Blogfight
They say academic politics are so fierce because the stakes are so low. Welcome to the politics of the history of weblogging, a discipline so arcane that people are positively hostile to each other.
I think it is clear that Dave Winer was a pioneer in developing blog software. More important I think was his role in establishing the culture of blogging, of understanding and popularizing the idea that the Web is a writer's medium. He's done much of that through his own writing, and he has also encouraged many others, including me.
Here's what Bill Gates once wrote on the DaveNet guest book: "He saw the power of communication using the Internet very early on and has been very effective in using that medium." Douglas Adams posted this: "His opinions are passionately held, well-informed, intelligent, argumentative, and quite often wrong."
Dave has pissed off a whole bunch of people, many of them on a repeated basis. Yes, he can be all the things he's accused of being, but in my experience he resets to zero pretty quickly and is ready to move on. He is surprisingly literal-minded and unironic sometimes, and I think that causes some communication breakdowns. One thing that struck me as I researched a profile of Winer for Wired is that some people make a sport out of disliking him. After a while it seems a little unhealthy for some of them.
Keep writing, Dave. And please keep developing software when you are all recovered from your heart surgery--this product I'm using could still be more intuitive and easier to manipulate, so that more people can jump into the medium you helped create.
4:33:12 PM 
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