Eye on Winer

Recently we’ve gotten a bit of push-back from some of our readers with regards to a few posts linking to interesting stories about Dave’s personal life. Here are two comments from the most recent post.

Yaggafla: Yeah, I think going after his personal life is a little lame. I think this blog works best when it critiques and pokes holes in his authoritative posts, but not when you go after his social life.

jay lerner: yeah, i kinda agree with yaggla on this one, eye. for the record, i think you do a swell job. but as dispicable as i find winer’s web bullying, let’s just leave the guy’s personal life out of it. if he wants to get down in the gutter and pick a fight, that’s on him.

I agree: “going after” Dave’s personal life would be lame. Fortunately, that’s not what we’ve done. The posts highlighted a facet of Dave’s personality by way of his interviews and his own writings. Nevertheless, at the urging of another blogger here at EOW, I’m going to try to clear up why Eye On Winer exists:

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I checked out the Technorati stats for EOW earlier today, and saw something disturbing: lots and lots of spam.

There are a number of sites that appear to have been hacked, and their bodies replaced with spam for various spiders. You might want to check to see if your site (or any that you frequent) are on that list.

It’s been suggested more than a few times that EoW host a wiki to allow more people to chronicle Dave’s “history” on the internet. To quote the most recent email in support of the idea:

I have to believe that Calacanis’s mention of O’Reilly’s statements from several years ago was enabled by wikipedia - a site jealously guarded by betsythedevine. I also have to believe that most people see these as isolated incidents and perhaps reflecting badly on both parties. It is only when the totality is made readily accessible that people will be able to see the things as they really are.

Indeed. This idea especially appeals to me because I keep up with the goings on on Dave’s wikipedia page, and while Betsy Devine stays, ostensibly, away from editing the actual page, she does protect Dave from the less rosy neutral viewpoints as an editor, something I don’t think Wikipedia has quite figured out how to control yet.

So… well… here it is. I’m going to try to let it grow organically, but please try to stay as objective and grounded in reality as possible. References are greatly appreciated and, though I shouldn’t have to say so, if you don’t want Winer poking around and figuring out your IP address, register for an account.

I imagine that there will be entries for things like Gnomedex 2007, and Adam Curry.

Although this welcome message is a little late (sorry, been moving into a bigger place. Business is good), EyeOnWiner would like to welcome its newest author Bullshit Mancuso.

This note also underscores the fact that any of you who wish to blog about Dave’s antics are welcome to do so here. (more…)

The voting in the KBcafe 2006 blog awards has finished and EOW won the “Best Anti-Blog” category. Which is pretty sweet, although I still think Mini-microsoft does a better job. Nevertheless, go check out the winners.

I noticed a few referals from The KBCafe RSS Blog and it turns out that EOW has been nominated for “Best Anti-Fan Blog” in their 2006 KBCafe Blog Awards. Mini-Microsoft is the other nominee in that category and while I don’t harbor any delusions that this blog has anything on Mini-Microsoft, there are a lot of other categories to vote in, so it won’t kill you to fill out a ballot. Go give it a shot. I have (though I did abstain from the Anti-Fan category).

I’m sure most of you read both EOW and Dave in your newsreader, and so do I… but sometimes I will visit Scripting.com just to see the little green EyeOnWiner boxes. I just made a quick update to the EyeOnWiner greasemonkey script. The GM script puts links to the EOW rebuttal right on Scripting.com. I updated it to also work with the Scripting Annex at wordpress.com. If you don’t feel like downloading a new version, it works prefectly well to just add “http://scripting.wordpress.com/*” to the list of domains in your greasemonkey admin.

If you’re not sure what on earth ‘greasemonkey‘ is, you are missing out. Here is the script. Alternately, you can always find the most recent version on th esidebar.

I also upgraded Wordpress and changed the header color back to a more traditional EOW green. Haven’t quite gotten around to mucking with the CSS colors yet, though. Oh well.

So WordPress does a good job of keeping comment spam off of the site, but a lot of it still gets tagged to “moderate” which is annoying to do. One thing about comment spam is that it almost always happens on really old posts, so I rigged up this wordpress plugin which will close the comments on a particular entry after a certain number of days. I chose 10 days.

So once a post has been around for more than 10 days, you will not be able to comment on it. This shouldn’t really bother anyone, but if you have something you’d like to add to an old post, shoot me an email and I’ll put it up myself.

Because the change from Blogspot to the new URL (EyeOnWiner.org) should have been seamless for people reading via RSS (got to love feedburner), it should be known that EyeOnWiner has moved on up in preparation for its first birthday!

Here’s some random notes worth noting:

GreaseMonkey Script — It came to my attention that the greasemonkey script had ceased working, so there is now a new version linked on the sidebar which seems to be working for me.

Guest Posters – I have opened up registration to any and all who wish to contribute. The process will go like this:

1. Register - you must use a real email address and please choose a username that means something — it will not be seen by anyone but me if that’s what you want.
2. Log in using the password that is emailed to you.
3. Write a new post. It will be saved as draft until I approve it. (I am not going to exert much editorial control here, but I need to keep Dave himself from posting a lengthy screed about how great he is)
4. If you want to remain anonymous, PLEASE INDICATE THIS AT THE TOP OF YOUR POST in some obvious way.
5. When I approve your post, if you have asked to remain anonymous, I will transfer ownership of your post to this new “anonymous” user so it will not be linked to you.
6. Once all that is taken care of, I’ll publish your post.

As usual, you can always just email me posts and I’ll publish them as Anon, as above.

Main Bloggers — I’ve sent out a few emails to other anti-Dave bloggers inviting them to merge and work here instead of their random blogspot places — that is an open invitation. If you want to sign on as a main blogger, go ahead and register and then shoot me an email and we can chat. The hybrid option is to register and just post things without asking to be anonymous… and then when I approve them they’ll show up under whatever settings you dictate for yourself in the wordpress options. The only difference between being a “main” blogger versus a “guest” blogger is whether or not your posts have to be approved before they go live.

Comments from Blogspot — I’m leaving the blogspot blog up because even though I did import the posts to wordpress, I did not import the comments… so comments on older posts are over on blogspot still.