shut people up at conferences by claiming they’re just selling something, as beret-wearing continuous partial attention blowhard Stowe Boyd points out:

I remember the mess at one of the Bloggercons, where Winer wouldn’t let Bob Wyman, then of Pubsub, speak because Winer thought it was commercial speech, although Bob had only said a few words. He also browbeat the indominable Chris Nolan when she stated unequivocally — in a session on “Making Money With Blogs” — that yes, she did want to make money blogging, and not use blogging as a means to make money some other way. But he kept telling her “No, Chris, you don’t want to make money that way.” And she kept responding, “No, Dave, I do.” He just wouldn’t accept what she was saying. It went back and forth a half a dozen times, at least.

He melted down again not long after at some blogging conference in Tennessee, I think, with Glenn Reynolds this time.

He’s a loose cannon, held in high regard for his contributions, but a powder keg. I had an actual pain in my stomach when he showed up that this year’s Reboot, although he actually didn’t attack anyone in public.

Winer has strong but totally misguided anti-commercial impulses, especially in conferences where many or all of the attendees are interested in commercial applications. Making money isn’t an intrinsic evil, and commercial speech is sometimes sensible and desired.

It’s weird that anyone takes Winer’s anti-commercialism seriously, considering that he sold Weblogs.Com for a couple million, has a mancrush on venture capitalist John Doerr and chased the buck as hard as anyone. (Remember when he secretly took $5,000 from Adam Curry to make his blog a default subscription in Radio Luserland?) At Gnomedex in ’05, Winer gave a speech on the OPML Editor, a project that’s only non-commercial in the sense that it has no commercial value.

Winer doesn’t explain what climbed up his backchannel and made him so mad at his Palacanis, but it probably was this use of his name as a verb:

I’ve gotten dozen folks telling me not to give getting “Winered”* a second thought. From what they said Dave has a habit of yelling at people at conferences including Blake Ross last year, Microsoft employees at the search champs event, and many others.

The best part of this fight — they sat three seats apart at Gnomedex while posting the blog entries that turned them from BFFs to FU2s.