Yup - it must be the weekend.

Besides the fact that Chris Pirillo was holding his annual Gnomedex this past week, the big excitement out there in the blogosphere was verbal nastiness being flung around as a result of Jason being called a spammer during his speech at Gnomedex by the illustrious Dave Winer; who was also in attendance at the conference.

What started out as some pretty basic heckling of Jason by Mr. Winer during Jason’s speech that centered mainly around his newest change the Internet endeavor called Mahalo has now developed into a weekend blogosphere verbal slapfest which has a whole slew of people jumping in with their opinions; which is pretty well guaranteed to carry the nonsense over until Monday when the serious stuff starts happening.

The simple fact is that Dave got pissy upset (*) because Jason; who was well within his apparent rights, discussed Mahalo and how important it was to the Internet. Well Dave apparently considered this nothing but spamming the conference goers and proceeded to say so loudly from the back row of the conference room.

It all is boiling down to the typical he said - he said ridiculousness that can ruin good and productive events; not to mention make the main parties involved look more like a pair of school kids whining in the schoolyard than movers and shakers of the Internet.

Sometimes some things should be dealt with one on one and not in front of the whole world because it only makes all of us look like childish idiots; and I am sure the whole silliness didn’t help out Gnomedex.

Here’s a list of a few relevant opinions and posts for you to follow up with - me I’ve got a far more interesting post by Jeff Jarvis to read

Jason’s view points - here and here
Dave’s point: here
Teresa’s opinion: here
Stowe Boyd’s thoughts: here

* I have changed the original wording of the sentence because as Dave pointed out in his comments I was being disrespectful in my choice of words. While I still feel this whole thing has gotten out of whack I wasn’t right in using a gutteral tone when referring to Dave’s opinion on the matter - Steven

Conversation Tags: Gnomedex, Dave Winer, Jason Calacanis, slapfest