12.03.05

Dave Winer: Good or Goblin?

Posted in business, tech at 10:20 am by mridley

So yesterday there was this whole big brouhaha about Adam Curry’s wikipedia editing. Apparently he was trying to correct some attributions in the podcasting history section and ended up messing up some edits and deleting a couple lines from the entry instead. So of course then everyone decided that he had an evil agenda and was trying to throw Dave Winer and company down the proverbial memory tube.

Adam responded with his side of the story, indicating that he hadn’t intended to erase others contributions and was actually trying to rewrite the Kevin Marks paragraph to properly (as Adam understood things) reflect his rather important role.

Of course that was then interpreted as a cover-up, and perennial victim Dave Winer felt compelled to reference back to an eariler essay he’d written entitled People With Erasers. His point being that Adam’s real intent was to rewrite history serrupticiously.

Then later yesterday, Dave wrote another post on his weblog which stated that Adam Curry and the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers had defrauded him out of his stake in PodShow. He claimed that he was a 50% owner of PodShow and that when KP funded it they instead improperly funneled all the money to Adam.

Adam responded to this on his web site by stating that at no time was Dave Winer ever an employee, officer, or owner of PodShow. And now, mysteriously, that post has been removed from Dave Winer’s site. Almost. He removed it from the main page, and he removed it from the monthly archive but he did not remove it from the December 2nd day archive. Or at least it’s up at the time of this writing. If he’s removed it later, there is a screen capture available on Adam’s site.

Hmm…now who is the person with an eraser? Pot, kettle, black. Kind of ironic. I wonder why he removed the post…perhaps he realized that publicly libeling one of the richest organizations in the world (KP) was not a good idea? One can only speculate.

EDIT - Dave Winer commented that this was just a “glitch” in the publishing system and it’s resolved now. Apparently Dave is allowed to have publishing glitches. It strikes me that it may be hard to believe that Adam could have problems figuring out how to edit a MediaWiki page, but it seems far more difficult to believe that Dave Winer can’t use a blogging system that he wrote. But who knows…

Viewing 2 Comments

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    The clue that it was a system glitch is that it wasn't on the home page or monthly archive but was on the daily page. No one said Adam was lying, why do you say that I am? Just curious. And I didn't say anything about what he did on Wikipedia, so why am I getting the pot-kettle treatment? Could you be more careful with the insults. Too much heat here, not enough light.
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    Dave-

    I have no particular reason to believe you aren't being honest. I just find the whole debate to be very distasteful. I realize that many of the inflamitory comments have not come directly from you, but this whole discussion just annoys me. I don't like double standards, and I don't like people jumping to conclusions about situations when they don't have all the facts.

    Of course you could argue that that's exactly what I did in writing this blog post, but frankly that's fine- I'll take that critisism since it's basically the point I'm trying to make. I don't know what Adam was getting at in editing the wikipedia, but I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

    I just find it frustrating that two very similar situations are seen in very different lights, simply by virtue of the populist perspective.

    -m
 

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