Eye on Winer

I’m not sure I understand why Dave thinks he deserves advance notice of a company’s search offering… as though he’s some sort of search, usability, or any other sort of guru.

And he keeps beating this drum of “Google News doesn’t allow blogs”. They do allow blogs, but only if the blogs are news content… he’s still got his panties in a wad over the fact that Google News doesn’t think that Scripting News is news (I’m sure the whole world wants to read one-sentence posts about him arriving in some random airport, right?). The bottom line is that Google News is a news search…

Of course, point 5 gets back to his self-centric world-view that if someone doesn’t talk to him they’re being “exclusive.”

As much as he whines and complains about being flamed, everyone’s favorite hypocrite certainly doesn’t mind flaming google.

Of course, the reason he’s pissed is because it doesn’t do river of news and clearly he thinks that’s the only way to read feeds. (And google’s arrogant?)

And then, of course, you have his ‘advice’ to Google… advice that, to the best of my knowledge, he’s never followed with any of his companies.

What simultaneously amuses and annoys me is that in the first post Dave, who cries like a schoolgirl every time someone says something nasty about him, tallies the following:

1. Google reader is slow
2. Reader and Blog Search are/were ‘ridiculous’ (whatever that means)
3. Nobody tested Reader internally.
4. Google didn’t look outside for ideas.
5. It’s “so wrong”
6. Reader is a “huge step backwards”
7. And, finally, that… wait for it… their arrogance is catching up with them.

Heh. Winer called someone else arrogant. Go figure.

Dave has a bit of a problem. Well, he has lots, but the one that’s most evident by this post is that he assumes everything he disagrees with is personal.

Read the post he references by Danny Sullivan. On top of being factually correct Sullivan isn’t even remotely personal in his criticism of Berlind’s column. But Winer says it’s “nasty”. A quick review shows the following:

Sullivan infers that Berlind is “getting huffy” and “ranting”

Sullivan says Berlind is “just flat wrong”

Other than that… nothing. Personal? Vaguely. Nasty? Hardly. Want to see nasty and personal? Look at the way Winer handles Republicans. What a hypocrite.

And the bottom line is that Sullivan is right. (Also: there are blogs included in Google News. And Google News doesn’t have a strict anti-blog policy… only that the blogs have to be newsworthy… which most, Scripting News included, are not)

Today, Dave writes:

Steve Tibbet: “Having your blog available in a standard format is IMHO a great thing. It wrests your creations from the grips of your blogging tool, and puts it into a format where interoperability is possible.” Exactly!

But this is the same argument that justifies Google’s AutoLink feature, which Dave really, really hates. It wrests the data from the grips of the author’s strangle-hold and puts it into a format where the user can enjoy it as they see fit.

Ahem.

Bob Stepno reviews the EFF guidelines for bloggers. Me, I don’t hold out much hope for the EFF’s advice, given that they don’t see any problem with Google’s ad hackery of our sites, what kind of clue could they actually have about blogger’s interests? They think we’re part of Google’s Gulag. Hey that’s kind of catchy.

Yes… that’s exactly right. Google’s Gulag. Becasue we all know that Google has “A forced labor camp or prison, especially for political dissidents.”

What the hell is this guy on?

I think, in his youth, Dave must have lived on a farm, because he’s more adept at erecting strawmen than anyone else on the internet. Seriously. He generally does this by way of really bad analogies. Like this one.

Okay, so Google doesn’t like us sharing their secrets, and they’re kind of touchy, some of the things they object to don’t even seem to us like they’re secrets. Well lucky for them, they own the throttle. They can just cut off our air supply. How could they do that. How how how? Well, remember we decided it was okay for them to modify our content way back in 2005. They didn’t even have to ask our permission. Not only that, if we said no, they could ignore us. They’re just giving the users what they want, and we believed them. But why John is it bad when Steve Jobs goes to court to get permission to modify three bloggers’ content, but it’s really coooool when Eric Schmidt calls it a feature? I guess the users wanted it, that’s the difference.

The difference, Dave, is that the “users” can turn off Google. Get a new browser. Get a new OS. Get something else. The users can’t turn off a court order, no matter how much they might want to — and this is by the correct usage of the term “user”, which is to say “end-user”.

Further: I’m not sure why everyone is in such a tizzy over Apple protecting its trade secrets. This isn’t some self-righteous blogger putting his content free and clear on the internet and then trying to determine how it gets read in the privacy of someone’s home, it’s an entity trying to keep something from getting out at all.

I’ll just wait for the next round of FUD and BS.

Remember when Dave was upset because Google News wouldn’t take him? (I do)

Well, even if we ignore the fact that half of his posts are so short as to only be headlines, I think it might be posts like this that make Google News’ editors think “That’s not really news.”

Can you imagine the front page of The Times displaying the headline “Winer Gets New Car!” or maybe a breaking news banner on CNN? Yeah. That’s news alright

Quick! To your “The End is Coming” sandwich boards! We are desperately needing them in bustling metropolises the world over to warn the commoners of our impending doom! Why, you ask? Google released their toolbar… with autolink!!!

As you might expect, Dave is quick to sound the alarm:

In the meantime, yesterday Google took the Toolbar out of beta, and along with it released the AutoLink feature we were discussing in February and March. They made some minor mods, but still haven’t allowed authors a way to opt-out on a feature that should be opt-in only. So, imho, Google is doing its own part to destroy the value of the searchable web, cashing our work out for a short-term benefit for their shareholders. That was my last attempt to try to coax Google back onto our side. We’re now on their slippery slope, I fully expect that they will release more content-modifying technology soon. AutoLink was merely a precedent-setter for them, and for their competitors

Not that he listens, but it’s not opt-out because these are individuals choosing to use information in a particular way, not a big company editing and republishing your data. It’s no different, I say again, than going to scripting.com, saving the HTML to your disk, adding the links by hand, and then viewing the page locally on your hard drive… except that the method google employs is more user-friendly. When did Dave Winer become so anti-user? Oh, that’s right. When it meant less control for him.

Of course, despite Dave’s liberal leanings, he ought to recognize that if this is such a bad thing, it wouldn’t be a precedent-setter for their competitors… because they’d want to have an advantage. Of course, what he realizes is that this is something that some users want: the ability to easily cross-reference data with the click of a button. Sure, he adds that as an “oh by the way” in his next post, but it’s clear that wasn’t his first thought.

Also: his argument of a slippery slope here is pure FUD — there’s not a speck of logic or reason to be found in it.

Also, I’m not sure what this has to do with the searchable web, since the transient local versions of pages temporarily stored on a user’s machine aren’t a part of “the searchable web” to begin with… so this really has no effect there, either.

Anyway, back to the bell-rining — the people must be warned!