Eye on Winer

Recent Twitter comments posted by Dave Winer:

• hillary is full of shit 05:26 PM January 21, 2008
• Hillary go to hell 05:43 PM January 21, 2008
• Okay Edwards is an asshole too. 05:47 PM January 21, 2008
• Oh fuck you Hillary. 06:00 PM January 21, 2008
• Fuck You John Edwards. 06:30 PM January 21, 2008
• Sorry, I know Edwards is from the south, but he sounds gay. 06:45 PM January 21, 2008
• No mercy for Hillary this time. 06:01 PM January 26, 2008
• Kill Hill Kill Hill. 06:01 PM January 26, 2008
• Fuck you Bill Clinton. 06:09 PM January 26, 2008

Winer’s “Kill Hill Kill Hill” comment is the kind of thing that gets the Secret Service knocking on your door investigating a threat. It says something about the 4,300 people who follow Winer on Twitter that the comment is still online, two days after he posted it.

Apparently EOW has joined Mahalo’s Top 7 for Dave Winer. Just in case Dave needed another reason to hate it.

An email from an observant reader discusses the ridiculous nature of RSS over XMPP…

Dave’s latest idea for a decentralized Twitter (which isn’t really an idea, blogging is already here as you mentioned…) is RSS over XMPP.

Think that over for a second and it even makes less sense. Sending an XML document (RSS) embedded into another XML document (XMPP). For a 140 character message. Overkill much? Well it gets worse since he’s trying to do this with UserTalk which is a scripting language environment run inside of his OPML editor which runs as a PPC app being interpreted on the fly by Rosetta. What a cluster fuck.

Speaking of Twitter, I snatched up twitter.com/eyeonwiner, mainly so that Dave can’t. If there are people that absolutely need to be followed, please let me know. If you have good ideas for what can be done with the Twitter presence, I’d like to hear those, too. (It took Dave roughly 30 seconds to block me when I followed him… hooray for echo chambers!)

Dave Winer on Twitter today:

davewiner: One of the reasons I am so angered by Jorn Barger’s annointing as the leader of the blogging movement is that he’s an anti-semite. about 1 hour ago

davewiner: Being against a race is anti-blogging, imho, which is about inclusion not spreading hate. I wonder if the people who promote him know this. about 1 hour ago

davewiner: To take something so good and apply it to such a bad purpose is tragic. about 1 hour ago

davewiner: Jorn blames jews for lots of stuff we’re not to blame for. Pretty classic race hate, the stuff we’ve been dealing with for hundreds of years about 1 hour ago

davewiner: @eastgate, ask NPR or the BBC, or other MSM outlets. They’re careful to say he coined the name, but I doubt if many catch the subtlety. about 1 hour ago

davewiner: Look, I don’t care if Barger uses his blog to spread hate. I object to the idea that I am following him somehow. It’s the other way around. about 1 hour ago

davewiner: The jew-hater is using the medium pioneered by a jew. How about that for irony. Missed totally by the MSM people because they’re lazy, imho. about 1 hour ago

davewiner: @krisguy, i didn’t say anthing about this for ten years. the msm ought to know who they’re promoting. obviously they haven’t read his blog. about 1 hour ago

Winer’s going deep into the wayback machine for this attack, referring to a scandal that arose in 2000 when Barger used the following two headlines on news stories about events in Israel and Palestine: “Is Judaism simply a religion of lawless racists?” followed by “Are Jews incapable of polite discourse? (Was: Response to my critics).” As the second headline demonstrates, a lot of people were mad as hell at Barger over the first headline.

None of this changes the fact that Barger coined the term weblog.

For someone who plays the anti-Semite card as hard as Winer, it’s interesting how he’s blogged about the same subject:

• Jan. 21, 2007: “I don’t know what it is about Jews, but when it comes to Israel they lose all sense of perspective. Do they think the Palestinians are entitled to a point of view? Imagine for a moment if you were a Palestinian. Might the treatment you’ve received by Israel feel just a bit like apartheid? … I was raised to think Jews are smarter than everyone else, but when it comes to Israel, we’re pretty damned thoughtless.”
• April 21, 2000: “When I was a kid, being Jewish was something dirty, to be ashamed of. I can’t say exactly how I came to this opinion, perhaps there is no reason why. I always hated how smelly and personal Jews were.”
• Aug. 1, 2006: “I know I’m going to catch hell for this, but it’s time to say something. Israel is wrong. There aren’t two sides to this anymore. … There are hundreds of millions of lives at stake in the Middle East, and this time not only has an Arab country, and that’s what Hezbollah is, withstood Israel’s attack, but they’re also clearly justified in their response to the Israeli attack.”

So Winer’s been an outspoken critic of Jews and Israel in the past, even to the point of speaking up for Hezbollah. As a Jew his criticism comes from a different place, but if you put his words in the mouth of a gentile, that person would be called a Jew hater.

Here’s where it gets weird. After Barger posed the questions that will forever tar him as an anti-Semite, Winer defended him: “I’m glad that Jorn Barger, who’s not Jewish (apparently) asked these questions. It’s reasonable to want to know if there’s a difference between being Jewish and being from Israel.”

Oy vey.

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 Winer today on Twitter:

meanwhile @lanehartwell isn’t wearing pants again. that’s big news in twitterland, at least where i come from.

This was in response to her comment …

i cannot seem to keep my pants on these days. wearing sweater, striped knee high socks and not much else.

A couple months ago, Winer published a picture of Hartwell’s chest under the heading “Objectified.” He also called her beautiful in linking to another photo he took on Scripting News.

Is there a context in which this isn’t completely ick? Winer’s excitement at the concept of Hartwell out of her pants is either unwelcome sexual attention — Anita Hill to the white courtesy phone please — or the first step in the blogfather’s elaborate mating ritual, to which I can only say, rent a (chat) room! Think of the children.

No matter how many times it gets loving press coverage, I will never understand the appeal of Twitter.

davewiner: Just took a righteous dump. Feel 10 pounds lighter and 10 years younger. about 5 hours ago from web

davewiner: A picture named “turd picture” http://tinyurl.com/2gturd. about 5 hours ago from web

scobleizer: Just linkblogged it. Nice shot. Did you take it with your iPhone? about 4 hours ago from web

gapingvoid: If you need investors in turdcasting, dave, I want a piece. about 4 hours ago from web

techcrunch: Looks like somebody’s been eating corn. about 3 hours ago from web

Who knew there was a market for constant MySpace “happy/bored/lactose intolerant” mood messages among old tech dorks? Dave Winer’s new Club140, a site that aggregates maximum-length Twitter messages, may be the perfect expression of the web’s most perfectly useless application.

Most people don’t bother to read the Terms of Service of sites they join. Dave obviously doesn’t.

From Twitter’s TOS:

4. You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users.

Twitter is Dave’s favorite place to abuse and harass people, though. So what are the consequences? (emphasis mine)

Violation of any of these agreements will result in the termination of your Twitter.com account.

So… when can we expect Dave’s account to be terminated?

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.

Excerpt from pages 14-16 of Who Let the Blogs Out?: A Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs, by Twitter founder Biz Stone:

As much as he’s known for his contributions to software development, [Dave] Winer is known on the web well, let’s go to the web and see how he’s known:

Ten prominent Google search results out of about 762 with the exact phrase “dave winer is a”:

Dave Winer is a jackass
Dave Winer is a pompous ass
Dave Winer is still a dick
Dave Winer is a loser
Dave Winer an asshole
Dave Winer is a nut
Dave Winer is a weirdo
Dave Winer is a bastard
Dave Winer is a pretentious asshole
Dave Winer is a hypocrite

It’s easy to dig up dirt like this on a well-known web personality. The results seem more fair if we use Googlism — a website that leverages Google to find out what the web “thinks” of a particular person. Here’s a sampling of the many results for “dave winer”:

dave winer is exhausting
dave winer is in bad taste
dave winer is one of those genius entrepreneurs
dave winer is an arse
dave winer is a software developer
dave winer is one of the pioneers of the online weblogging community
dave winer is striding forward with his latest version of rss
dave winer is an asshole
dave winer is perhaps the single most prolific contributor to the blog community
dave winer is a loser
dave winer is insuring that he will get a lot of attention
dave winer is the villain in the story
dave winer is right up there with luminaries like tim berners
dave winer is an online legend
dave winer is one reason a number of people have left
dave winer is a leading figure in the development of the internet
dave winer is maker of various nerd devices that i dont understand
dave winer is one of the world’s best
dave winer is evil
dave winer is a fanatical blogger
dave winer is entitled to express his opinions
dave winer is dave winer

The web can be a harsh mistress.

Dave is harping on Scoble to say he’s sorry, and does it not only on Twitter, but on his blog, and in a Twittergram. Can you imagine the hell Winer would raise if Scoble did the same to him? He gives some good advice, though, that we’ll remember to offer to him in the future: Just admit you made a mistake. I also took the liberty to edit the audio for the purposes of commentary:

Physician, heal thyself.