Tag: Dave Winer

Terri Schiavo Is Not Brain Dead

If you’re going to write about something, you should take a minimal amount of time to get the facts right and avoid embarassing yourself. Dave Winer makes the bizarre claim that

Re Terry Shiavo [sic], the woman whose brain is dead, Congress and the President should not have gotten involved. They made a mistake.

Schiavo is definitely not brain dead. Rather she is in a persistent vegetative state. Schiavo suffered apparently severe brain damage, but her brain is currently functioning although not normally.

If you’re brain dead, you’re just plain dead — no one recovers from brain death. People do, rarely, recover from being in a persistent vegetative state, which is why Schiavo’s parents still hold out hope for her.

Regardless of your opinion on whether or not Schiavo should have her feeding tube removed (and I favor letting the state court decisions stand), it doesn’t help to spread misinformation like claiming Schiavo is actually brain dead.

Somebody’s Web Site Just Isn’t There, But I Think It’s Dave’s

Dave Winer again excoriates Google,

Lucovsky’s blog has gone 404. Editorial: Lucovsky shouldn’t have trashed his former employer in a Google-owned space. But you don’t pull the site because of that. You learn, grow, show your mistakes, do it better next time. Mark L’s former employer gets it, Google does not. The company that owns Blogger has not one clue what blogging is about.

But I can reach Lucovsky’s site just fine, including the post Winer linked to yesterday.

Winer gets a 404 from the notoriosly unreliable Blogspot site and its suddenly a huge conspiracy. Well, somebody doesn’t have a clue.

(The real question here is when is Google actually going to do something about Blogspot’s horrible performance problems, which frequently rear their ugly head when you try to access archived entries).

ROTFLMAO at Google Toolbar Attacks

You just have to appreciate the sort of bombast that Dave Winer can generate. Google creates a beta version of its toolbar that automatically detects addresses and turns them into links to Google Maps automatically — if the user explicitly chooses this behavior — and it turns out to be the end of the Web as we know it.

Any news organization or academic journal that publishes on the Web now has a serious integrity issue because of the existence of the Google toolbar with the AutoLink feature. All documents will have to contain a disclaimer that links contained within the page may not have been placed there by the author or organization whose copyright notice is on the page. Same is true for legal documents, end-user license agreements, rental agreements, etc. And if links are changeable, is text subject to change as well? Might Google correct our spelling? Or might they correct our thinking? Where is the line?

Straight from user-requested automatic links to George Orwell’s 1984.

I’ve participated in this sort of insidious conspiracy myself. I have an Extension to Firefox that inserts a graphic next to any link that is a PDF, MP3 or a number of other such links that piss me off when I click on them without being warned that my browser is going to try to load some huge-assed file.

I thought I was enhancing my experience and tailoring the web to work the way I’d prefer. Instead, I was walking down the slippery slope of Big Brother control of the web. If that plug-in can insert a graphic after a PDF, for example, what’s to stop it from taking every instance of “Winer” in a web page and substituting “Weenie”?

Hmmm… I wonder if Winer ever received permission beforehand to do SalonHerringWiredFool.Com? And I bet all of those organizations are happy he let the domain expire so it could become a porn site. Maybe Google should alter Dave’s thinking!

Dave Winer, Derek Powazek, and Search

This post in combination with this post certainly should win Dave Winer some sort of award. I’m thinking, though, that it would be the Internet equivalent of the razzies.

Derek Powazek mentioned on his weblog that in 2000 Winer referred to him as “brain dead.” Winer took umbrage at that on Scripting.Com, saying,

Anyway, I’d love to see the pointer to where I supposedly said he was brain-dead. If I said it, I apologize, that would be a really mean thing to say, and obviously not true. On the other hand, I probably said his design was brain-dead, which is an opinion, a way of saying it could stand a lot of improvement. I’ve done tons of brain-dead design myself, and lived to tell the story. And here are all the citations for Powazek on this blog. You can see there’s a good mix of praise and criticism.

One of the brain dead things Dave does, IMO, is rely on Google for searching his own weblog. So the citations link above uses Google to provide a list of all the blog posts he’s done which mention Powazek.

The kicker is that the “brain dead” comment occurred on Scripting.Com right here, but because of the way he’s configured the Google search’s output, it doesn’t show up unless you actually visit the archive page. In fact, even if you search for the exact text, “brain damaged” (not brain dead — Winer apparently edited the post), the post still doesn’t show up in the results.

And for this, Winer (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) thinks he deserves an award,

Anyway, I don’t get awards, but I wish I did. Given a chance I would certainly nominate this site for best technology in a weblog, if only for the cool Google-powered search, illustrated above in the post about Powazek. Did you know it uses the Google API in conjunction with the local content database to only give you the bits you’re looking for. It’s a big thing, and as far as I know, of all the millions of weblogs they’re tracking at Technorati (thanks to weblogs.com, by the way), this is the only one that has such a cool search command.

Yeah, it really helped him drill down to “only give you the bits you’re looking for” in this case. There’s a reason millions of weblogs aren’t using “such a cool search command.”

And still, Winer will never understand why people treat him with such hostility when he greets them with sentences like, “Your site [Powazek’s] is the most brain-damaged weblog I’ve ever seen.”

Gee, it’s so surprising that negative bickering sucks up all the energy among folks concentrating on syndication.

Dumbest Dave Statement Ever?

Dave Winer has said a lot of dumb things over the past few years, but this one is his all-time lowest point (at least since I’ve been reading Scripting News),

With all due respect to Jeffrey Veen, who I know from my Wired days, his experience with the email model type of RSS reader is exactly why that’s the model you don’t want to use. It’s not like email. Let the river of items flow through your queue, scroll over them with a scroll bar, and don’t let the software tell you you’re falling behind. Your time is what’s valuable, there’s no value to the items you didn’t read. If it’s important it’ll pop up again. RSS is not email. Don’t sort them out into little boxes that you have to go to, make them flow to you, in a river, unsorted. I wish people would just listen to this simple idea, so many people are using RSS the wrong way.

Stupid users — you’re using the software the wrong way! Dave boiled down to his essence.

Same Old Dave on Google

If Dave Winer didn’t exist, someone would have to invent him. Dave’s company, Userland, makes products so good at doing search that Winer uses Google for searching his own blog. Nonetheless, that doesn’t stop Winer from not only criticizing Google for failing to implement non-trivial features, but goes on to suggest that Google is intentionally trying to destroy blogs (emphasis added),

It’s very true that Google has failed to keep up with the “search engine optimization” tricks that cause links to porn sites to show up on our Referers pages and blog post comments. As we’ve said here several times, and thought many more, Google is the place where this practice should be stopped. It’s because of Google that our sites are littered with links to these offensive sites that have nothing to do with ours. If they’re smart enough to come up with tricks like Google News and Local Google, why can’t their search engine recognize comment and referer spam and not use it in determining page rank? Of course they can. Why don’t they? I’d love to hear an explanation. Better yet, I’d love to see them fix it. It’s a bug in Google’s software.

Maybe secretly Google really doesn’t like blogs. Maybe it’s not so secret. They still haven’t deigned to support the standard format for syndication, as every other tech company and major publisher has. Why Google has a stake in breaking the standard is another puzzle. How does this relate to Don’t Be Evil. We’ve asked this question a few times, only to be met with the usual Google stone wall.

When Google News first came out, Dave derided it as defective. Now it’s so good, its evidence that Google really doesn’t want to stop search engine optimization tactics.

I could go on about how Google usually get slammed by people, including Winer, when it tweaks its algorithms to try to deal with those trying to game the system, but the site of Dave complaining about a vendor being slow to fix a bug is simply too much to get past.