Poor Williams! He's just the latest target of Winer's wrath. The irascible Internet fussbudget has gotten mad at Jason Calacanis for being self-promotional, mad at Internet commenters who do not acknowledge his contributions to the Internet, mad at Twitter for not doing what he says, and mad at Hillary Clinton for being alive. (We've also long suspected that he is secretly mad at the New York Times because they will not hire him as a columnist and run his verbal spew unedited.)

But Winer's latest rant is hilariously hypocritical.

Williams's sin, according to Winer, is playing favorites with Twitter's "Suggested Users" page, a feature meant to help bewildered new Twitter users navigate the messaging service's real-time, 140-character spasms of pointless puffery. He writes:

I pour a lot of effort into Twitter, and while I wasn't in the top tier of users, I was solidly in the second tier. I wasn't doing the things you have to do to get the most followers, or I didn't have a powerful media presence like Leo or Shaq to get me up there. ... It's now approaching 20,000, which I am proud of, but it's not very much compared to the numbers of some people who did nothing other than be friends of Evan Williams to get hundreds of thousands of followers. ...

Think about it this way — do you know who wrote Apache or PHP? Do any of them have the power to deliver so much flow to an installation of their software? Imho, that's exactly the relationship Twitter should have with its users. Or the phone company and users of phones — they shouldn't jump into a conversation and say (for example) "We know someone really cool you would probably like to talk to. We're connecting you to them now.

Makes sense! Who would want the phone company to do that? Except Winer did the exact same thing himself with his own blog-software company, Userland Software, in 2003, writes former employee Rogers Cadenhead. Moreover, unlike Twitter's Williams, he actually took money to promote a blogger — former MTV veejay Adam Curry. In 2003, Curry wrote:

Time to come clean on an investment I made a year and a half ago. At the time, UserLand software had released a Mac OSX version of Radio and I was totally digging the built in news aggregator. I came up with a cunning plan: I asked Userland if I could purchase a pre-installed feed on their aggregator, which supports RSS xml feeds. I paid $10,000 for a one year license. To date I've been delighted with my purchase and although I haven't checked recently, I'm pretty sure Userland still has me in the defaults. ...

The $10k didn't 'just' give me an automatic base within the userland community, it got pasted on web pages all over the world and I've built up an audience that consists of 50% aggergator users.

Williams hasn't said anything about charging for placement on the Suggested page, but it can generated tens of thousands of new followers a day for featured Twitter accounts. Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis — yes, the one Winer feuded with — has offered to pay $250,000 to get featured on it. Which makes us think: Winer isn't mad at Williams because he's playing favorites. Winer is jealous because Williams is far more effective at playing favorites than Winer will ever be.

The makeover represents a shift from the "podcast era" to an era of premium, episodic Web content, the company said.

CEO Ron Bloom suggests we'll finally be getting the tech podcast we've been waiting for:

Typical technology channels are really just listings of programming, featuring boring talking heads or uninformed rants. PodShow TECH will feature personality driven content with a healthy dose of attitude... fair, but not necessarily impartial... accurate but also exciting."

Is Bloom ignorant of most tech podcasts? Or his own company's Geek Brief TV? Or is he pulling a Curry claiming innovation and originality where there is none? And calling Dvorak "exciting"? The notoriously anti-Apple journalist may be "outspoken" but never exciting. The marriage of pervasive, annoying, and irrelevant John C. Dvorak to the PodShow network is a match made in heaven... for Curry, Bloom, and Dvorak, that is. For the user... a marriage forged in the fires of hell.

(Party photos from Natali's own post on Google's holiday party)

• As soon as an AOL Joystiq blogger turns off the tape in a normal little interview, Sony exec Phil Harrison (pictured) sneers, "Well those were positive questions." So he's trying to prove Sony's not arrogant — it's just a little bitchy. [Joystiq]
• Amanda Congdon extends her 15 minutes into Hong Kong media. [Daily Hits Blog]
• Conde Nast biz dev guy Kourosh Karimkhany was named general manager of Wired News (now that Conde Nast owns it). Hey, I know that name — he's a proud alum of our big brother Kotaku. Good to see at least someone merited a promotion after the buyout. [Press release]
• Note2Dell: Before naming your blog one2one, check whether one2one.com is a porn site. Because, well, it is. [ZDNet]
• Overheard in a chat room: "Adam Curry invented everything related to podcasting." "Well, he certainly invented the history of podcasting."

A bigger version is after the jump, or in Tom's photo stream at Flickr. Other Morris wit: The Zany Web 2.0 World and The Wacky World of Steve.

Heh. "Nano Nikes."

Source: What are the nerds doing? [Tom Morris on Flickr via Morris's blog]

I just heard from a Dutch source that Adam Curry is being sued by the Dutch government for tax evasion. He hasn't been in the country to answer the charges and seems to be avoiding going home. Don't know if this is true, but one could check a Dutch news service to corroborate.

And the Dutch news services haven't said a thing about any tax troubles for the ex-MTV VJ and current podcaster. Treat this as a "wouldn't it be funny" for now.

Especially since would-be podfather Dave Winer is reportedly on the "Defame Adam Curry" warpath — an unconfirmed tip says Winer recently ranted about "taking down" Adam Curry at a party. (Caveat to this caveat: Public ranting seems unlikely even for the excitable Winer.)

• BusinessWeek profiled little old me. Note: The Compaq Evo is being replaced by a refurbed Powerbook with working speakers. Continue sending loud and obnoxious videos. [BusinessWeek]
• Podcaster Adam Curry was a real sport about the Bastard of the Blogs thing. (But he implies that he drinks Budweiser smokes pot. Official loss gain of cool points?) [Adam Curry]
• And Waggers keep writing the Valleyspeak phrasebook. Note to would-be word-coiners: the blog-related lexicon is saturated. Send words about business, social networks, anything but blogs! [Valleyspeak]

Curry was just embarrassed in late March by a podcasted reading of his Podshow contract (which gives Podshow rights to all the material by featured podcasters). Before that, Curry was sent through the blogosphere's gauntlet for editing Wikipedia and crediting himself for podcasting. Yes, this is a man who managed to make bloggers sympathize with the usually unpopular Dave Winer, who really did help invent this medium.

This would make a really boring episode of Behind the Music, wouldn't it? Anyone want to float a drug rumor or something?

Adam Curry "Bastard of the Blogs" card [Those Bastards]