Eye on Winer

Says Dave: I think advertising is so over

This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Also, I wonder, does he stop going to websites with ads? Is he willing to pay for the feeds without ads? Why should content providers not be allowed to make money for their goods?

And further: Note in the upper-left corner a link to the “OPML file.” Unfortunately they mistakenly use “title” in place of “text” so the headlines show up blank. Arrrgh.

I thought Dave was supposed to be a good programmer. Is it that hard to have his “amazing” new “product” properly read ‘title’, also? Or is this Dave’s way of trying to force everyone into the standard?

Dave Winer has been talking non-stop about this outliner thing, so I decided to give it a shot.

My verdict? A completely unimpressive and uninspiring piece of software. The usual characters have raving about it… ‘it just works’, they all say. If by “works” you mean that it allows you to edit OPML files, then yes. It does work. All of the talk of interoperablity? Increased productivity? Blah, blah, blah…? Not seeing it. Let’s be real, here… everyone who has spent more than 20 seconds doing any real coding work has come across a need to model some sort of data in outline form. Writing an outliner is not all that special.

So what’s the BFD? I couldn’t tell you. I have been unable to get the instant outlining feature to work. I edited my “Instant Outline” on my home machine and saved it but it’s not showing up on my work machine. (Yes, I’m logged in to the same account, yes the opml is up on the net) Also: Blogging via OPML? Worst. Idea. Ever.

I was hoping this would be something amazing, life-changing, and productivity-enhancing. I should know better, by now, than to believe the hype. It’s just another piece of mediocre, half-working software… as if the internet needs more of that.

Sorry, Dave… I’m sticking to OneNote. If you’d like to see a piece of outliner software “just work” check that one out. Of course, he’d complain that it doesn’t use OPML. Cry me a river.

Josh Hallett has a great post on revising posts without notice. He asks whether Dave’s typical bait-and-switch style of ranting (and then replacing the rant by something sober and usually terse) is really ethical… in demonstrating the idea, he shows a great picture of this post of Dave’s.

Excellent example… thanks, Josh.

Now that the Rove/Plame story has started to fall apart for the lefties like Winer, they’re moving the goalposts.

Daniel Shorr: “The underlying issue in the Karl Rove controversy is not a leak, but a war and how America was misled into that war.”

Like here for example.

Cunning Realist: “In the unlikely event that Bush did not know until now that Rove was involved, isn’t the fact that Rove did not admit to this before now — despite the publicly-stated desire of his boss for the leaker to come forward — itself gross insubordination worthy of immediate termination?”

Or here.

It’s really great to see the press finally press the White House on Karl Rove’s crimes. Isn’t it clear by now that he’s going to jail? Isn’t it high time they cut their losses. And they should never have been allowed to hide behind the reporters unwillingness to expose sources. The Bush control of the press may finally be crumbling and not a moment too soon.

But now it’s not about the leak. No no. Never was, actually. Move along. Nothing more to see here.

Dave sez:

I’m still getting lots of email, every day, about the podcast re Audible and DRM. Got one this morning that says their RSS feeds don’t work with iTunes 4.9, because of the DRM. I tried to explain to the CEO how the design of podcasting rejects the entire concept of DRM. He didn’t want to hear it. Instead he wanted to tell me How It Is. Hah. Apparently he’s hearing it now, just two weeks later. Sometimes it pays to listen, and not talk so much, when a former customer explains why your idea doesn’t work. He probably understands, even better than your competitors. A company that insists on talking when that kind of information is coming over the pipe is one without much of a future.

Wait, wait, wait. So if the content owner is DAVE and he wants to keep people from, say, modifying his content before they read it, he ought to be able to do that… but if a different content owner, say Audible, wants to use DRM on their content, that’s dumb because it’s not what the users want?

Dave, could you be a bigger hypocrite?

Sigh.

So let me see if I get this straight…

If Dave isn’t invited, standards work can’t be done.

I’m not sure I even have the energy for this today.

Dave: call a proctologist and see if you can have your head removed from your ass. May want to call a psychiatrist first — make sure it’s small enough to fit without too much tearing.

An anonymous commenter has teed off on Dave in response to his post here (linked from here).

I hardly know where to begin:

* Dave SPAMS the entire invitee list of a conference, apparently

* to ask them to participate in a limited (read: closed) beta of something OPEN SOURCE (does he not get the point of open source?)

* … it’s Windows-only (again, open source… gnomedex… and he’s got a windows-only thing to hawk?)

* … and his next port target is not any open source OS, it’s MacOS X. No mention of a Linux port anywhere.

* He signs-off the message as “Gnomedex Keynoter.” Isn’t it a little convenient that Dave can code-switch at will, wielding “Keynoter” or “Forum moderator” completely at will to speak from a position of artificial authority, but then turn around and lecture us about the need to “route around” hierarchies (see for example his beef with DMOZ) and people in positions of authority (see also his beef with having an Editor whiel at Wired).

Hey, Dave? It’s Open Source. You know, the “Shut Up and Show Us Your Code” community that operates on a meritocracy? Why the hell is the fact that you’re a Gnomedex Keynoter at all relevant to persuading people to do free labor on your software project?

Could it be that you’re a little short on street-cred in this community, having said awful, nasty things about Open Source folks for years (see also his beef with the Casbah project folks, who wanted an Open Source Frontier back in the day) and have had this on-the-road-to-Damascus conversion?

This “Instant Outliner” thing is a bankrupt concept, you already tried to hype it once a few years ago and failed, by your own admission it was unworkable.

* Lastly, listening to Dave espouse the use of an entirely NON-semantic format like OPML as a good way to encapsulate knowledge, like baseball team rosters, and knowing his longstanding beef with the RDF community (the ideal format for expressing knowledge), this is all the more sad.

BTW: I’m more than happy to post things like this anonymously if they’re emailed to the gmail account listed in the sidebar. But putting them in the comments works, too.

Someone added EyeOnWiner to the Dave Winer Wikipedia entry and I’ve been getting a fair amount of click-through from there. It looks like, if I’m reading the history document correctly, that the link was added last week. “Thank you” to whomever added EOW.

Greetings, Wikipedia readers.

Umm…

Now it’s nice and quiet, but when I came in, at first there was a busload of retarded adults, and they made a lot more noise than the kids, and it was more disgusting, screechy, body noise. Get what I mean?

I’m not sure if this statement would be worse if it were tongue-in-cheek or said sincerely. I’m also not sure if it would be worse if the adults were actually mentally/physically retarded or if he’s using “retard” as a slur against the functionally normal adults that were there.

Really, either way it’s a pretty disgusting comment. I sincerely hope I’m lacking some sort of context that would make this “OK”.

Maybe I’m being a bit of a pedant here, but be weary of anyone who says that “But one thing’s for sure, the time-vs-space tradeoff is way way behind us. Left in the dust. A distant memory. Farewell old friend.”

Yes, for many things the time-vs-space tradeoff is no longer an important consideration because the tradeoff is negligible in both directions, but there’s a huge difference between “being negligible most of the time” and “Left in the dust”.

Of course, one has to wonder: how much better would Dave’s code be if he cared about the time/space tradeoff? There’s something to be said for pedantry in coding.