Battle of the Bloggers, Childish as Hell
One of the talks given at Gnomedex was that of Jason Calacanis. He came to talk about the pollution on the internet, i.e. spam. All of us know about this stuff. It includes email spam and, more pertinent to Jason’s point, search engine spam. His point? That so many businesses are out there practicing SEO tactics to get into the top results of the search engines, even though they are not most relevant. So, while you may search for “travel to Seattle”, for example, you may get a bunch of results from people who paid SEO firms to get them into the top results, not necessarily sites which are most relevant to traveling to Seattle.
Good point, and then Jason moved into talking about Mahalo. Now, for those of you who do not know who Jason is, his wiki entry explains that he is the co-founder of WebLogs, Inc. as well as the former GM of Netscape. His new venture is Mahalo, which means he was talking about his own business at Gnomedex.
OK, next we have Dave Winer. You can check out his wiki entry for more bio on the guy. In short, he is one of the fathers of blogging, so to speak.
OK, both of these guys are titans in the world of the internet. Movers and shakers, so to speak. So, they both come to Gnomedex. Winer as an attendee. Calacanis as a speaker. Calacanis starts talking about Mahalo. Winer blurts out “conference spam” and causes a bit of a scene in the room. Calacanis is visibly shaken by this. And then, as usual, the blogosphere takes it out of the realm of Gnomedex:
- Calacanis: On Getting “Winered” Yesterday
- Winer: What Bothers Me about Mahalo
- Winer: Specifically Speaks About Jason
- Calacanis: The Blogosphere Responds
- Winer: Apologizes
- Calacanis: Accepts Apology from Dave
- Winer: Rubs It In
- Winer: Says No to Jason Asking Not to be Mentioned on Scripting.Com Anymore
And so it goes. This is geek soap opera.
OK, I was there. I thought Winer was kind of rude. Then, I thought little of it. I was actually surprised to find that it carried over into a battle of the bloggers online. I think it’s rather childish. I mean, I know this kind of stuff gets people involved and gets traffic (after all, I’m blogging about it). But, these are two people who are both, in their own way, very instrumental in developing the internet sites and technologies we use today. Don’t they have anything better to do than to get into personal bitch-fests on their blogs?
Oh, and Chris Pirillo, smartly, has stayed out of it. Good move. 
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Comments
One more thing, I couldn’t stay out of it, after Jason decided to make me the excuse for what went wrong at Gnomedex, and kept up his campaign for days, in lots of different places, after he said I got fired from his TechCrunch 20 conference, unless I was willing to let his accusations stand, I had to say something.
So your giving grief to both of us is grossly unfair and pretty thoughtless.
Yes, I could have not said anything, and believe me, I won’t be saying anything at Gnomedex in the future, after this outpouring of anger, it just isn’t worth the trouble.
And by the way, I wasn’t the only person who objected to what Jason was doing. A lot of people talked to him openly in the room, before I said anything, and in the chatroom and on Twitter, including Chris, so he didn’t stay out of it.
I was the just guy Jason decided to villify.
FYI.
You’re right about it not being much of an incident. I have a suggestion — why don’t you take your own advice and stay out of it. “Good move.”