I told him this wasn’t much of a threat if they weren’t willing to put it in writing, and I wasn’t intimidated. I also told him I was a blogger and would be writing it up. He didn’t care.

He told him he was a blogger and would be writing it up*? I’ve imagined repeating that line to anyone and simply can’t do it with a straight face. It’s like something from the onion but it’s real. It would be different if Winer was 15, but he’s in his fifties.

What did he expect? A quick apology and reconnected service because he was, gulp, a blogger?

And that is why I love Dave Winer.

*A close second was this comment:

**That’s not to say I don’t believe the web can be a powerful force. It certainly can be. And in the hands of Dave Winer, a comical one as well.

Dave Winer, of course, took Pirillo’s comments as vindication. Winer then went further:

I’ve been told by lots of people that they like it when these blowups happen, they find it entertaining. I understand, but I don’t like being part of these things. So much so that I don’t go to many conferences.

I’m a creative guy, in that I like to create things. I don’t wake up every morning thinking who I can pick a fight with. I know other people do, and sometimes they try to engage me in those fights.

Those are ridiculous comments, of course. The number of people who’ve been attacked by Dave Winer is substantial. That’s not debatable unless you believe Winer is always misunderstood and everyone else always mistaken.

Winer’s most absurd claim is that he’s averse to confrontation with others; as if Gnomedex 2007 was an aberration. Winer thrives on it; it’s his nature. BlogNashville 2005 where Dave Winer was a speaker:

Winer began the discussion by instigating the audience, introducing hot-button issues like abortion and Southern stereotypes in an effort to generate heated debate. But rather than commanding respect, he simply demanded respect without reciprocating.

One of the most uncomfortable moments came when Winer was talking about the economy and the failing American dollar. He was telling us that we all need to listen to one another because we are in a global economy, when all of the sudden he just stopped, mid-sentence.

“Why are you doing that?” he said, speaking directly to a gentleman in a red short-sleeved shirt. “Do you know how disrespectful that is, what you are doing right now?” Apparently, the audience member was chuckling to himself when Winer made his blanket assertions about the economy. Winer’s voice grew even louder. “I’m going to finish my thought, but first I would like you to stop laughing. That is about as ugly as it gets. I don’t know your name—I would use your name right now.”

The man being lectured spoke up, “My name is Stan Brown.”

“Stan, that is about as ugly as it gets. You sit there while a man is talking to you, and you laugh at him? How dare you?”

“Dave, why don’t you pick some topics that are less disagreeable?” Brown was attempting to defend himself when Winer shot back, much like a 10-year-old, “Why don’t you learn how to listen?”

One of the reasons people have such problems with Winer is that the way he behaves can be at such odds with the very spirit and culture of blogging.

I suppose it was Winer’s intention to keep the conversation on topic, but his overbearing presence and propensity to prattle on just agitated conference-goers. He was challenging everyone to treat each other with consideration, all the while interrupting and berating those who disagreed with him. It wasn’t until he extracted himself from the discussion that it became remotely civilized and productive.

Dave Winer, much like a 10-year-old indeed.

Wikipedia is therefore a puzzle to me. Because while it’s helpful, it also hurts me, because my biography there is more of a vendetta, by anonymous people, who seem self-centered and immature, but it’s impossible to tell what axes they have to grind, because they’re largely anonymous.

Here’s Winer’s Wikipedia entry.

Two thoughts:

1. Dave Winer, who has a history of viciously attacking those that disagree with him, doesn’t like anonymous contributers because he can’t bully them into submission. Wikipedia, though not perfect, has it’s own system of checks and balances to try and achieve a fair and balanced perspective.
2. Dave Winer calling other’s “self-centered and immature” is so farcical it’s hard to comprehend. Winer has always showed the traits of the typical cam-girl (could he be the original cam-girl?). Heap praise upon him and tell him how pretty he is and he eats it up. Observe that he uses the sideways head tilt to hide his weight gain and you’re dead to him. Self-centered and immature; a better description of Dave Winer has never been written.

Dave Winers Wikipedia entry seems more than fair. Credit is given for contributing to Podcasting, Blogging, and RSS. HIs controversial past consists of one paragraph under the title “Relationship to the Public”. Winer has shamelessly influenced his presence on Wikipeida in the past, and Winers sycophants do their best to squash any criticism.

Still, Dave Winer will never be happy with his Wikipecia entry until it mirrors his own vision of himself; a vision that has little to do with reality. Despite his efforts, Dave Winer can’t control Wikipedia.

And that’s a good thing.

I looked up blogging to find the names of some more obscure ones, the first hit was the Wikipedia page, and out of curiosity I searched the page for my name. It’s not there. All kinds of people get credit for building blogging as a practice and tools for blogging, but apparently, according to Wikipedia, I had nothing to do with it, nor did Scripting News or UserLand.

The same day Winer whined again on TechCrunch:

By coincidence yesterday I wrote up a long-standing issue I have with Wikipedia, that I don’t get any mention in articles on blogging (and also RSS though I didn’t mention that in yesterday’s piece). I’ve raised it quite a few times, even to the visionary, but since I’m not available for ‘fucking his brains out 24 hours straigHt’, the problem has never been turned over to his internal fix-committee, and people who want to know about blogging or RSS get the idea that other people did the work and took the risks that I did.

Hours later one of Winer’s sycophants fans had corrected this egregious error:

Done, changed. It now mentions scripting news and links to the wikipedia page “Dave Winer”.

The debate on his contributions to blogging aside, the only person who seems as childishly and consistently protective of his legacy as Dave Winer is Roger Clemens. Ironically, both come off looking worse for their efforts, blinded by ego.

Writing

All writing will be done on teamryan. In the past I’ve tried using Vox for more trivial writing, but that (obviously) hasn’t worked. I have my hands full keeping one site updated. So if it’s important enough for me to write, it ends up on my personal site.

Linking

During the past year I tried and failed to stick with a convoluted system of both online and offline tools for bookmarking. If I came upon a link that I wanted to bookmark for future use but thought it would only interest me, I stuck it in WebnoteHappy (a fantastic application). If I thought others might find it interesting I posted it to Delicious. If I thought others might find it interesting but it was a link I would probably never revisit (ex. A youtube video) it was posted to Tumblr.

Enough of that nonsense. If I visit the link often (Ex. My bank) I bookmark it in Safari. Otherwise Delicious it is. I’m often wary of relying on web only applications, but if I don’t have an internet connection links are useless to me anyway. Delicious also makes it easy to create a backup (or I could synchronize my bookmarks with WebnoteHappy). I’ve played around with sites similar to Delicious but I’m a fan of their stripped down design.

Pictures

As with links my 2007 system for dealing with pictures was overly complicated. I sent all pictures taken with my camera to Flickr. Pictures taken with my cell phone (about all I took this year) were posted to a second Tumblr account. In 2008 I’m sending everything to Flickr. I’m paying for it, and though there are things about Flickr I’d change, they do a pretty good job dealing with photographs. Unlike Tumblr, I’ll have the added benefit of backing up my pictures and ordering prints (and yes, I have actually made prints of pictures taken with my cell phone). To keep some sense of order I’m putting all camera taken pictures into sets. Cell phone pictures will not be grouped into sets (for the most part) but will have their own page by using the phone tag.

A big part of simplifying my online activities is eliminating Tumblr. For a catch-all solution it’s great (jack of all trades, master of none). However, I tend to prefer sites with a more specific purpose. I also sent a report request to Tumblr many months ago that was never answered. Tumblr is free, so that’s understandable, but with Flickr I know I can email support and get a response quickly. That’s important to me and I don’t mind spending a little money for that peace of mind. Lastly, pictures I send to Tumblr from my cell phone often took hours to arrive. Some never did. I haven’t had that problem with Flickr.

By streamlining the tools I use online hopefully my production (writing, photographs, linking) will increase. I’ll reevaluate in 2009.

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.

No-www is a site that shares that philosophy.

No-www.org strives to make the Internet and communications about it as fruitful as possible. To that end, we make the modest proposal that website makers configure their main sites to be accessible by domain.com as well as www.domain.com.

According to no-www teamryan now validates as a class B domain.

Class B is currently the optimal no-www compliance level. This classification helps remind users that, while the www subdomain is accepted, it is not necessary. In Class B, www.example.net is a valid address, but it redirects all traffic to example.net.

The wikipedia article on no-www gives some counter arguments. Though valid, in most cases the no-www philosophy is preferable. Adding www to a domain is awkward, unnecessary, and often confusing to less experienced internet users.

Perhaps the most perplexing counter argument is the following:

One of the biggest concerns for dropping the www. subdomain is that your average user may be unable to identify that it is in fact a website, unless it’s specifically mentioned. For example, in the media: www.example.com can be easily identified it is a website, however example.com may not be identified by some users as a real website.

First, I tend to give more credit to the “average user”. Secondly, if more websites were accessible and promoted without the www it wouldn’t take long until example.com became the standard. Is it more confusing for users to have a standard or random url protocol?

The prefix www is not required for teamryan, just as there is no need to add index.html at the end. That keeps things simple, and simple is good.

I kept my eye on teamryan.com and by some miracle (this wouldn’t happen today), the domain wasn’t renewed and became available to the public. I snatched it up, and though it’s taken a while, it’s finally up and running. I feel very lucky to have it, and I no longer feel homeless on the web.

About 6 months ago, I started receiving phone calls asking to discuss the possibility of my selling the domain. I had no interest and ignored the calls, but later received an email from the caller. The caller was actually the head of a web-design firm acting as a negotiator between me and, you guessed it, a realty agency. I emailed him back telling him that unless they wanted to make me a rich man (I was joking) I had no interest in selling. He responded with something along the lines of ‘working in the business and knowing what a fair price would be’. I wrote back a final time thanking him for the interest but clearly stating I had no intentions of ever selling the domain. He ended by thanking me for my time. He was polite and professional.

That’s the problem with putting a value on a domain name. ‘Fair price’ is a relative term. On the open market teamryan has some value, but not as much as it has to me. I doubt anyone will ever find as much value in the teamryan domain as I do, which means teamryan is not for sale today, nor, chances are, tomorrow.

(The realty company went on the buy the dot net version of teamryan. Since dot com is so ingrained in our minds I periodically get random meeting notes, client info, and software registration confirmations forms, almost enough to make me wish I had bought up all forms of teamryan, but I’m not a greedy guy.)

58% of current iPod owners who are planning to buy a new digital media device in the next 12 months are ‘likely’ to choose Microsoft’s Zune.

After the release of the Zune marketwatch reported that the iPod claimed 5 of the top 10 and 10 of the top 25 on Amazon’s most purchased electronic items list. The Zune, in fact, lagged behind the iPod USB Power Adapter.

By comparison, Microsoft’s new Zune media player, despite heavy marketing, came in only at No. 75 on Amazon’s list of 100 best-selling electronics, trailing items such as Apple’s $29.99 iPod USB power adapter, at No. 65.

With community sites such as metafilter, digg, and sportsfilter link blogs aren’t as useful as they once were. Still, the best ones can still be trusted to put personal feelings aside and separate the nonsense from the viable, the good from the bad, the worthwhile from the drivel (most blogs that linked to the survey saw the faulty wording and dismissed it).

The worst link blogs throw up anything that supports their viewpoints and discard the rest.

You can become a member of Daring Fireball for 19 bucks, but for 29 he also throws in a Daring Fireball t-shirt. This is in addition to the full RSS feeds Mr. Gruber gives to all members. Most members, me included, become members to help Mr. Gruber continue writing. I would have joined even without the t-shirt option.

After joining I instantly received an email with my key to unlock the full Daring Fireball RSS feeds, and the promise of a t-shirt within 2 weeks. Several weeks went by with no t-shirt. I wrote Mr. Gruber instructing him that I hadn’t received my t-shirt and though it wasn’t a big deal, I thought I’d write in case my order got lost. I included my receipt along with the email.

Several month went by with no t-shirt. During this time Mr. Gruber mentioned on his website that he was behind a little on t-shirt orders. I thought surely one of those orders was mine, and my shirt would be coming soon. Not long after I read of people receiving their t-shirts, and even photographs of those t-shirts on flickr. I was not one of these people.

I then switched to writing Mr. Gruber once a month asking about the t-shirt. It went from a basic:

“It’s no big deal, but if there’s a problem with the t-shirts please just drop me a line.”

to a helpless:

“4 months….still no t-shirt.”

Despite multiple emails begging for an explanation I never received a response. It seemed so bizarre to me that Mr. Gruber would make no effort to respond that I emailed from different accounts in case one was being filtered into his spam folder. Still, nothing. Eventually I gave up. After all, it wasn’t about the t-shirt (I kept telling myself this).

Until one day, when I had given up on ever receiving my Daring Fireball t-shirt, it was at my doorstep. I half expected a note inside with an apology, or an explanation, but alas, nothing. Which is fine. I didn’t join Daring Fireball for the t-shirt. I joined Daring Fireball to help Mr. Gruber continue writing great articles about Apple, and continue he does. Though waiting almost half a year for a t-shirt promised in 2 weeks was frustrating, I still believe it was money well spent.

However, if you’re buying a Daring Fireball t-shirt for a gift (as I would have this Christmas), or intend to wear it on an upcoming trip (as I had originally planned oh so many months ago), you might want to take my story into consideration. Though Mr. Gruber promises delivery within 2 weeks, it could easily be 5 months, and you’ll get no reason why.