Eye on Winer

A few weeks ago, Colby Palmer exchanged tweets with Dave Winer after telling him “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’?” After their chat ended up here, Palmer wrote a post for us about how conflict is bad, cooperation is good, and the blogosphere should be one big reacharound of happiness.

We didn’t run it.

This made Palmer so mad that he started his own blog, hoping to set an example for positive thinkers everywhere:

The conversation, unfortunately, was picked up by some vacuous hate-blog site called Eye on Winer and published. Apparently they are like Dave Winer’s personal Valleywag. If I were Dave I would be flattered; they obviously put a lot of energy into this crap. I attempted to comment on their post, even registered and tried to post my own comments, but for whatever reason the site refuses to approve my post. OMG really? If you’re going to publish my tweets out of context, at least give me the opportunity to express my perspective … right? If not, I felt it needed to be said … so here we are.

So … this needs more than 140 characters so I decided it’s time to start my own blog. Yes, I am THAT cantankerous that I will create my own sweet blog, just so my first post can tell the world what some other jerkass website doesn’t want to publish. This is not rebuttal, not apology, not a withdrawal. It’s just my side of things, and hopefully the beginning of a productive conversation. Dave Winer is NOT the point of this post; the point is that the narrow-minded cowards who waste their time on lame Twitter-fights and crap like EOW should really take stock of their priorities and try to do something more noble with their intellect.

This appears to be the first time that Eye on Winer has fathered another blog. And it didn’t take long for our child to rebel against his parent.

It’s great that Palmer wants to rise above the fray and be the better person, though no one over 12 should use the phrase “OMG really.” But the tech industry is full of hucksters and charlatans and assholes, which makes it a target-rich environment for anyone with a bullshit detector. Telling the truth about these people tends to make them mad.

Welcome to the blogosphere, son.

Why is it that people (many, although Dave is certainly one) acts as though someone saying or posting something anonymously makes them less credible? Really, at the end of the day, what difference does it make who is saying something? Shouldn’t we be evaluating their comments on their merits and not based on the commenter? In fact, there’s a logical fallacy (that Dave often mistakenly accuses people of) whose entire point is in saying that arguments should be made on their merits and not on the merits of the author. Or, in other words, the identity of the author does not make something true or false.

The most recent place I noticed this was on the talk page for Dave’s wikipedia entry. First, an anonymous user accused both this site and I’m Not Dave of being (more or less) spam blogs… which is odd, because neither of the sites have any ads on the whatsoever. Of course, then Ben Houston comments that EOW is “problematic” because I don’t identify myself.

I would be ineterested to have any post in which my identity changes the validity of my statements pointed out to me. I doubt there is one. But, further, there are some good reasons to be anonymous here.

1. This isn’t a comparative personality study. I’m not saying I’m better than Dave (or that I’m not), only calling him out for the things he does. I welcome people to call me out both for things I do with this persona and things I do with my public one (both in their appropriate places).
2. This sort of thing would bore my regular blog readers… which is more a reason for a separate site, not one for anonymity I guess, then again I’m sure I’d attract some trolls to my personal site, which would cause annoyance for more than just me.
3. In that same vein, anyone who has had had misfortune of running up against Dave’s merry band of sycophants knows how nasty they can be, which makes sense, because Dave himself is a fairly nasty individual. Though I doubt I rate high enough on the importance scale to warrant Dave siccing his minions on me, I’d rather not run the risk.

So… anyway… there’s that. Also, speaking of Dave’s Wikipedia entry, the link to Eye on Winer is now outdated. Some enterprising wikiteer might want to make that 10 second edit.