Eye on Winer

On Aug. 31, 1986, Knight-Ridder Newspapers ran a feature story on the 3.6 million never-married American bachelors. You might recognize one of them.

THE UNMARRIED MAN 3.6 MILLION LIVE ALONE, DELAYING MARRIAGE FOR CAREER

DAVE O’BRIAN, Knight-Ridder Newspapers

When Dave Winer comes home late after a hard day at the office, no one is there to greet him. But he doesn’t really mind, he says, because he is hardly ever home.

And though he may be by himself, he is not exactly alone. He is one of 3.6 million American males who live by themselves and have never married.

More than a blip on a demographic chart, Winer’s group has grown 124 percent during the past 15 years, according to a 1985 Marital Status Report by the U.S. Census Bureau. Much has been written about the alleged plight of “older single women” — including the recent press furor over “Marriage Patterns in the United States,” a controversial Harvard-Yale study which concluded that single women over 30 have little chance to make it to the altar and that after 40 they have virtually no chance at all. Never mind that the study’s results were questionable. The single, never-married American male remains a species that seems to have been all but ignored.

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Christmas came a day early at Eye on Winer: NPR has begun a week-long history of blogging that doesn’t exaggerate Dave Winer’s grandiose and bogus claim to have originated the medium.

NPR’s first audio story, seven minutes that are incredibly funny and include interviews with Justin Hall and Peter Merholz, comes with a blogging timeline prepared by Andy Carvin, an NPR online exec and online diarist since 1994. As you might expect from a person who was writing chronological updates on his life and work years before Winer began Scripting News in 1997, Carvin groups Winer with online journals and other personal sites that were bloglike before the term existed.

Here’s the part that put the coal in Winer’s stocking — the timeline of blogging begins counting up from the day Jorn Barger came up with the term weblog.

December 1997: Jorn Barger starts a daily log of interesting Web links published in reverse chronological order, calling it Robot Wisdom WebLog. The term “Weblog” is soon generalized by other online publishers to include any page with frequent short posts in reverse chronological order.

There’s nothing unfair about this logic. It’s completely reasonable to decide that blogging didn’t start until the term “weblog” was coined to describe the practice. Even more fair is to place the medium in context with the seminal stuff that came before. Back in 1997, Winer owed a debt to the publishers who came before him — one he rarely if ever acknowledges. Blogging did not spring whole from his skull like Athena from Zeus.

But as you might have guessed, Blogfather don’t play that way. Six a.m. Pacific on Christmas Eve, and Ebenezer Dave wakes up kvetching and bullying Carvin on Twitter:

davewiner: @acarvin, like so many before, confuses the naming of blogs with the invention of blogs. barger wasn’t the first, for the 180th time. about two hours ago

davewiner: btw if you’re going to publish yet another wrong timeline of blogging, why not allow for comments so people can correct your mistakes. about two hours ago

davewiner: @acarvin, jorn copied me, used my software, as did all the early bloggers. if you dispute that, where your evidence? 35 minutes ago

davewiner: @acarvin, and you’re not consistent. according to your logic, the moment podcasting started was when the word was chosen. 34 minutes ago

davewiner: @acarvin, in both cases, we needed a word for what we were doing. when jorn came up with weblog, we all went with it. he wasn’t the leader. 33 minutes ago

davewiner: and the really shameful thing about it is that the record is all there, in the archives. if you wanted to do it right you could have. 33 minutes ago

davewiner: @acarvin, i saw that i’m in the timeline for other things, but i want credit for the work i did. it was hard and not obvious stuff andy. 19 minutes ago

davewiner: there were quite a few bloggers before barger, notably kottke and camworld. look at blogtree for a record of who inspired who. 16 minutes ago

davewiner: blogtree is offline, but it’s all in archive.org’s database. 15 minutes ago

davewiner: @rexhammock, thanks! and with that, i’ll say no more about NPR, and I’ll avoid listening to it this week to keep from getting depressed. 2 minutes ago

On and on it goes, always to the central theme of Winer’s professional life: The work I did was important, influential and instrumental. The work others did was incremental and insignificant. In keeping with the season, every idea he’s ever had was a virgin birth.

Dave might know a thing or two about tech (although that is debatable) but he doesn’t know a thing about the entertainment industry.

[I]n this case, the execs, the nemesis of the Internet, seem to be taking the side of the Internet. They can’t promise the writers a share of the money they make on the Internet because they don’t see how they’re going to make money on the Internet. How can you share something that doesn’t exist??

I have a sneaking suspicion that Dave was trying to see how many absurdly ignorant statements he could cram into two sentences. If, in fact, the entertainment industry didn’t know how to make money off of the internet, and wasn’t making money now, they would gladly give the writers a larger share of nothing to get them back in their cubes. The execs would be getting something for nothing. What’s more likely is that the execs are making money on the internet and have a plan for how to make more, and they want to keep it for themselves.

For another thing, it’s not just the “new media” (which is a catch-all provision that tends to cover everything less common than DVD sales) contract clauses which are up for debate. So, too, is the DVD residual rate and calculation clauses… surely Dave doesn’t think that people aren’t making money on DVDs right now.

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About a week ago, Dave spilled some bits talking about why he hates video cameras. In sum, it looked like this:

I’m at a cocktail party, but I’ve been drinking water because I’m being taped in every conversation I have. One guy is even live-broadcasting to god knows who. I feel like a presidential candidate. What if I say something which, taken out of context, sounds like I have a belief that’s politically incorrect.

When a journalist wants an interview, he refuses to do it and opts, instead, to answer the questions publicly so that there’s context. He argues that someone broadcasting his every word would make it easy for them to be taken out of context. This, of course, is silly. A video of the conversation gives more context than a poorly remembered text-quote ever could. It gives body language, tone, and exact words and phrasings.

Dave’s real problem is that he knows that, if someone video tapes him saying something untoward, he has no plausible arguments to avoid responsibility for his words. He can’t claim to be misquoted. He can’t claim a serious comment was a joke. He can’t exaggerate or downplay. All he can do is defend his words or apologize, and that scares the hell out of him.

(I’ve heard some arguments that this is just self-consciousness at work, but he seems pretty amenable to having his picture taken, so I don’t think that’s the real issue.)

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.