Eye on Winer

Dave Winer’s Head is a Bubble

March 10th, 2009 by Bullshit Mancuso

Dave Winer’s having an envy fit today on Twitter over how the service gives new users recommendations on who to follow:

There are at least two Twitters, the Friend-Of-Ev Twitter, mostly people who put in little or no effort but have 100K-plus following… about 2 hours ago from web
…and the old Twitter for people who work to get a sizable following, sometimes for years. It’s like the banking system that collapsed, Ev. about 2 hours ago from web
There’s a bubble here. Not sure how or when it pops, but with hindsight as a guide — it will pop. about 2 hours ago from web
One of the lessons of bubbles is that few are willing to say it’s a bubble and people who say it is are thought of as party poopers. about 1 hour ago from web

Winer is, of course, not one of the recommendations. Company founder Evan Williams surely knows enough about Winer’s many emotional flameouts not to expose new users to that junk. (Probable reason for Winer’s fit: Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington are among the recommended people to follow.)

As he goes on and on about the unfairness of this system, keep in mind that when Winer was running UserLand Software, he secretly sold Adam Curry a place in the default subscription list of Radio UserLand’s RSS reader for $5,000. It didn’t come to light until Curry blogged about it — users had no idea the list contained paid links. For him to complain about Twitter’s recommendations is just brazen hypocrisy.

Posted in Dave, Twitter | 7 Comments »

Dave’s Virus Problem

March 9th, 2009 by EyeOnWiner

I don’t get it. How does someone who claims to be a programmer and technologist end up with a rootkit almost as soon as he plugs it into a network? In a great many years of windows computing, I have yet to come within spitting distance of a rootkit. That’s not because I’m especially clever, it’s because, as a general rule, you get those sorts of things from doing things you shouldn’t be doing to begin with. Pirating software and movies, for example. Visiting questionable websites. Et cetera.

What on earth is Dave doing with his PC?

(One thing he’s doing with it is contributing to increased costs for amazon: by returning a product he broke 1 2). These will be good things to keep in mind the next time he calls out some company for shitty customer service: he’s the guy that abuses the system and ruins things for everyone. He’s the kind of guy who is a reason for shitty customer service.

Tags: Rootkit, Virus
Posted in Amazon | 7 Comments »

Dave Winer Pulls JSON’s Pud

March 6th, 2009 by Bullshit Mancuso

Need any more proof that Dave Winer’s just making shit up as he goes along?

Dave Winer on JSON on Dec. 20, 2006:

God bless the re-inventers
Gotta love em, because there’s no way they’re going to stop breaking what works, and fixing what don’t need no fixing.
I’ve been hearing, off in the distance, about something called JSON, that proposes to solve a problem that was neatly solved by XML-RPC in 1998, the encoding of arrays and structs in a format that could easily be processed by all programming languages. …
Today I looked. I read on Niall Kennedy that del.icio.us has come up with an API that returns a JSON structure, and I figured, sheez it can’t be that hard to parse, so let’s see what it looks like, and damn, IT’S NOT EVEN XML!
As Dr Phil asks — What were they thinking?
No doubt I can write a routine to parse this, but look at how deep they went to re-invent, XML itself wasn’t good enough for them, for some reason (I’d love to hear the reason). Who did this travesty? Let’s find a tree and string them up. Now.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this is why I’m fed up with Mountain View, Cupertino, Redwood Shores and Redmond. Give me Berkeley and New York any day. Silicon Valley is made up of little boys pulling their puds, constantly making love to each other, pretending the world revolves around them.

Winer a day later, after he was told that JSON was an existing part of JavaScript syntax, not a new invention:

So JSON isn’t evil. It’s just the internal object serialization format for JavaScript. No problem. But using it as a basis for interop, when there were already good ways to achieve interop is evil, imho. I don’t think that’s what del.icio.us did, but I do see some people advocating that, and I think they’re wrong.

Winer today:

Dave, if you could go back in time, would you have used JSON instead of XML for RSS, OPML, XML-RPC, etc, had JSON been popularized at the time? The reason I ask is that most of those protocols and formats don’t use much of the extras that XML is required for (schemas, namespaces, attributes, data escaping, etc). Simple key/value/dict/array/string/number structures would be sufficient in all those cases. If you could take a do-over, would you?
Great question! And if you look at how I use XML, you know the answer is yes. I have no love for XML, I thought it was over engineered, and too much was promised for it, but everyone wanted to do it, and that convinced me. …
That’s what I like about JSON, it has a low-techness to it, no fuss, no pretension.

So now JSON’s the format he would’ve used all along, in spite of the fact he called JSON advocates “little boys pulling their puds” and thought using it for interop would be “evil.”

Posted in Dave | Comments Off

Dave Releases Tweet Pirating Software

March 5th, 2009 by EyeOnWiner

As we’ve already covered Dave’s most recent OPML editor extension’s sole purpose is to rehost the copyrighted material of other people. Unsurprisingly, he does so without permission.

Now, he’s decided to make the ability to steal and re-host other people’s tweets widely available.

If you’re still not sold on the copyright, take a look at this passage from Dave when it was about his content:

The next step is to look at the copyright issues his service raises. They are quite interesting. Scripting News, both in HTML and RSS, has a clear copyright on it. Should I have a say in publications created from my content? I generally don’t mind, but shouldn’t I have to give permission? Suppose a magazine started publishing all my writing. Would I have recourse? I am not a lawyer, but it seems clear that I would. Is Pilgrim somehow immune to copyright law? I’d love to hear the legal theory that allows him to do what he’s doing with my work.

So . . . is Dave “somehow immune to copyright law?”

Posted in Copyright, Projects, Twitter | 3 Comments »

Brilliant Postulate

March 4th, 2009 by EyeOnWiner

Quoth Dave:

I have a postulate that if very few people do something then it must be hard, and therefore whoever is doing it must be smart.

More proof that Dave doesn’t even give a first thought to the things that he writes on Scripting.com, let alone a second thought.

Posted in Dave | 1 Comment »

Paying To Read Your Own Blog

February 25th, 2009 by EyeOnWiner

Today while I was running I spit a pool of saliva orders of magnitude deeper than most of what Dave puts into his blog. Case in point, today:

Do I have to pay to read my own blog?

And if so, who gets the money?

I don’t recall receiving any checks from Amazon.

News flash, Dave, you already pay to read your own blog. You know how you’re always whining about how much you pay Comcast for how badly they supposedly treat you? Guess what! If you stopped paying them, you wouldn’t be able to read your blog on that connection any more. Same with your cell phone, DSL, and so-on.

They’re called “service providers” for a reason.

Tags: Kindle
Posted in Dave | 1 Comment »

Dave Winer Saves the Newspaper Industry

February 23rd, 2009 by Bullshit Mancuso

Dave Winer’s solution for the dying newspaper industry is to open up the newsroom to unpaid experts with time on their hands:

Here’s how you take the first step toward the open newsroom. Pick a story that you’re covering on an ongoing basis, something important enough that you’ve assigned one or more reporters to it full-time. Have them continue to do what they’re doing, we’re going to add to that coverage, in an experiment to learn how the newspaper of the future might work. Now pick two or three experts on the same subject, and invite them into the newsroom. They will not be paid. No benefits. They agree to the same rules governing the integrity of your reporters. For a period of four weeks, they report to the newsroom, the physical one, not a virtual one, every day, and are part of your news team. … Now, to be clear — I’m not talking about recruiting idiots or people whose opinions are (in your opinion) worthless. I’m talking about respected experts, the kinds of people your reporters call to get a perspective on the news the people they quote. Instead of having them talk to the readers through the reporter, I want them to go directly. Their writing should be as readable as the reporters’ so I would choose experts who express themselves well.

So in other words, they need to let people like him come in and write for them for free. And offer snacks and excellent networking.

Newspapers are saved! Saved! Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen, Jim Romenesko and the rest of the journalists, unclench your buttholes! Long live the newspaper!

In all the years he has been blogging, has Dave Winer ever identified a problem for which Dave Winer was not the solution?

Posted in Dave, Media | 1 Comment »

Bit.ly Shortens Team by One Dave Winer

February 18th, 2009 by Bullshit Mancuso

Dave Winer’s collaboration with Bit.ly didn’t last long:

As you may know I participated in the intial design and rollout of the bit.ly URL-shortener. It was one of the most instantly successful projects I’ve ever participated in, up there with the release of Radio 8 in 2002 and MORE 1.0 in 1986. Sometimes the time is right for a product, and the execution is great and the communication is crisp. Everyone gets it, and it takes off like a rocket. Bit.ly is one of those phenoms. They’re getting ready to grow a real business around it, and I want to go on to do other things. So we worked out a deal that leaves me satisfied with how things turned out and am no longer a shareholder. I wish the company and the team the very best. Onward!

Bit.ly launched only seven months ago, so the decision to part ways with Winer this early suggests the working relationship wasn’t going so hot. With Winer’s copiously documented inability to work with others, that’s definitely the safe bet. But the Bit.ly crew is making nice about his exit as well.

Here’s John Borthwick, the founder of the company that runs Bit.ly:

Dave is moving on from his day to day involvement with bit.ly — I want to thank him for his ideas, help and participation. It was an amazing experience working with Dave. Dave doesnt pull any punches — he requires you to think — his perspective is grounded in a deep appreciation for practice — the act of using products — understanding workflow and intuiting needs from that understanding. I learnt a lot. From bit.ly and from from me — thank you. A pleasure and a privildege.

Here’s Andrew Kortina on the Bit.ly blog:

We had the pleasure and privilege of working with Dave at bit.ly — he helped design and create bit.ly and he worked with us during the first phases of its development. Thank you Dave for your help, ideas and your passion for making great, truly wonderful products. Best wishes and please look after your puffer fish.

Startups occasionally snuggle up to Winer, presumably to exploit his Scripting News audience, which is heavy with tech reporters and Web 2.0 bigshots. Mike Arrington cozied up to him when launching TechCrunch, as did Loic Le Meur with Seesmic and Adam Curry with PodShow (now known as Mevio). The smart play is to do what Borthwick has accomplished here, which is to get away from Winer after the initial hype fades and before the inevitable moment where he completely loses his shit and attacks his partners.

Posted in Dave, RSS, Twitter | 2 Comments »

Dear Dave: Kill Yourself

February 15th, 2009 by EyeOnWiner

We’ve seen it before. Ridiculous, far-fetched nonsense spilling out on Scripting.com for the purpose of eliciting a reaction. It’s a simple formula. All you have to do is say the first crazy-ass thing that comes to your mind with nary a thought as to the reality of it.

Today’s “brilliant” idea is, guess what! Overpopulation caused the economic decline because we subconsciously know that the world has too many people on it:

Why should we fight to get our economy growing again? Isn’t growth the whole problem? Shouldn’t we see the economic downturn as not only inevitable, but as our last hope for salvation? These are fair questions imho.

The inescapable truth that no one wants to speak out loud is that we have too many people, and we’re adding more people at too fast a clip. The planet can’t sustain what we have now without destroying the climate, yet we haven’t done anything to limit growth.

Ignoring the bizarre link between the economy and Al Gore’s hyperbole, I still don’t get it. Even if we assume as fact that we are irreparably destroying our environment — neither the “irreparably” nor the “destroying” part are agreed-upon fact — there’s been no credible source saying that we can’t grow in an environmentally friendly way.

But, Dave, I support you in your endeavor to lower the world’s population. Since population growth is nothing more a greater birth rate than mortality rate, and we can’t stop people (at least in the U.S.) from having more kids, the only factor left at our disposal is impacting the death rate.

Mahatma Gandhi is quoting as having said “You must be the change you want to see in the world.” Dave: be the change you want to see in the world: kill yourself. Thanks.

Tags: Economy, Global Warming
Posted in Politics | 4 Comments »

Massive Copyright Infringement

February 4th, 2009 by EyeOnWiner

Today Dave admitted to engaging in a whole hell of a lot of copyright infringement:

In mid-January I started a project to archive the Twitter posts of the people I follow. At first I experimented with rendering the archives in an XML-compatible form of HTML, but decided the point would largely be lost, so I decided to go with OPML.

You can find the folder of archives here:

http://twitter.opml.org/calendar/

Alright, so everyone Dave follows has had their Tweets stolen and re-hosted elsewhere. Why? Because Dave feels like it.

No regard for their intellectual property rights whatsoever. Selfish, but not at all surprising.

Someone Dave follows should send a DMCA takedown notice to Amazon. That could be entertaining.