Eye on Winer

Dave Winer recently launched NewsJunk, an RSS-backed aggregator of political news, with Nicco Mele. Mele, the former webmaster for the Howard Dean campaign, says they’ve been developing it for months:

I’ve been working on a new project with Dave Winer — Newsjunk.com. For the last few months, I’ve been annoyed at how hard it is to follow the political coverage. News pops up in a lot of different places, and having single source to follow what’s happening throughout the day has been an itch that needs scratching. Dave remembers the briefing books we had on the Dean campaign, a fixture of many campaigns. So NewsJunk.com started as a way to scratch the itch of the political news junkie, and a way to begin to build an open briefing book.

During the 2000 cycle, I worked as the webmaster and technical director of the Shadow Conventions. That’s actually where I first met Dave, through Edit This Page.com. Then during the 2004 cycle, I worked as the webmaster for Howard Dean. This cycle (2008) after a false start, I’m excited to be working on NewsJunk.

What’s the over/under on how long it takes before this collaboration crashes and burns? As Jason Calacanis will tell any human or puppet who asks, Winer can’t work with people. He’s never mastered the principle “you have to be a friend to have a friend.” Mele, who destroyed his rep among former Deaniacs by backing McCain, is exhibiting some weird judgment here too.

As Mele ponders how much effort to put into their joint venture, perhaps he should consider the significance of the following three facts:

1. Winer owns the domain
2. Winer runs the application on his own server at 70.85.234.142
3. Winer claims all rights to the project: “© 2008 Scripting News, Inc. NewsJunk is a trademark of Scripting News, Inc.”

Say what?

Yeah it’s irrational that all the oil is in the Middle East. Now what?

…wait, wait, wait. I mean, it’s one thing to be a little wrong, or miss some minor technicality, but this assertion is not only demonstrably false, it’s not even “almost” true.

Almost 15% of the world’s reserves are in Canada which, last time I checked, was not a part of the Middle East. According to that chart, I count over a third of the world’s reserves in places in the region of the world known as “Not The Middle East.”

Hell, if you look at the top countries from whom the US imports oil, you’ll see that the #1 country isn’t in the Middle East. It’s Canada again.

It must be nice to have it all figured out, though.

Dave has seemingly come out of hiding (or maybe he got bored with cybersquatting the domains of people he doesn’t like) and it’s unsurprising that what brought him out of hiding was McClellan’s new book that’s come out.

Now, I haven’t read the book (I doubt Dave has either), but what strikes me here is how quick Dave is to assume that everything McClellan says is truth and everything current staffers say is a lie. If you’re going to talk about bias and conflicts of interest, you simply can’t ignore that someone writing a book has a motivation to sell more books, and that means stretching the truth, reaching on some conclusions, and even lying outright. He may not be, of course, but to suggest that he’s doing this out of the goodness of his heart is a little disingenuous.

Odds are that the truth is somewhere between what McClellan wrote and what the right-wing apologists would have us all believe.

Also?

In court, if you have a conflict of interest, you’re supposed to disclose it, and if it’s serious enough, it disqualifies you.

I’m sure he means “in jury duty” because no such requirement exists in “court”. It’s the opposing counsel’s job to draw out the conflicts of interest and the Jury’s job to determine what impact they have on the credibility of the witness. The same is true of jury duty, actually, except that trial attorneys are so experienced with voir dire that they never let anyone onto the jury without asking them if they have conflicts.

Loren Feldman’s earning his Winer Number:

Want to have some fun? Trademark the 1938Media name than take those cyber-squatting domains away from DW..

By Fred Grott on May 28, 2008

Fred - I dont give a shit about anything Winer does. His career is finished, mine is just starting. His legacy will be that of a desperate old douche bag. Fail.

By Loren Feldman on May 28, 2008

Videoblogger Loren Feldman recently began mocking Dave Winer through the magic of puppetry:

1. The Dave Winer Experience
2. Happy RSS Awareness Day from Dave Winer
3. Is Obama Black or Black?
4. Dave Winer on Desensitizing Twitter

Winer responded by cybersquatting the domain names 1938media.net and 1938media.org on May 1, created an account on YouTube under the name evilmikearrington on May 5 and used it and the domains to promote his own puppet video, which shows he’d get killed in a puppet war.

One of these days, Winer’s habit of cybersquatting to fuck with people is going to bite him in the ass.

In a post today about how sites should give users back their data, Dave Winer sings his own praises in this regard, complete with a lame claim for credit:

I’ve always believed that blogging and RSS tools should export their data so users can switch tools and the products at UserLand all did this. As a result, there’s a tradition among RSS readers that they import and export OPML subscription lists. It happened because Radio UserLand, the early market leader, did.

One thing he neglects to mention, which was pointed out several times by McD in comments here: In the entire time that Share Your OPML was running, the site never shared its OPML. Thousands of users shared their OPML subscription lists with Winer’s site, at his urging, and he never reciprocated.

As for the portability of data in Radio LuserLand and Winer’s other software, there’s a reason that Robert Scoble and most other LUserLand bloggers never moved their data when they abandoned the software, leaving years of work and all of their subscribers behind. It’s a giant nightmare to get the data out, because the software’s export capabilities are non-standard, XML support is a messy kludge, and there are character encoding glitches out the ass.

Even Donovan Watts, the author of Radio UserLand: The Missing Manual and the biggest expert on the software, never exported his blog when he switched to WordPress.

Data portability requires more than some cheesy “seal of approval” Winer is thinking about giving out. You have to do the work to fully support the standards that make data portable.

Dave’s been awfully coy about Switch-a-Bit so far. At present I’m really unsure what this is going to be, but I’m having a hard time caring. What scares me is that someone actually think’s Dave’s a good enough programmer to drive a start up. Wow.

It’s also designed to scale to work for hundreds of thousands of users, Murphy-willing.

Sure thing, Dave. I wonder why he couldn’t make FlickrFan scale well for ONE user but he can build a platform which supposedly will scale well for “hundreds of thousands”.

Dave Winer’s declaration that no one has the right to judge Rev. Wright provoked this exchange in his comments with a blogger named Marco:

Marco 18 hours ago

It will be hard to believe but this is not meant to be a shrill attack.

Posts like these are jarring in their inconsistency. I fully understand your point on Rev Wright and even sympathize with your position.

What I don’t understand is why you can’t see the hypocrisy in wanting to extend individuals like Rev Wright every possible explanation for their words or actions (”He was alienated”, “He was caught in a position non of us have ever been in”) but when someone you disagree with politically is automatically an evil person and each misstatement is borne of the most nefarious motives.

Its insulting to see you constantly deride others for sweeping generalizations and oversimplification of issues only to have you follow up with a string of posts casting sweeping dispersions and attacks based on 3 seconds sound bites addressing unbelievably complex topics.

I appreciate the perspective you bring which is why I haven’t yet unplugged from your feed but it would be great to see just a little of the balance you want to see in our political process displayed in your posts.

dave 17 hours ago

It’s pretty simple, I say what I have to say and it’s a function of what happens in the world. So when things change, my point of view may change too. If you disagree, go ahead and disagree. But all these charged words, hypocrisy, insulting, deride, attacks, etc — sorry, that’s your mind playing tricks on you. I’m none of those things. Usually I don’t let comments that require defensive responses (or else I admit to all the BS you accuse me of) through, but this time I wanted to restate this, that I’ve said many times before. My blog is my space to say what I think. You don’t have to agree, and if you want to, start your own blog to say what you have to say. That’s where comments like yours (above) belong, not here.

dave 17 hours ago

See how much space it takes to clear up your mess. But now that it’s clear I can answer your question.

BECAUSE MY MIND WORKS DIFFERENTLY FROM YOURS.

Which is so obvious it doesn’t even need to be said. All our minds work differently, we were all raised in different environments with different values. To say basically that I should see everything the same way you do is a waste of bandwidth. It’s ridiculous. It’ll never happen nor should it ever happen.

Marco 17 hours ago

That’s not even remotely my point.

Do you really think I would be interested in engaging you or anyone else who did not agree with my world view if that was what I believed? Of course not.

Your response is a wonderful defense of your desire to remain ideologically isolated. “I see things the way I see things and I have no need to try and understand your position” is a great way to stifle true debate and a horrible way to effectively change the way we approach issues in this country. As I said before - it wouldn’t matter to me if you wouldn’t insist on standing on your soapbox and donning sackcloth and ashes to mourn the death of honest debate.

dave 17 hours ago

Okay you get the last word, the rest of it, if there is more — in your space.

Marco, like every well-intentioned person who responds to Winer, hasn’t learned yet that he can’t handle criticism. Winer’s statement, “Usually I don’t let comments that require defensive responses (or else I admit to all the BS you accuse me of),” is one of the clearest explanations he’s ever given that explains why: He thinks that if he doesn’t delete critical comments, it means they are true.

Open and honest dialogue is not possible on any forum that Winer controls.

…of why Dave should stay 100 miles away from politics. To wit, he has no idea what he’s talking about.

Obama finally said what he should’ve said weeks ago, and Dave, who has spent weeks crowing about how the press “got it wrong” is trying to find a way to save that assertion now that Wright has demonstrated that the press, less Moyers, pretty unequivocally got it right. Wright is eight kinds of loony, and now Obama doesn’t want to go anywhere near him. Dave’s fundamental problem, in situations like this, is that he fancies himself the perpetual victim, so when he sees other people being “attacked”, he immediately identifies with them. (Sometimes, when it suits him)

The fact is that Wright represents the sect of Liberalism that moderates and conservatives loathe the most: the Anti-Government, Blame-America sect. Obama knows it, and he did the right thing by coming out against Wright’s tired rhetoric. He’d have won a tremendous number of moderate and conservative votes if he had done that from the get-go.

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This is pretty funny. Needed to be about 100x as long and contain lots of dead air.