Let’s All Grow Up and Play Nice, Shall We?

by Kent on 23. Aug, 2006 in Tech

Rogers Cadenhead and Paul Kedrofsky aren’t buying what Dave Winer is selling.

I have mildly defended Dave here a few times when I thought he was getting ganged up on and I have also said many times that he often makes it hard to defend him. Just yesterday, I mentioned how happy I am that Dave is focusing on Blackberry applications, simply because we need to close the media gap between the otherwise lovable Blackberry and every other phone on the market. I don’t know Paul from Adam (though I note that he refers to himself as Dr. in his bio, so please think of me as either Lawyer Newsome, Mr. Newsome or Cool Rocking Daddy, take your pick, for the duration of this post). While I don’t know Rogers, he seems like an allright guy and I have read his blog for some time. In other words, I don’t really have a dog in this fight, and I really, really don’t care who invented the internet or who invented news wires or news rivers or news papers.

Rather, I will make three points about getting along in the blogosphere:

First, whether Dave is right or wrong, he is sometimes his own worst enemy. When he writes something like this:

“Over in another part of the tech blogosphere they’re having a discussion about blogs that make big money. I still think Scripting News has the record there, by a wide margin. Last year we did $2.3 million in revenue. Expenses? One salary (mine) and about $1000 per month in server costs. A few thousand for contract programming. Pre-tax profit? Millions.”

That doesn’t just sound like bragging- there’s no other way to interpret it. It’s a “look at me, I’m not getting enough attention” sort of thing. One of the basic rules of human interaction is that someone who keeps grabbing your collar and telling you over and over how smart or how successful they are is bound to lose the argument. Let it go. If you’re smart and successful (which from my perspective Dave seems to be), people will figure it out. If they don’t want to admit it, it’s usually because they think you’ve been unkind, arrogant or a braggart. A pugilistic personality will grab the spotlight from personal achievement every time.

Second, why write in condescending riddles like this:

I don’t share this space with hitch-hikers. I use my blog for my own ideas. They make good money. No point diluting what I have to say.

I can see more arrogance and I can tell Dave’s mad at someone, but I have no idea who. All that a reader who doesn’t follow the story like Jane Goodall follows chimps can glean from that paragraph is contempt. For crying out loud man, just say what it is you want to say. Who are you dumping on? Everyone? No one? Just tell us. At least then there is the possibility that someone might agree with you.

And finally, all this fighting over who invented what and all these little smart boy nerd-of-the-week clubs that pop up here and there in the blogosphere make the blogosphere look more like a nursery room than a place where intelligent grown-ups engage in distributed conversations about grown-up stuff.

Everybody needs to grow up, take a long look in the mirror and stop believing their own bullshit.

Is anybody with me?

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  • you put your finger on precisely what bothers me most--or at least cloes to most--about this kind of Winerlogic: you know he's out to get someone; sometimes you can glean who; sometimes someone else names who; sometimes dave can't contain himself and comes out with it two posts later, then edits how he reallly feels, then deletes the post, or leaves the post but puts up a little thumbnail graphic and tries to make it all ok.

    it's not okay, but your dog has a very cute snout.

  • From Wikipedia:

    "Dave is one of my favorite sources of information and opinion on the Web. His opinions are passionately held, well-informed, intelligent, argumentative, and quite often wrong," quipped Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams.

    May explain the hitch-hiker reference...



  • Heh, to think I nearly missed this!

    Only one comment, in response to Phil, who said: "Dave has basically had a particular idea of what the internet is and how it should be used. And the short summary is : the internet is NOT mainstream media."

    Since when did the NYT and BBC (the material Winer's republishing) stop being mainstream media?



  • "Whereas *everyone* and his mother-in-law are gonna get rich from AdWords, right? :-)"

    No - only a tiny percentage are going to get rich by any means. Everyone else will labor in obscurity. Not that there's anything wrong with that, *if it's what they want*. But there's also a huge amount of hype and hucksterism. Because in order for that tiny percentage to get rich, a large number of people have to be convinced to be part of the system, and that often involves a marketing pitch of economic benefit which won't be realized.

    "Blogs act as information routers ..."

    No, blogs as a trade newsletters, marketing brochures, portfolios. This is also media.

    A further view is that blogs are something sold to people so that the seller can profit from the service.

    As in (sarcasm) "Why don't you little Z-listers be happy chatting away and "conversing" (and using the software from this start-up ... and search engine from that start-up ... and providing the basis for that A-lister to bloviate about how the revolution is at hand so big business should pay a hefty consulting fee ...)". Which is the "egalitarianism" of a flock of sheep.

    So, exactly, it's economic profitable for the providers of blog services and consultants to try to sell people on it, even if those people never have more than a few readers. Because the *seller* will profit, even if *nobody* else does. That scales - for the blog-evangelist!











  • [quote]If I can paraphrase: "Use your blog as platform to *market* your *consulting* business, and sell *services*". This sounds very very appealing. The problem is that it doesn't stand up to close examination. In order to market your consulting business, well, you need to have a consulting business in the first place, and that's only a small percentage of the population. Similarly, a service platform is difficult to have succeed (though granted, he did). But by definition, this will only work for a very few people.[/quote]

    Whereas *everyone* and his mother-in-law are gonna get rich from AdWords, right? :-)

    There seems to be two rival views of the role of personal publishing in the information economy :

    One is that people are basically consultants and professionals, who use their blog to suppliment their service. Blogs act as information routers, conversation starters and ways of sharing useful knowledge. It doesn't have to be large scale. At the local level, blogs are probably doing the same sort of thing as membership of the local Rotary Society or Chamber of Commerce.

    The other view is that blogs are mini-media. That even at the local level, MyTownBlog is able to sell AdWords for MyTownBusiness to MyTown residents. So the blog is the equivalent of the local newspaper.

    Which of these is actually the more egalitarian in the sense of a) having fewer barriers to entry, and b) a fairer distribution of the wealth created?

    As a programming geek I can easily imagine the scenario where a blogger in a medium-sized enterprise writes : "I'm thinking of using this tool or technique to solve that problem" and one of his 5 readers comments "don't do that because of X". At which point, the blogger changes his mind and avoids a world of pain (not to mention 6 months and a million dollars of wasted effort).

    Apart from Hugh Macleod (who might sell a 30 million dollar yacht or something) it's hard to imagine any blogger making a similar return on one reader via the advertising model.

    The advertising model seems to require a far more vicious competition for scarce attention. To make anything your probably need thousands of readers, all of whom, by definition are paying their scarce attention to you rather than each other.

    How can that scale-out to be more egalitarian? Imagine a network, closer to a lattice than a small-world, where every blogger had at most 5 readers. Blogs would still be economically productive on Dave's model, but not on the ad-driven one.

















  • He's boasting about his income from selling weblogs.com, not to be obnoxious about his wealth, but because he's desperately trying to push people to think outside the box and see opportunities beyond traditional advertising. Of course, he'd have never seen the opportunity of a "weblogs.com" if he hadn't been immersed in the blogging world.

    The same is true in the other direction. Because he has so many opportunities outside of advertising, he doesn't recognize that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bloggers are making good part- or full-time income through ads.

  • If I can paraphrase: "Use your blog as platform to *market* your *consulting* business, and sell *services*". This sounds very very appealing. The problem is that it doesn't stand up to close examination. In order to market your consulting business, well, you need to have a consulting business in the first place, and that's only a small percentage of the population. Similarly, a service platform is difficult to have succeed (though granted, he did). But by definition, this will only work for a very few people. One harmful aspect of blog-evangelism is to take those relative handful of people who do succeed that way, and then trumpet them as The Way Things Should Be Done, because, hey, it worked for *them*. But, if e.g. you're going to sell a notification service for millions, you need to have a huge number of people using that notification service, to make it commercially valuable. So mathematically, only very few such services can be profitable - unfortunately usually correlated with those "who keeps grabbing your collar and telling you over and over how smart or how successful they are", and that they're the #1 top guy inventor, so thus the moneybags should buy-into and then buy-out, their service, and not anyone else's.

    Note the usually reaction to this analysis is boosterism and shoot-the-messenger, which doesn't refute it.

  • Phil, I really appreciate the exegesis. It's sorely needed sometimes to try to understand what Dave is trying to say.

    Based on your interpretation, I and a lot of other people I know would largely agree with Dave's theory. I have been a constant and loud critic of the reliance on ads as the primary business model for Web 2.0.

    My problem with Dave, to the extent I have one, is that he doesn't seem to distinguish between those who share his views and those who don't. He just bashes everyone- other than a few selected pals.

    If he wants to truly be an influencer, he needs to learn how to embrace those who agree with him, because as big as he may be, he could make a bigger impact as part of a movement as opposed to trying to be the movement.





  • If you'll allow a quick bit of speculative exegesis.

    For approximately the last 12 years, or so, Dave has basically had a particular idea of what the internet is and how it should be used. And the short summary is : the internet is NOT mainstream media.

    What happens is that mainstream media continuously try to take over the internet and remake it in their image. And Winer is continuously, passionately arguing that they're misguided (and sometimes dangerous)

    In this particular case, Winer is simply continuing a theme he started many years ago in a series of "how to make money on the internet" essays, who's basic message was "Look beyond the business models of traditional media. There's more money to be made by really taking the idea of two-way communication seriously. Pay attention to your customers and they'll tell you about new opportunities."

    Winer uses his blog to have *conversations*, to learn stuff, and to be an influencer. He thinks *that's* that way to make money with blogs, and that retreating to thinking of them as simply cheap-to-produce magazines, which perpetuate the business model of reselling their reader demographics to advertisers, is a debasement of this wonderful new medium.

    He's boasting about his income from selling weblogs.com, not to be obnoxious about his wealth, but because he's desperately trying to push people to think outside the box and see opportunities beyond traditional advertising. Of course, he'd have never seen the opportunity of a "weblogs.com" if he hadn't been immersed in the blogging world.

    The "hitchhikers" he's disparaging are *adverts*.











  • I read the article, and simply posted a question about how he did it.

    I suspect the answer will tell us a great deal -that is, there will be no substantive answer.

  • My first impulse upon reading your post was to totally agree that as adults we should be able to play nice... that’s what we try and teach our kids, right?

    Change of mind. Now, I could disagree by simply pointing out that playing nice doesn't often happen and so isn’t realistic, or as Seth stated isn't even always the "winning" tactic. Instead, I'm going to disagree for a much more base reason. This childishness at times certainly adds a level of entertainment to our blogosphere...and isn't that part of the value of blogs...entertainment?

    We don't want Jack to become a dull boy do we?



  • Seth, I suppose you're correct, at least in some instances, about the collar tugger from the business world perspective. I was coming at it from a conversational perspective- which is my default view of the blogosphere.

    Dave strikes me as an equal-opportunity offender, so I wonder if he's getting lots of consulting dollars. He may be, but he certainly could market himself better if he'd just calm down and figure out who his real enemies are.

  • "One of the basic rules of human interaction is that someone who keeps grabbing your collar and telling you over and over how smart or how successful they are is bound to lose the argument."

    I don't see this as true at all. If anything, I'd say there are many counter-examples.

    "And finally, all this fighting over who invented what ..."

    I understand the sentiment. However, I believe you're neglecting that there's a huge amount of money to be made in consulting gigs, and being known as #1 inventor of [buzzword] *matters* if someone is playing that game. Note that the successful players whine all the way to the bank, with "millions".





  • I'm all for civility. Nobody should have to be childish to be real.
  • Anonymous
    Now did Dave Winer make that 2.3 million from selling Weblogs.com? If so then I don't think he can make claims that he's making from his blog. He sold an application.

    That's a one time deal and he won't make anything close to that again until he has a new idea that he can sell.

    To say that he's making money from his blog and he's doing better than everyone else is just not right.



  • Too true! Dave has long professed that you don't make money on a blog with ads, but thru self-promotion. I think he's upset at the people that are making money on a blog with ads.
  • Anonymous
    I'm definitely with you on everybody stop believing their own b.s.

    I'm not in the tech industry but am just a guy who enjoys using and learning new technologies. And I must say, the tech industry seems to be full of people who have an over-inflated sense of their own self-importance.

    In the last go-round, many of the then self-important companies ended being nothing more than stock market scams. And I'm not so sure that many of them weren't on purpose. There was lots of outright lying going on about number of users, revenues, etc. The public got swindled. You'd think the industry would tone down the bs a little bit.



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