Gawker: valleywag, dave winer

Chef Mocks Times Critic: 'Whaaa...'

Ryan Tate — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:03:29 EDT

Tyler Florence wants Frank Bruni destroyed; Dave Winer wants The Moment to unplug and Rod Corddry is sick of his family. The Twitterati were feeling destructive.

Chef and Food Network host Tyler Florence whined that the New York Times' Frank Bruni is a whiner.

Blogging pioneer Dave Winer gave some free microblogging advice to the New York Times' shamelessly vapid style blog.

Writer and San Francisco Chronicle Web producer Zöe Stagg has had it with "greige."

Google exec Dick Costolo found his summer reading wasn't very lively.

Rod Corddry, Daily Show guy, famed misanthrope.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

The Web at 20: Not Quite Old Enough to Drink, Yet Drives Us to It

Owen Thomas — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:01:14 EDT

Dear important scientist Tim Berners-Lee: Thank you for inventing the World Wide Web 20 years ago. It's really great and stuff! But were you aware of the crimes committed in your name?

Not that we blame Berners-Lee for these things ... okay, okay, we do. The 20 worst things about the World Wide Web:

1. Julia Allison
2. Twitter
3. Jason Calacanis
4. Wikipedia
5. Henry Blodget
6. Dave Winer
7. Blogs
8. Dead newspapers everywhere
9. Congressman Jared Polis
10. Robert Scoble
11. The Pets.com sock puppet, and Michael Ian Black's subsequent career
12. Digg
13. Perez Hilton
14. /b/
15. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales's love life
16. Oversharing
17. Mark Zuckerberg
18. Chris Crocker
19. Internet commenters
20. Kevin Rose

We realize they weren't in your original spec, Timbo, but you should have anticipated them. Really.

Blogfather Accuses Twitter of Payola Scheme He Pioneered

Owen Thomas — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:21:41 EDT

Dave Winer, the old guy who takes credit for blogging, podcasting, and other tech trends, is mad at Twitter CEO Ev Williams. Why? Because Williams is making people — people who are not Dave Winer — famous.

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.

Why did Californians ban gay marriage?

Paul Boutin — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:20:00 EST

I love Dave Winer's blog. He's even crazier than me, but he's pathologically unable to lie. Winer's latest post admits something most Californians would deny: The first time he learned a friend was married to another guy instead of a gal, he blurted out, "I find this shocking and it makes me a bit uncomfortable." He got over it, but he remembers that feeling. Dave, don't ever change. Remember when you found out I was working for Denton? That was hilarious. (Photo by tobiashm)

Karl Rove's Jedi mind tricks don't fool Dave Winer

Paul Boutin — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:20:00 EDT

"I totally don't trust Rove when he says that McCain has gone too far," writes Berkeley blogger Dave Winer, of Dubya's former campaign mastermind. "I wouldn't take the bait and pass this on as the Obama folk are doing. There's got to be a virus in there somewhere. Some devious trap that springs later in this process." Aw shoot, now if that doesn't happen, I'll be disappointed.

Comcast will pop a cap on your bandwidth in October

Jackson West — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 02:00:00 EDT

250GB, or "125 standard definition movies," will be Internet service provider Comcast's new cap on monthly bandwidth usage for downloads, according to a release from the company — which confirms some rumors and shoots down others. Which is 200GB short of what cranky customer Dave Winer has been reported to use. Better send some cupcakes to your friendly Comcast support representatives on Twitter for overage indulgences. [DSL Reports]

Hot startup to squirm away from old man's caring embrace

Melissa Gira Grant — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:20:00 EDT

It's been a rough year so far, Internet, what with Twitter's ups and downs, Facebook's family feud, and Microsoft's failed bear-hug acquisition of Yahoo. Now a bunch of grumpy old men are plotting a "bear hug" on Twitter, too. Not a takeover, per se, and more passive-aggressive than hostile. But make no mistake: Steve Gillmor and his gang want to bend the microblogging platform to their will, with their ursine embrace, at Bear Hug Camp, a group grope set for September.

This techie version of a "bear hug" involves deploying powers of annoyance rather than shareholder proxies. "Dave Winer used the bearhug to wrap his arms around Netscape’s version of RSS and not let go until a merged RSS was born," muses an unusually wistful but incomprehensible as always Gillmor. "The time may be here to bearhug Twitter."

Gillmor's immediate goal is to create a standard for identifying every utterance made on the new microblogging services — not just Twitter, but Jaiku, Plurk, and the rest. This will serve to make it easier to cross-reference your own bon mots, self-promotional stunts, and hookup attempts. Never mind the architectural details of Gillmor's mostly-gibberish plan: What he's really trying to do, as Winer did with Netscape, is attempt a credit-nicking takeover of Twitter's best ideas.

He's unlikely to succeed. Bear Hug Camp will certainly be an opportunity for the Old Men of Blogging to stroke each other's egos, and more. But Twitter should remember: It's not a hug Gillmor wants to give them. It's an attention grab that leaves a bad-touch feeling and a permalink in its wake. Better to let Gillmor and his gang beat their man drums in the woods, alone, together.

Want more traffic? Throw your widgets overboard

Paul Boutin — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:40:00 EDT

"Some blogs, like TechCrunch and Mashable are so loaded with widgets that they take at least 30 seconds to fully render," gripes a post by frequent Valleywag commenter Alan Wilensky. So true! When I was a website producer, I used to plot page load times versus daily pageviews. Load speed affected traffic — and hence revenue and brand reach— far more than I could convince my managers.

The time it takes before the main text and/or images load matter, too, because most readers will start reading the page as soon as there's something to look at, rather than waiting for everything to settle into place. Dave Winer's Scripting News is a living lesson in speed over flash. I hit Dave's site once a day because I know it'll take under 10 seconds to load the page, scroll down it for Valleywag-grade dirt, and then move on to another site. Yet for whatever reason, I've never been able to personally convince anyone to lighten up a heavy front door. Oh, everyone who cares uses RSS now. Tech people have the best excuses for laziness.

SF's dotcom-era mayor now black, white and read all over

Paul Boutin — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:20:00 EDT

Willie Brown, San Francisco's only black mayor (1996-2004) and a fixture in local politics for more than 40 years, has popped up as the Chronicle's latest columnist. Brown's first offering reads like a mix of Herb Caen and Dave Winer — short, first-person musings on current events, ending with a namedrop of Willie's rich neighbors at the St. Regis. It's pro forma to hate on Brown in San Francisco, even though he helped legalize oral sex and badgered President Clinton to leave the city's pot clubs alone. Willie's real crime? He always plays to win, and he usually does. For most politicos, a newspaper column would signal early retirement. In Brown's case, I can't wait to see how he parlays the Chron gig into his next big score. (Photo by AP/Eric Risberg)

Calacanis, Scoble, Arrington pawns in FriendFeed's smart marketing campaign

Nicholas Carlson — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:00:00 EDT

Egobloggers Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble as well as startup PR clearinghouse Michael Arrington all want to know: How amazing is it that after two years of using Twitter, they've each already got nearly half as many "followers" on FriendFeed after just a few months? Asking the question, each offer hypothetical answers involving the social-network aggregator's ease of use — "The comment systems is so fast and easy that it's perfect," says Calacanis — or Twitter's frequent outages — "Twitter downtime plays a big part," writes Arrington. But here's the real answer to the amazing growth these bloggers have seen on FriendFeed:

It's not that amazing. As CenterNetwork's Allen Stern first pointed out, each time a new user signs up for FriendFeed, the site suggests the new user becomes friends with "Popular FriendFeeders." On the list: Bret Taylor, Fred Wilson, Scott Beale, Michael Arrington, Loic Le Meur, Jason Calacanis, Dave Winer and Leo Laporte — despite, as Stern notes, the fact that many of these "popular" users don't actually use FriendFeed very often. Why? We haven't asked anybody at FriendFeed because the answer is obvious: So that the whole bunch of easily ego-fluffed blog blowhards will blog about how amazing FriendFeed is, without bothering to figure out why, exactly, it seems to be growing so much faster for them than everybody else.

Blogfights: A 100-word history

Paul Boutin — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:20:00 EDT

Nearly ten years before Violet Blue vs. Boing Boing, the Internet's early bloggers discovered their new medium's killer application: Personal spats. Radar Online blogger Choire Sicha, angling for his 14th return to us here at Gawker Media, recounts blogfeuding's past. Choire: tl; dr. Only one era bears recounting: the months after 9/11.

2001 and 2002: With the emergence of "the warbloggers" post-9/11, as they were called, everyone feuded with everyone. Seriously. Everyone! (N.B. that account includes some serious misreading.) It was sheer chaos, a mass freakout that distended psychoanalytic space and time. There were even Denial of Service attacks. Dave Winer, the feudiest of all internetters, took on the world, briefly.

You won't click all those links, so just read the one where Instapundit agrees with Denton.

(Photo via Wonkette)

Julia Allison and Dave Winer share love of un-conferences

Jackson West — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:40:00 EDT

A reader writes to us concerned that the apocalypse is nigh. Why so scared? Because wantrepreneur Julia Allison (who was not fired from Star magazine) and cranky RSS guru Dave Winer are now link lovers. What sparked this show of mutual affection? Winer's treatise on how he created the first, true "un-conference" back in 2003, where instead of panels, it was a discussion — because "the eloquence and intelligence in the room are distributed not concentrated." This apparently reminded Allison of class discussions at her alma mater, Georgetown, "except this time you care." (Photos by Brian Solis, bub.licio.us and Doc Searls)

Comcast considering 250GB monthly cap on downloads

Jackson West — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:20:00 EDT

Internet service provider Comcast is considering instituting a 250-gigabyte monthly cap on downloads, according an anonymous source cited by BroadbandReports.com. Users would be allowed one month over the cap in a year. Any month after that, and the customer would be charged $15 for each 10GB in excess. No cap is expected for uploads. Cranky RSS guru Dave Winer, who admits to downloading an astronomical 450GB a month, would end up with a regular $300 surcharge on his Comcast bill.

Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas didn't confirm or deny the plan to BroadbandReports, only saying "Comcast is currently evaluating this service and pricing model." Earlier this week, the company ditched the proposed "P2P bill of rights" it was developing with file sharing startup Pando. (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

Not even Comcast's Twitter-stalker can placate Dave Winer

Nicholas Carlson — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:40:00 EDT

Comcast has assigned a customer-service employee to monitor Twitter for the passive-aggressive whines of tech-savvy insiders. A tipster forwards us evidence of the Twitter-stalker in action in the screenshot below. Meanwhile, another sighting of this rare customer-service animal in the wild comes from bilious blogfather Dave Winer, best known for arguing about which obscure Internet technologies he invented. Yesterday he posted a rant about how the Internet service provider abruptly cut him off. (The cause: Software he wrote which inefficiently downloads Flickr photos en masse.) After Winer complained over Twitter, the stalker, a Philadelphia-based customer-service rep named Frank, reached out, but couldn't help. So Winer called Comcast's hotline for Internet miscreants and recorded the call (MP3). During that conversation, a Comcast rep threatened to shut down Winer's connection. "I asked if I could get this in writing," Winer reports. "He said no."

Happy birthday, Julia Allison, we're finding a new man for you

Nicholas Carlson — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 13:30:38 EST

Geek-loving cover girl Julia Allison turns 27 soon and all she wants — other than a MacBook Air and whole long list of stuff — is a boy, "tied with a red bow, like a new car for graduation." Knowing Julia's taste for geeks like Kevin Rose and some guy who used to run some video site, we figured: Who better to help Julia land a new man than Valleywag readers? So help her out and vote in our latest poll.

Remind us who we're sleeping with this week?

Melissa Gira Grant — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:00:14 EST

"It would be easy to put together a scorecard and a list of Web 2.0 luminaries who haven't graced their pages," suggests sexy Internet daddy-type Dave Winer. "We might find out who's sleeping with the editors of Valleywag." Great idea, Dave! You make a chart, we'll run it at full 720-pixel width. Promise. But only if you specify which editor. One of Winer's commenters claims Blognation owner Tristan Louis got a free pass from the 'Wag. But did Louis pay through the nose for Mary Jane Irwin's sweet, sweet GFE embrace, or is Owen Thomas giving him the reacharound for free? Readers care about those little details.

Protoblogger Dave Winer suggests Valleywag...

Owen Thomas — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 17:32:10 EST

Protoblogger Dave Winer suggests Valleywag doesn't write about people its editors sleep with. His readers quickly correct him: "Or could it be that you've slept with the editors, but you're really bad at sex?" Precisely. Who wants to hear about bad sex? [Scripting News]

Mitt Romney, my choice for president, "suspended"...

Jordan Golson — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 14:30:03 EST

Mitt Romney, my choice for president, "suspended" his campaign today. More disappointing? Dave Winer, who will never, ever let you forget his pioneering role in blogging, will continue to blather on about the election in his Twitter feed for months and months. Dude, we get it. You like Obama.

Blogs beat New York Times 4-1 in five-year contest

Paul Boutin — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 13:00:56 EST

Five years ago, daddy-blogger Dave Winer bet NYT president Martin Nisenholtz that by 2007, blogs would be more relevant sources than the Times in Google search results for the year's top news stories. (Obligatory brag: The bet was my idea.) The Long Now Foundation has handed down its final decision on the bet. The Times came out ahead on the mortgage crisis. Blogs won on the other four topics — the Iraq war, Virgina Tech's shootings, oil prices, and Chinese exports. But you need to know that the Long Now panel blamed the bet's terms for its lopsided outcome:

Had the bet been structured around commercial vs. noncommercial content, and they had chosen an average ranking system (which actually seems to answer the question being asked more clearly), commercial content would have won by a factor of more than four.

I'm pretty sure that when Winer envisioned a future media landscape dominated by blogs, he wasn't thinking TMZ.

Online, lovelorn Dave Winer claimed "athletic build"

Owen Thomas — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 14:09:46 EST

There are lies, damn lies, and personal ads. Dave Winer, a newcomer to The Well, an online community, posted one in 1994 that said he had an "athletic build." I don't have a photo of Winer circa 1994 (anyone?), but this one from 2001 doesn't show much supporting evidence. Winer's ad, courtesy of Upcoming.org founder Andy Baio:

From: Dave Winer (dwiner) Date: 1994-08-17 17:52:00 Conference: singles Topic: Personal Ad experiences

Well, here goes — my first message on The Well. I've just been lurking for the last few days, trying to figure out what's going on. It's pretty daunting, but maybe I'm getting the hang of it... You all seem like VERY nice people.

Photo by Kris Krüg on Flickr

Anyway, I wrote a personal ad last week, and sent it via email to a bunch of friends, most of them women, for their reaction. Here's the ad:

SWM 39, 6'2", athletic build, Bay Area, software entrepreneur turned massage therapist, gentle hands, romantic, emotionally developed, born-again hippie. Loves gardening, road trips, walking, skiing, writing. Looking for a great gal who's ready to create a safe space for love and lots and lots of play. Send email to: mailbox12@aol.com.

One of my friends had a pretty animated response:

"You're going to find a nurse or a chiropractor. Why? The self-description sounds too needy, as if you're looking for succor. Anyway, i never describe you that way to anyone i know. Your description entirely omits your shining INTELLIGENCE — you're a genius; you assimilate new ideas like most people consume their morning cereal. You see shapes when there are only nebulae. You're also kinetic, always soul-searching. grounded and yet ready to leap. You're body's pretty irrelevant, but obviously you want to be of athletic build (for what sport, exactly, would your body be considered athletic? no offense, but REALLY). As long as you've got some hair left and your sexual organs, your body's functioning, or do you really want to be a combination of Yogi Berra and Albert Einstein? — Love, Sylvia"

Of course I liked Sylvia's version of the ad better. ;->

Dave

PS: I'm a great skier. Definitely athletic.

The Sylvia in question? Most likely the sharp-witted, sharp-tongued Sylvia Paull.