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:
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 agoIt 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is pretty funny. Needed to be about 100x as long and contain lots of dead air.
Dave has been using Disqus for a while to add comments to his blog. It’s a small improvement from no comments at all, even if he does still censor them when he doesn’t like them. One of the great things about Disqus, though, is that they’ve added some social features, like global user accounts and comment ranking. As anyone who has ever had both of those things in a web service can attest, the next logical step is to create some sort of ranking based on it.
For Disqus, that ranking is called “Clout:”
Clout (measured in points) is a person’s reputation across the Disqus network of blogs. Clout is determined by a few different things, but mainly by the rating of comments by others.
Clout helps blog moderators separate top commenters from trolls. This number also helps our system detect spam and unsavory behavior. Since it may imply greater legitimacy, a higher clout will allow for more privileges in the near future.
Dave’s current “Clout” rating, as pictured above, is -30.
For reference, here are some other Disqus users’ clout ratings:
In fact, scrolling down a few of Dave’s posts, it’s hard to find anyone with a negative clout rating besides Dave himself.
Update: I took the screenshot above anticipating this: after this post, Winer’s rating shot up to above 50. Whether that’s Dave creating ghost accounts to vote for his posts, his sycophants going nuts, or his buddies at Disqus helping him out I can’t say… but it is pretty funny.
Today Dave compared the media’s handling of the Karla Faye Tucker case to their handling of Rev. Wright. In so many ways, the comparison could not be any more appropriate.
Dave’s logic on Rev. Wright goes like this: people were attacking Obama with clips from this pastor. Because Obama is “good”, Wright must also be good. Because he’s good, those clips must be “taken out of context” and the reports about them misleading. Because Wright was kind and human during a TV interview (that he did specifically to try to help Obama), that proves he’s good.
On twitter today:
DaveWiner: Problem is people expect support, and I can only support Mac, too much for one person to support two OSes. #
DaveWiner: If there were Windows users who wanted to test the software, prepare a download, and answer questions, I’d work with them. #
stephenedgar: True, though users like myself and amyloo use Windows and can and do help other Windows users of the OPML Editor. #
DaveWiner: great! so let’s set up a support forum and try to get some critical mass. maybe use a google group? #
stephenedgar: Does Google Groups have Wiki features? If so set it up. #
DaveWiner: no no no — you’re already trying to get me to support you. I already have plenty of work like this. #
So it goes like this. Dave laments having nobody to help him support BloatrFan on Windows. He gets a volunteer. Dave says “let’s set up a support forum”, to which his new volunteer says “great! go ahead!” and Dave looks a gift horse in the mouth — worse, though, was he was really quite rude about it.
Instead of saying something like “I don’t really have the bandwidth to get this up and going right now. If you do, go for it and I’ll link to your efforts”, he chose to scold Edgar like he was some sort of child or was trying to trap Winer into a lifetime of support for a google group. (Of course, we all know that Dave has no problem pulling the plug on services he had previously been supporting)
What an ass.