Listics

Dave Winer says,

I’m so fed up with the supposed selflessness of programmers, while everyone gets paid for their work, and we’re left working our asses off for nothing. And the “no good deed goes unpunished” creed keeps getting worse and worse. It’s like the old days, when someone joked that the best way to drive Amazon to bankruptcy was to buy their product since they sold them at a loss. And then I realized it’s my fault. If I want to get paid, I have to stop working for free. People sometimes threaten you, Oh if you don’t give me the software for free I’ll use someone else’s. To which I say, okay with me. Inside that makes me laugh. I’m sure the programmer whose software you use for free is going to be real glad to hear from you.

There are a number of things that tickle me about Dave’s attitude. The first one is the “as-if” factor. If Dave says “we programmers work for free,” I’d have to say “as-if.” My impression of Dave is that he’s very market oriented, and this is a VERY good thing for an entrepreneur. Dave is an entrepreneur.

Dave may sometimes work to front-load a market with some product he’s hyped about. From RSS to OPML, Dave makes a buck crafting products and services in the open standards community for all of us to buy. Is he making any money on OPML? Maybe his return on that investment will be goodwill. Maybe others in the Winer constellation of products and service offerings will actually make the cash. Sometimes the returns for our contributions are less than tangible. Dave does a good job seeding the marketplace of ideas with his own.

But there’s a difference between writing to open standards and writing for free. In the old days, before Dave invented interoperability, programmers were salaried and they worked to add “goodness” to the systems they coded. Today, Dave thinks too many programmers are working for free, and where’s the goodness in that? And more to the point, where’s the profit? There remain many salaried programmers, and many of these are “open source” programmers, working for free in their spare time to add goodness to a common body of code. But among these, I would venture that many, perhaps even most, have an entrepreneurial vision, and they hope that the nifty little utility they’re developing or the skills they’re polishing can make them some money some day. Ultimately all of us would like to be compensated for what we produce.

Dave’s special message this morning, his marketing schtick, has to do with a new and special Dave Winer product that he calls Channel Z. When Sir Pings-a-lot is ready to unveil it and put a price point on it, the market will determine his new product’s value. Until then, it’s a secret I guess. But let’s help him with the buzz!

The other thing that tickles me about Dave is that he’s the kind of guy who can use a sentence like, “It’s like the old days, when someone joked that the best way to drive Amazon to bankruptcy was to buy their product since they sold them at a loss.” The subtext here is that the period marked by the emergence of Amazon is somehow the old days. Which in Internet time perhaps it was, but on the other hand, the concept of Internet time is a bit passe too, doncha think?

It’s been too long since I posted in this category! My lips have started to unpucker.

Noteworthy today on the spread-the-good-news-about-Dave’s-continuing-accompl.ihments front is…

(pause for brief fanfare and flourish… tada… okay, back to the announcement…) Nominated for Wired Magazine Rave Awards in the Soft-serve and tastee-freeze category:

SOFTWARE DESIGNER
•Jonathan Abrams – Friendster
•Toivo Annus, Janus Friis, Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, Jaan Tallin, •Niklas Zennstrom – Skype
•Bram Cohen – BitTorrent
• iTunes Music Store Team – Apple Computer
•Dave Winer – RSS

I’m nominating the Rave Awards for “Best Use of Frames by Web Designers Who Should Know Better.”

Noto bene… Steve Jobs heads the Rave Award list for “Wired Renegade of the Year.”

Dave Winer expressed it for me this morning:

We have it all backwards in the political system in the US. Before we even consider a candidate, we should talk issues among ourselves. Make decisions and then, kind of like the Priceline model for buying stuff, go shopping for candidates whose values match ours.

I like to think I don’t have it backwards. I shopped Kucinich. I helped convince him to run. He’s where I want a candidate to be on all the important issues from handgun control to the death penalty. Not only that, but he’s as bright as can be, and genuinely humble. If he doesn’t win the nomination he will support the party and help assure that someone besides Bush is elected. He doesn’t have any of the destructive chutzpah of a couple of well known third party candidates who have steered their side away from victory during the last three election cycles.

My friend Dave Winer has shared a moment regarding his concern that not all on #joiito hold him in the highest esteem. My advice is to let go of it. I don’t know anybody who knows anything that doesn’t agree that Dave’s work has been seminal and that we all owe a lot to him and that his creativity continues to flower and that the industry is fortunate to have such fine fellows as him hard at work for the common good.

In fact, it may be a little over the top of Dave to suggest that the habitues at the #joiito channel have much to say one way or another about him. I’m an IRC newbie and the #joiito channel is a good place to pick up skills and tune into conversation by some very forward looking technologists. A lot of them are young people with their best work ahead of them and a lot of them talk about that work.

I guess I’d have to say that on Berkman Thursdays there may be some discussion that includes reflections on Dave. Dave is the catalyst for the Thursday night meetings that are webcast, hence heard around the world. I tuned in last week and heard Dave call Carville an asshole… at least that’s what I thought I heard and I fed it down the wire. Someone else on the channel reflected that Carville would probably accept that as a compliment. Nobody said an unkind word about Dave.

One of the best parts of BloggerCon was the feedback loop the IRC channel gave us with remote webcast participants able to provide realtime comments about what they heard on the webcast.

Dave, if you’re reading this (and you probably aren’t because this humble blog is way beneath your line of sight, really), you might consider that you have a lot of friends on the #joiito channel and adding IRC to the Berkman mix would open up the whole conversation globally.

Dave Winer has such a cool name! My brother’s name is Dave. My best friend’s name is David. Dave Rogers and David Weinberger are two guys with the same first name as Dave. And there’s that TV talk show guy David Letterman… and Doc’s given name is David, and my best friend whom I’ve been neglecting shamefully since he moved to upstate New York is named David. And of course there is the famous sculpture by Michaelangelo, although it’s probably not as well hung; and yes, there’s even an 18th century Italian artist named Davide Fossatti or something like that. I could be mistaken about the Italian guy. But isn’t Dave a great name? Goliath, on the other hand, sucks as a name.

Well, Dave Winer is one too! Dave says…

Personal note. There’s a class at UW-Madison that’s reading my blog and commenting on it. That’s really cool. I’m an alum of UW, got my Master’s in Computer Science in 1978.

Of interest here is the registered trademark bug on the bucky.gif I ripped off from Dave’s site. This version of Bucky is actually public domain. He’s from a generation when school spirit trumped branding and marketing. Donna Shalala, a great marketer and a superb football coach recruiter and debaser of academic currency, introduced a new, stylized Bucky with all the attachments of intellectual property. if I wanted to post that nouveau Bucky, I’d need permission from the regents of UW. But the real Bucky stands proud here and on Scripting News and wherever school spirit trumps marketing. Also there are still a helluva lot of T shirts and decals and other schwag peddled with the old Bucky on them. Screw U. regents!

My post yesterday regarding Dave Winer and outlining was poorly constructed. Dave didn’t seem to accept it as appropriate suck-uppage. Here then is an attempt to do better… I’m new at this. I don’t have a history of sucking up to anybody, so I hope you’ll pardon the rough edges while I learn the genre:

Dave is willing to share his opinions. That’s a strength for anybody. Today, vis a vis the Dean campaign he avers that the Dean effort carved out a new “25% party.” I hope this is just a slice of what is at work in the Dean campaign, just as I hope that the Democrats on-board outnumber the loosely bonded. I don’t think that the Dean campaign will take their voters and go home if HD doesn’t win the nomination. At least I hope they won’t.

And something that Dave also said seemed so compelling that I think it is worth linking and quoting. Dave says, “What about the rest of us? Find a local candidate who wants to win using the Internet, and as Picard said, make it so.” I think this is profound advice… acting locally, using the new communication tools, sliding further away from the influence of “broadcast messages” to the engagement of interpersonal communication. This is what it’s all about. Thanks Dave!

And speaking of DW… I promised to say something nice about Dave Winer every day, and here is today’s observation: He’s an outlining kind of guy!

David Weinberger, Don Williams, Dave Winer… this DW thing could catch on.

If I’m going to suck up to Dave every day, I better have a category. Hmm, what should I call it I wonder?