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.