Eye on Winer

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.

Dave amended his post on the Wired piece to add:

These mob attacks are fun for you guys, but they’re not fun for the people who get ganged up on. Some people take advantage of that, and use it to build flow and page rank, and distract people from issues they don’t want to talk about. Publications like Wired should be counted on to slow things down and check the facts. If we have more of that, we’ll have less of the bad stuff.

So, since we know Dave reads us here at EOW… allow me to ask a direct question:

Dave, exactly which facts are you claiming that Wired got wrong?

From where I’m sitting, everything they wrote was right on the money. They quote Calacanis, who says he didn’t kick Dave out of TechCrunch20. Dave has already agreed with this. Wired then quotes Calacanis who quotes O’Reilly. Note that it was not Wired citing to O’Reilly as fact, they provided the same quote that Calacanis provided to them.

Even if we assume that simply providing the quote gives it some imprimatur, the quote itself is 100% accurate. O’Reilly never states or implies that Winer has been disinvited from all conferences, only from one specific conference.

Then Strange, the author of the Wired piece, does his own writing, in which he describes Winer’s reputation for being a loud-mouthed jerk (my words, not Strange’s) and then does a little finger wagging at Calacanis for seeming to pretend not to know that Winer is an opinionated hot-head.

So… again… where, exactly, did Wired go wrong? Aside from maybe reading a little too much into Calacanis’ statement.

PS: We’re now back to Dave disliking mobs after a spell of him really liking them.

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…

(more…)

Dave Winer won’t be heckling anybody at the TechCrunch20 conference next month, according to Jason “Fistful of Mahalo” Calacanis:

Yes, Dave resigned from TechCrunch20 today. I’m relieved. I don’t want folks trying to make a go of it berated by someone who made it

The event’s set up for 20 tech experts to grill 20 startups for a chance to win $50,000 and spoon with Jack Michael Arrington Jr. during one of his afternoon power naps. Winer, alongside such luminaries as Mark Cuban, Mark Andreesen and MC Hammer, could have alienated another 20 dot-com CEOs in a single afternoon.

If anyone has a cache of Winer’s Twittergram podcast feed, he ranted yesterday during the drive home from Gnomedex, saying he would not soon forget that Calacanis called out the “wiener boys” on him. An hour later it was replaced with this Twittergram about what a great day he was having. And who wouldn’t have a great day, driving alone for 798 miles and calling in XML-RPC-powered audio harangues fueled by the largest sense of personal aggrievement since Richard Nixon circa 1974?

For those who missed this fight because they have rich personal lives, Loren Feldman has posted a dramatized re-enactment of the Calacanis-Winer argument.

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.