Valleywag
silicon valley users guide
Posts Tagged “
Dave Winer
”
silicon valley users guide
willie brown
SF's dotcom-era mayor now black, white and read all over
Willie Brown, San Francisco's only black mayor (1996-2004) and a fixture in local politics for more than 40 years, has popped up as the Chronicle's latest columnist. Brown's first offering reads like a mix of Herb Caen and Dave Winer — short, first-person musings on current events, ending with a namedrop of Willie's rich neighbors at the St. Regis. It's pro forma to hate on Brown in San Francisco, even though he helped legalize oral sex and badgered President Clinton to leave the city's pot clubs alone. Willie's real crime? He always plays to win, and he usually does. For most politicos, a newspaper column would signal early retirement. In Brown's case, I can't wait to see how he parlays the Chron gig into his next big score. (Photo by AP/Eric Risberg)
social networks
Calacanis, Scoble, Arrington pawns in FriendFeed's smart marketing campaign
Egobloggers Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble as well as startup PR clearinghouse Michael Arrington all want to know: How amazing is it that after two years of using Twitter, they've each already got nearly half as many "followers" on FriendFeed after just a few months? Asking the question, each offer hypothetical answers involving the social-network aggregator's ease of use — "The comment systems is so fast and easy that it's perfect," says Calacanis — or Twitter's frequent outages — "Twitter downtime plays a big part," writes Arrington. But here's the real answer to the amazing growth these bloggers have seen on FriendFeed: More »
feuds
Blogfights: A 100-word history
Nearly ten years before Violet Blue vs. Boing Boing, the Internet's early bloggers discovered their new medium's killer application: Personal spats. Radar Online blogger Choire Sicha, angling for his 14th return to us here at Gawker Media, recounts blogfeuding's past. Choire: tl; dr. Only one era bears recounting: the months after 9/11. More »
geek love
Julia Allison and Dave Winer share love of un-conferences
A reader writes to us concerned that the apocalypse is nigh. Why so scared? Because wantrepreneur Julia Allison (who was not fired from Star magazine) and cranky RSS guru Dave Winer are now link lovers. What sparked this show of mutual affection? Winer's treatise on how he created the first, true "un-conference" back in 2003, where instead of panels, it was a discussion — because "the eloquence and intelligence in the room are distributed not concentrated." This apparently reminded Allison of class discussions at her alma mater, Georgetown, "except this time you care." (Photos by Brian Solis, bub.licio.us and Doc Searls) More »
broadband
Comcast considering 250GB monthly cap on downloads
Internet service provider Comcast is considering instituting a 250-gigabyte monthly cap on downloads, according an anonymous source cited by BroadbandReports.com. Users would be allowed one month over the cap in a year. Any month after that, and the customer would be charged $15 for each 10GB in excess. No cap is expected for uploads. Cranky RSS guru Dave Winer, who admits to downloading an astronomical 450GB a month, would end up with a regular $300 surcharge on his Comcast bill. More »
comcast
Not even Comcast's Twitter-stalker can placate Dave Winer
Comcast has assigned a customer-service employee to monitor Twitter for the passive-aggressive whines of tech-savvy insiders. A tipster forwards us evidence of the Twitter-stalker in action in the screenshot below. Meanwhile, another sighting of this rare customer-service animal in the wild comes from bilious blogfather Dave Winer, best known for arguing about which obscure Internet technologies he invented. Yesterday he posted a rant about how the Internet service provider abruptly cut him off. (The cause: Software he wrote which inefficiently downloads Flickr photos en masse.) After Winer complained over Twitter, the stalker, a Philadelphia-based customer-service rep named Frank, reached out, but couldn't help. So Winer called Comcast's hotline for Internet miscreants and recorded the call (MP3). During that conversation, a Comcast rep threatened to shut down Winer's connection. "I asked if I could get this in writing," Winer reports. "He said no." More »
poll
Happy birthday, Julia Allison, we're finding a new man for you
Geek-loving cover girl Julia Allison turns 27 soon and all she wants — other than a MacBook Air and whole long list of stuff — is a boy, "tied with a red bow, like a new car for graduation." Knowing Julia's taste for geeks like Kevin Rose and some guy who used to run some video site, we figured: Who better to help Julia land a new man than Valleywag readers? So help her out and vote in our latest poll. More »
contest
Remind us who we're sleeping with this week?
"It would be easy to put together a scorecard and a list of Web 2.0 luminaries who haven't graced their pages," suggests sexy Internet daddy-type Dave Winer. "We might find out who's sleeping with the editors of Valleywag." Great idea, Dave! You make a chart, we'll run it at full 720-pixel width. Promise. But only if you specify which editor. One of Winer's commenters claims Blognation owner Tristan Louis got a free pass from the 'Wag. But did Louis pay through the nose for Mary Jane Irwin's sweet, sweet GFE embrace, or is Owen Thomas giving him the reacharound for free? Readers care about those little details.
Protoblogger Dave Winer suggests Valleywag doesn't write about people its editors sleep with. His readers quickly correct him: "Or could it be that you've slept with the editors, but you're really bad at sex?" Precisely. Who wants to hear about bad sex? [Scripting News]
Mitt Romney, my choice for president, "suspended" his campaign today. More disappointing? Dave Winer, who will never, ever let you forget his pioneering role in blogging, will continue to blather on about the election in his Twitter feed for months and months. Dude, we get it. You like Obama.
blogging for dollars
Blogs beat New York Times 4-1 in five-year contest
Five years ago, daddy-blogger Dave Winer bet NYT president Martin Nisenholtz that by 2007, blogs would be more relevant sources than the Times in Google search results for the year's top news stories. (Obligatory brag: The bet was my idea.) The Long Now Foundation has handed down its final decision on the bet. The Times came out ahead on the mortgage crisis. Blogs won on the other four topics — the Iraq war, Virgina Tech's shootings, oil prices, and Chinese exports. But you need to know that the Long Now panel blamed the bet's terms for its lopsided outcome: More »
geek love
Online, lovelorn Dave Winer claimed "athletic build"
There are lies, damn lies, and personal ads. Dave Winer, a newcomer to The Well, an online community, posted one in 1994 that said he had an "athletic build." I don't have a photo of Winer circa 1994 (anyone?), but this one from 2001 doesn't show much supporting evidence. Winer's ad, courtesy of Upcoming.org founder Andy Baio: More »
dave winer
Blogger calls for Hillary Clinton's death
Death threats get dished out online routinely, and few take them seriously — the Kathy Sierra row of last spring being the notable exception. But Dave Winer, the blog pioneer, may have chosen the wrong target over the weekend. In a Twitter sent while watching Hillary Clinton on TV, he wrote "Kill Hill Kill Hill." Webheads accustomed to Winer's dyspeptic logorrhea may dismiss such talk as the ranting of an addled mind. But the Secret Service, which protects Clinton as both the spouse of a former president and a presidential candidate herself, may view it with more jaundiced eyes. If agents pay Winer a visit, will he Twitter about that, too?
paul boutin
Wikipedia wins, I lose big bet on the news
Blogger Rogers Cadenhead doesn't get to declare the official winner of the bet between the Dave Winer and the New York Times. Google — the company, not the search engine — will call a winner, and the Long Now Foundation, which holds the cash in the pot, will decide the issue. I know because I set this all up in 2001, by talking to Google PR chief David Krane before approaching Winer and the Times to arrange a wager on whether blogs or the paper of record would cover the big stories of this year better. The bet ran in Wired's Long Bets issue. More »
geek love
Dave Winer tweets his way into our hearts
Twitter isn't all Jason Calacanis yelling death to Luddites or Jeremiah Owyang pontificating on his own marketing prowess. Sometimes it's about love. Loooooooooooove. Coooooooool. Like this sweet tweet from blogfather Dave Winer. Want to know what she said? More »
anniversaries
Happy birthday, blogosphere!
Ten years ago, on December 17, 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term "web log" for a webpage where an author "logs" the other webpages they find interesting. Since then, blogging has become serious business for some and a place for nonsensical blabber for others. Though Dave Winer frequently claims that he was the first to launch a weblog at Scripting News, it was really just an online archive of columns rejected by HotWired. Jorn Barger had the first true weblog worthy of the name at Robot Wisdom.
conferences
