thanks for commenting on this as up to point it was appearing one side from the involved parties.

Personally I find your comment here a little more level headed and less “promoter speak” than what wass on your blog - maybe time has given everyone a chance to level out over all of this.

1. I was invited to Gnomedex to talk about what I’m working.

2. My presentation was designed to be three equal parts: talking about internet pollution, talking about my solution to part of the problem, and a spirited Q&A. The second I said the word “Mahalo” Dave berated me…. I mean, common courtesy might be to wait until the Q&A, or as (forme)r friends to maybe talk to me 1-on-1 post my talk?

3. If the conference was a “don’t talk about your projects” conference I would HAVE NEVER said two words about my current project. I could have spent another 10 minutes on other people’s solutions to spam/pollution and went right to Q&A. I was never told not to talk about my project, and 10+ other folks talked about their projects.

I’m really sorry if I broke some Gnomedex rule, but I’ve been to three Gnomedexes in four years and I’ve never seen this kind of behavior. Of course, now I’m getting many, many respected folks emailing me about Dave having a pattern of berating people at conferences. I don’t want to get into Dave’s head or motives–it’s not really my place. However, I do think that as an industry we should learn from this:

a) be very clear about if one is allowed to talk about their project or not
b) be very clear that if you disagree with something being said that the backchannel IRC/twitter/whatever or the ample Q&A time is the place for that. Berating people mid-sentence is not the proper way to discuss anything.

As I said, I’m very sorry if I broke some rule, but it’s a rule I was honestly unaware of. In fact, Chris introduced me as Jason here to talk about a) internet pollution and b) mahalo.

I’ve been speaking for 12 years at conference and I’ve never had someone berate me in mid-sentence. I’ m all for spirited debate during the Q&A, but again common courtesy would argue that you let a person state their case before ripping them apart.

That being said, Dave might have good points about us having an API… which we’re working on. I don’t know that I agree with his benchmark that a project needs to be a platform that he can make money from to be valuable or interesting. That may be his personal benchmark for interesting, but as Robert states it is certainly not the benchmark of success in the real world.

all the best,

Jason

Dave Winer had a good point, and had it been delivered a bit differently, the dialog would have been incredibly valuable to us during the event.

But at the end of the day, getting “Winered” was the best thing that could have happened to Calacanis. It made the session a highlight of the day. It made people pay attention. And the bonus is that the conversation is getting significant air time following the event.

In my experience, Calacanis has been listening and responding to intelligent feedback about the site, but that’s always easier to do that when it’s presented in a non-attacking way.

In an ideal world, we’d all be thick-skinned enough all the time to listen to the substance of a message, even when it’s being hollered at us from the back of a packed auditorium. But we don’t live in that world. I’m sure there were better ways to get Dave’s point across.

This reminds me of when Republicans pretend to be SHOCKED at what “the left” are saying about this or that issue, and then refuse to address substantive points.

OK maybe Winer hollered at Calacanis; is the guy really
THAT thin-skinned that he can’t take that??? I thought he was a brooklyn street-fighter! come on , a little heckling never hurt anyone.

The irony here is that Mahalo would probably work much better if Calacanis were asking questions about what Winer meant instead of just using Fox News style smear tactics.

In fact, he looks like the right royal tool - from taking a potshot at your writing “verbal slapfest”, to dismissing this comment thread to being offended/ disrespected to about your “pissy” comments.

me thinks he should ease back on his ego and patronizing tone and live with the fact that blogging is a highly opinionated forum and if the word “pissy” upsets him so much he should really get out of the blogging game.

Dave’s done some good things in his time but that does not give him an automatic pass from being called a knucklehead when it’s called for.