For a while now, I've had the distinct feeling that Dave Winer has been increasingly losing his fucking mind. I've been suspecting it for a good while now, but the first undeniable proof of it was when Dave Winer called Ben Hammersley's article on newsreaders in The Guardian "tainted", originally just flawed, because it didn't mention Dave Winer's personal toy Radio Userland.
Oh, and for those unacquainted, Radio Userland is not a newsreader, it's a weblogging tool. Now with the recent debacle/debate concerning the development of RSS, the psychotic side of Dave Winer has, as it seems, completely swallowed the old Dave.
Yes, Dave, you have lost your fucking mind.
Anyone who works with Hemenway or Kearney should be aware that these people are nothing less than monsters, who will stoop to any level to get their way. Their perversion may even be the reason they're involved. Dave Winer
What Dave neglects to consider is that unlike him, to the mentioned individuals this whole thing is a hobby. A side project. Dave is the one feverishly trying to raise his statue of self-appointed importance, Dave is the one never missing an opportunity to tell the world that he owns RSS, that he invented weblogging, and so forth.
Unlike the Al Gore situation, Dave is the one doing the persuasion.
This is not about RSS, RDF nor anything else of relevance. It's about Dave Winer losing his precious shine. I'm not sure when it began but it has escalated beyond reason since that article in The Guardian a few weeks ago.
Initially, Dave claimed the said article was flawed because Dave's Radio Userland was not mentioned among the free newsreaders, most likely because Radio Userland isn't one. Were he not so self-absorbed he would have just let it pass, but instead he has made the article his personal nemesis, most recently declaring it tainted.
He has since the publishing of the article discovered that the maker of AmphetaDesk -- one of the mentioned newsreaders in the article, Kevin Hemenway, is a co-writer at Ben Hammersley's own blog on RSS. So, now the article is flawed because Hammersley "has a relationship with" Hemenway, not because it neglected to mention the tangential Radio Userland.
Dave's new obsession is to label the article in The Guardian as a "review" and the reason it is "tainted" is because the author of it is acquainted with the maker of one of the "reviewed" newsreaders. Well, first and foremost, it's not a "review". The article mentions a few aggregators, but anyone who has ever read a review knows this to be an article about aggregators as a concept, and not a "review" of software.
Yesterday I posted a note on Scripting News saying that, unless there were any objections, I would add support for namespaces to the RSS 0.94 specification. There weren't any objections. Dave Winer
The community is shouting objections. Dave Winer does not want community input on RSS, he wants community appraisal of whatever he decides RSS to be.
Comments
I guess this whiner-guy would then be pretty angry at me for not seeing the advantage of RSS. It's not a time-winning concept but a time-losing one. You will never be able to get me over to the dark side, Tomas. =)
Comment by talisyn at 00:35, 21 Sep, 2002 #
But why do they insist on calling them newsreaders? If it's to have a better name than aggregator then use "feedreader" for Christ sake. Newsreaders are used to read pure text by the nntp-protocol and not some xml-wanker-excerpt-markup-thing. It is important to keep these two apart becasue they don't have anything in common at all.
Comment by Nicklas at 00:59, 21 Sep, 2002 #
Newsreaders, rss-aggregators, feedreaders, they've got plenty of names. I guess they are called "newsreaders" because they were primarily, I think, ment for reading headlines from news-sites.
Oh, and "feedreader" is a specific newsreader, so that kind of rules that term out as a generic name.
I call 'em rss-aggregators myself.
Comment by Tomas at 01:10, 21 Sep, 2002 #
RSS is definitely a time-saver for me. Using an aggregator (we've really got to get a decent name for these thing) I can keep up with more sites than I'd be inclined to if I had to visit each one 'manually.' I've likewise included feeds for my own site to save people the bother of having to visit just to find out what's new.
But anyway, to each their own. The whole RSS 2 spec thing is turning into a spectacular train wreck. I
ve been following the posts on Ben Hammersley's site and elsewhere. What I can't understand is Winer's talk about "community" when he consistently ignores that community. He's also not very good at answering questions people put to him, and goes on the attack easily.
Maybe there's stuff happening behind the scenes that I don't know about, but it's definitely easy to conclude that Winer's getting a little, er... disassociative (as they say in clinical psychiatry).
As a 'publisher' of RSS feeds, I just want a clear, agreed-upon spec that's easy to understand and implement. I don't want a return to the dark days of the web when you'd have to develop multiple versions of sites for Netscape and IE because they both had such different tag bases and rendering quirks. This is why standards are good and why it's important that RSS not be allowed to Balkanise into competing or fragmented specs.
Comment by jh at 05:37, 21 Sep, 2002 #
I can pretty much bet my life that the reason Dave wants to rename what is RSS 0.94 to RSS 2.0 is because he wasn't involved with RSS 1.0 and the figure 2.0 "sounds" newer and more improved than 1.0.
Were he to name it 0.94 this problem would probably not exists, as 2.0 it creates an enormous amount of confusion. 2.0 is actually 0.94 and as such a step _back_ from 1.0.
Dave is doing this because he wants to take RSS back from the dev-community.
As I've mentioned, he's lost his fucking mind. I'm not even exaggerating either. One minute he says UserLand _does not want ownership_ of RSS, the other he says RSS is his - go make your own syndaction format.
One minute he says this is a community effort, the other he defines the spec of 2.0 himself without listening to _any_ of the objections that are _shouted_ at him.
RSS 2.0 is indeed the "Hitler"/"dictator" version as it is sometimes called.
Comment by Tomas at 11:29, 21 Sep, 2002 #
Winers latest tactic is demanding that everyone be nice to him, accept his RSS 2.0 standard without complaining and generally putting up with all his crap and mail harassment because he's recovering from his recent heart attack. Way to go, Dave.
Ok, so you invented weblogging, aggregators and RSS? You're still a sad, cranky old man who can't get along with the rest of the world.
Comment by Fredrik at 12:35, 21 Sep, 2002 #
Maybe it's just me, but I would feel pretty cranky if I received death-threats; the anti-semitic slurs from Kevin Hemenway/Morbus Iff are not pretty; I don't think it's so much about RSS.
Comment by Erik at 14:55, 21 Sep, 2002 #
Death-threat? You call _that_ a death-threat?
Morbus is comparing RSS 2.0 and Dave to Hitler and the holocaust; he isn't calling him a "dirty jew" or anything like that. Is any mention of the holocaust at all "anti-semitic slurs"?
You're right about it not being about RSS though, it's about Dave's backstabbing, deceiving ways.
Comment by Tomas at 15:34, 21 Sep, 2002 #
I haven't really been into the rss/rdf discussions but it's nice to learn that there's basically a war going on over the 2.0 specs.
At the other hand, I've met Dave a couple of years ago and in my experience he was rather funny, charming and above all: intelligent company.
Maybe he's angry man who feels stepped over after he invented something that is now becoming a popular standard?
Comment by frédéric at 16:00, 21 Sep, 2002 #
Very possible frédéric, that still doesn't explain how he one minute want RSS to be a community effort, and the next he states it's his. And so on, and so forth, ad infinitum.
What he truly wants is for it to be a community effort, except the community should just love and praise anything he does.
Comment by Tomas at 16:07, 21 Sep, 2002 #
Tomas: Hemenway wrote: "Some day, I hope to eat dinner with Dave Winer - perhaps I'll raise his blood pressure so high that he'll have a heart attack". Sure, comparing jews to Hitler and their actions (Dave Winers?!) to the holocaust is a standard anti-semitic trope since WWII. I'm sure Iff/Hemenway is aware of this.
Comment by Erik at 21:28, 21 Sep, 2002 #
Erik: Exactly, you call that a threat? One must take everything everybody says extremely serious to interpret that as a threat to ones life.
I don't see what is anti-semitic about comparing a person to Hitler, I really don't.
Tell me, why does comparing a person to Hitler imply one hates/dislikes/discriminates jews?
Comment by Tomas at 23:08, 21 Sep, 2002 #
Note that Dave Winer did not invent RSS, Netscape did. Dave Winer/UserLand was a major contributor to version 0.91, among other members of the RSS community. In the Netscape RSS 0.91 document (July 1999), neither Dave Winer, UserLand, or any others are specifically referenced as contributors, except to say that several elements from <scriptingNews> were incorporated into RSS 0.91.
In June 2000, Dave Winer created a new 0.91 document and put a UserLand copyright/license on it and claimed that any deviation from his document was "a fork".
It was that action plus the refusal to allow user-driven extensions that led to the creation of an open working group.
Comment by Ken MacLeod at 23:21, 24 Sep, 2002 #
The discussion has been closed on this entry. Thanks to everybody who participated.