If you ever pine for those days back in school where kids would pick out a victim and then gang-insult him in hopes of creating some easy entertainment, then tune into the current Dave Winer Bash-a-thon. Dave Winer (whose company, UserLand, makes the software I use to maintain this site, and hosts some of my stuff on its servers) is writ large in the blogging world–his Scripting News is probably the best-read semi-technically-focused weblog there is. And Dave gets picked on by a crowd of detractors who sometimes don't seem to have anything better to do with their lives. At least Dave gives them direction.

I happen to like Dave Winer. I don't consider myself to be “friend of Dave”–that would be presumptuous, since I really don't know him all that well; we had dinner a few times when I was in Palo Alto back when I ran XML Magazine, and he wrote a column for that publication for a while. Mostly, Steve Gillmor dealt with him, while I played management games.

Dave and I have had disagreements. He's a curmudgeon, and has some strongly-held views of the world. He's not diplomatic. He's written some things that pissed me off. But generally speaking, I think Dave is pretty much on the mark most of the time. And he and the folks at UserLand have contributed a lot to web publishing. Dave doesn't always play well with others, but he's got personal honor–something that is woefully absent from much of the business world today. I respect him for it.

The argument that created this latest Dave-bashing episode (and its predecessors are legion) sprung from his assessment of Rebecca Blood's Weblog Handbook. He felt the book didn't have the story straight.

I haven't read the book; frankly, I understand Dave's aversion to books about blogging–the concept itself borders on the the category of pomo self-referentialist pseudo-intellectual ego masturbation (like much of blogging), stamped on the carcasses of dead trees, posing as self-help. But that's just my opinion :-).

I'm sure the book has its merits. I like Rebecca's blog, and the folks who've taken the time to review her book on Amazon gave it strong approval. It's just not the kind of book I'd go out and buy (for philisophical reasons. but also because I spend my reading time very judiciously these days because there's so
little of it). But the book seems to be tangential to the argument at this point–it's become a referendum on whether people think Dave deserves respect.

This is all, as an editor of mine once called it, is “Inside Baseball” — the dissection of a topic taken out of the context of the larger world, with no import to anyone but those within the argument. It's the fight for rank in the pecking order. And it's an immense waste of the resources of a lot of very talented people, because it consumes so many of their compute cycles. In other words, it's like life in academia, or campus politics, where it's more about the fight than about the cause.

If we'd all just cut each other a little more slack, the word would be such a happier place.