The Irascible Dave Winer
While searching for the creator of the first blog Cnet recently labeled Dave Winer “irascible”. Dave Winer took offense:
They call me “irascible.” Not sure if I’ve met either of the authors in person, I wonder how they formed that opinion and why they feel the need to label people like that.
Lately Dave Winer has also shown interest in finding a way to insure his legacy:
No one really likes to think about dying, but it comes for everyone, eventually, and if you’re living a creative life, as so many of us are these days, maybe you’d like your creations to live at least a little bit longer than you do?
A large part of that legacy consists of his words and actions documented on his blog. Dave Winer’s online existence has been marked by controversy and confrontation, sometimes to the point of overshadowing his contributions, and in that context, irascible fits well.
Winer is known as one of the more polarizing figures in the blogging community. Tim Bray, a co-inventor of XML, wrote on his blog “Dave Winer has done a tremendous amount of work on RSS and invented important parts of it and deserves a huge amount of credit for getting us as far as we have. However, just looking around, I observe that there are many people and organizations who seem unable to maintain a good working relationship with Dave.”
Tim O’Reilly, who has had a rocky relationship with Dave for many years with regards to the technology conferences Tim organizes, says that Dave “can be a great contributor, but he can also decide, for no apparent reason, that someone is somehow on ‘the other side,’ at which point he becomes disruptive and abusive”
Dave Winer accepts positive labels from sources that rely strictly on his online persona (“The protoblogger.” – NY Times.) and displays them prominently on his blog. While he may be a gentleman in person, his irascible nature is as much a part of his online legacy as RSS and Podcasting. To ignore it would render his legacy incomplete.
