By your rules I would have both WN and EWN of 1, but I am leery of claiming it because I no longer have the email in question.
Better to limit this to publicly-available documents, though that does rather reduce the pool of eligibles.
— Anonymous 
bwahahaha
i have a winer of 1/1, for having the unmitigated call of explaining to a newbie the benefits of css on a message board.
— Anonymous
If Dave answered all of the emails about his cruddy software, everyone’s EWN would be lower. Of course, he doesn’t respond - nor does anyone - thus keeping everyone’s EWN fairly high. That having been said, I’m a 1/4. Pity…
Anyway, what if you’ve been abused by Dave’s software? Does that give you a WN of about 4?
I think you will find that abuse does not fully connect blogdom. Most people will have a Winer number <= 1 or an undefined Winer number.
To add some meaning to this otherwise meaningless thread, I will mention that the book “Six Degrees: The science of the connected age” by Duncan Watts covers the Erdos number and other fascinating topics.
— Nona Myous
I don’t like the notation. Suggestions:
(WN,EWN)
WN|EWN
WN:EWN
…this is just because it looks like Erik, above, has a Winer Number of 0.25 .
— kami
Based on the notion of the “lowest non-zero EWN” I’d say 1 / 4 does indeed equal 0.25
— Jake
This does not take into account the possibility of self-abuse.
— jbm
Oh no, Mark, why would you make a bad situation worse?
*hides*
— Gina
So I finally figure out what the fuss is all about after taking a BellSouth imposed break from even reading blogs, and I finally understand all this stuff, after reading Sam’s blog. I actually built a feed editor for my RSS reader after our last lunch, just so I could delete Dave’s feed. And now I find out I have to taunt you until you abuse me so my Weiner number will become lower. Geez, take some time off and everybody pisses everyone else off.
Well, mine would be 1/1 I think - BUT! - I gained the distinction before 1999 - so that should count for something.
(Winer attacks were much less frequent then… or at least it seems so in retrospect. Nah, the rate has probably been constant for the last 20 years…)
— anonymous
I don’t understand why Bill gets the lowest possible number. A number of people I know — myself included, actually — would suggest that Bill Kearney, David Bayly and myself all deserve exactly the same rating. That is, our EWN is so close to zero that HE may sometimes confuse us for himself.
Actually, though, I’ve very often been on the opposite end of the spectrum with Dave, meaning he has posted high praise of me or my work… usually just days before the next round of abuse starts. (or even during the same abuse)
— Seth
Seth brings up the bi-polarness of Winer. Bi-Winer?
— anonymous
Hmm, 0/0 = infinite :)
— Breyten
In an effort to spread this fun new number around, I’ve created the EWN namespace (http://www.vkps.co.uk/Public/EWN/) for use in FOAF documents. More information can be found on my own site.
— GaryF
Damn, that should’ve been http://www.vkps.co.uk/Public/EWN/
— GaryF
Mu
— Jeremy Dunck
Now that’s funny!
Since I’ve no clue what this whole thing is about (being particularly oblivious to my blog-world surroundings) and since nobody else has stepped up to fulfill the obligation of at least one self-righteous opinion.. I’ll frown with disapproval… hell, somebody has to do it, won’t be an internet posting without it.
So go ahead, picture me frowning please.
— kasia
Mark, what’s your agenda with all this? Why the pissing contest? Why don’t you just stop reading Scripting.com if Dave pisses you off so badly? Surely you’re better than resorting to this abuse cotton-wrapped in humour.
“Why don?t you just stop reading Scripting.com if Dave pisses you off so badly?”
Ignoring Scripting.com does no stop the abuse. The worst abuse happens off scripting.com.
— Nona Myous
Oh, I haven’t read Dave in months. I’d almost forgotten he existed until Zeldman’s rant the other day.
— Mark
I truly *love* your work Mark, and I honestly find your humour very funny, but since you claim to have read Zeldman’s “Enough Already” rant, I found this particular sentence by Zeldman somewhat interesting:
“Mean-spirited people have sometimes made themselves feel big by parodying Mr Winer’s style of writing, but this only makes them look small.”
– http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0303a.shtml#csswiner
Mr. Zeldman’s words, not mine.
Sorry for pulling your leg like this. I’ll go away now, before you lower my WN. ;-)
Mar: Guilty as charged. ;)
Unfortunately (for Zeldman), Zeldman seems to be laboring under the misapprehension that, if he says enough nice things up front before disagreeing with Dave, he can get Dave to go easy on him, or reconsider his position, or even listen to what he has to say. I used to fall into the same trap. It seems like a good strategy (”butter ‘em up before dropping the bomb” — it certainly works with lots of people, including me), but it doesn’t work with Dave.
— Mark
Yeah, Zeldman did a fair bit of buttering, before the disagreeing part.
I’m curious, are you only assuming (from experience?) that this particular buttering would not have worked on Dave, or was there some private correspondance between yourself, Zeldman, and Dave that supports that claim?
Ah, so it is. My bad.
— kami
Mar: I base my statement on repeated observation of people on mailing lists trying to give constructive criticism of specs/APIs/formats that Dave favors, people on discussion forums trying to report bugs in UserLand products (Dave’s previous job), and also personal experience in private email.
As to why I bother, regular readers will notice that I stopped bothering sometime last year, after the last CSS debate. Many communities have powerful people who act up in various ways, and learning how to handle them is a useful and unfortunately necessary skill.
I learned this skill well by engaging him in debate last year. I made all the mistakes then that others are making now (including Zeldman). Note that I have *not* tried to engage him in any meaningful debate this round, because there is no point. I have not repeated the mistakes I made last year, trying to argue with him directly or thinking I could convince him to change his ways.
Most of the time, I try to focus on making positive contributions. Admittedly, some days this works better than others. I try to lead by example, I write tutorials, I go through public redesigns and explain myself along the way, and so forth. I learn from people who teach, and I teach people who want to learn. Dave wants to do neither, so I (and, eventually, the rest of the community) will simply leave him behind.
But yeah, sometimes I can’t help but tweak him, and others, who so sorely deserve it. I sorely deserve it sometimes too, and people who know me know how to tweak me. It’s a perverse form of flattery, I suppose.
— Mark
You guys can read about how I earned my Winer number :)
Today Scripting News officially left my aggregator.
— Thijs
I’m not sure I like where this is going. One of your acronyms is EWN and my first name is Ewan. Seems like you’re diluting the value in my name, and I’m afraid I will probably have to have a legal eagle explain why that’s a BAD thing to you…
:-) for the humor impaired…
— Ewan
So, wait, your list totally failed to take into account another (I believe even *STRONGER*) category of Winer-abuse. What if (and I have) I have worked for (and been abused by) a guy who was SUED by Dave Winer? I think that should give me a WN of, say, 1.5.
— Justin
Definitely a Winer number of 1:
Ages ago, when people thought it would be a cute idea to have little “banners” posted on Weblogs.com as “ads” for their weblogs, Dave screwed up the permissions on the images directory that held the banners. This would’ve been ok, except each file was named with the email address of its owner, .jpg.
I found out about it because I signed up as ‘thatsite@mysite.com’. A few weeks later, I started getting spam. Emails to the Weblogs.com admins were ignored. I posted some questions to MeFi, and found out that I wasn’t the only one getting spammed. Even better, Dave had been notified of the vulnerability for over four months, and never fixed the problem.
http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/8140
I still get spam to that address.
— Unxmaal
Unfortunately (for Zeldman), Zeldman seems to be laboring under the misapprehension that, if he says enough nice things up front before disagreeing with Dave, he can get Dave to go easy on him, or reconsider his position, or even listen to what he has to say.
Mark: I was writing for my readers, not for Dave. (If I’d wanted to contact Dave I would have emailed him.) I wrote in hopes of minimizing some of the damage caused by Dave’s anti-CSS remarks, which seem to be based only on the most cursory experience with the spec, i.e. trying something for a few minutes and then giving up when it doesn’t work the way he thinks it should.
I began with a summary of Dave Winer’s history as a publisher and developer of XML-based specs because that is where the contradiction lies. Dave is not a novice relieving his frustration in a little-read corner of the web. He is a widely read web publisher who has helped create several XML-based standards, which makes his disdain for other standards all the more baffling.
I hoped to avoid turning this issue into a personal one. Personal attacks, even if they retaliatory, and even when they are amusing, merely escalate the name calling. More importantly, they obscure the IDEA that was orginally being discussed: semantic markup and CSS versus tag soup. That idea is now gone; instead we have name calling on one side, and personality-driven satire on the other. None of that will help developers who’ve had a few less than salutary experiences with CSS and structural markup and wonder whether they should persevere or give up and stick with the tag soup they know.
Those fence sitters are the people who matter in this discussion, and they are not being served by the Ego Tennis match this has turned into.
— zeldman
0.5
— 0.5
Geez, who cares.
— Anonymous
Zeldman, I too am puzzled by Dave’s dual nature with standards generally, which was the purpose of my “Enough already” post. Explained more fully here:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/04/18/enough_already.html#c001370
However, I am not puzzled by Dave’s hatred of CSS. More on that in a minute.
But first, re: “I hoped to avoid turning this issue into a personal one.” What you fail to realize (and I can only assume this is due to lack of experience dealing with Dave) is that *everything* with Dave is personal. Bug reports will get you cursed at, suggestions for enhancements will get you called an idiot, questioning his understanding of a problem or his proposed solution makes you an asshole. Furthermore, everything he doesn’t understand is eventually construed as a conspiracy against his products, and therefore against him.
Example: you have a style switcher. Last year I had a similar switcher, with a few different crudely built CSS “themes”. Visitors could select one from a dropbox, and the theme would stick through subsequent page hits and visits.
At the time, I held this up as a concrete example of the benefits of CSS. Dave’s response was that his Manila weblogging product already had themes. Which is sort of true, in the sense that there is a mechanism for a site author to easily import and install a bundle of graphics + templates. (All pages are dynamic, so the changes are available immediately. I used to have a Manila-based weblog, and it’s a powerful feature.) However, I mentioned that my solution allowed *multiple* templates, and that it allowed the *end user* to choose between them, instead of the site author. He replied that Frontier (on which Manila is based) could do that, which, as far as I know, is also true.
In other words, Dave sees CSS’s main benefit (separation of markup and styling) as a threat to his CMS products, each of which have ways of managing the separation of content and markup. Note that there is actually no threat here — they serve different purposes and are in fact complementary technologies — but Dave insists on conflating separation-of-markup-and-styling with separation-of-content-and-markup, and therefore mistakenly thinks that he has already solved the problems CSS is trying to solve.
To further drive home this point, it should be pointed out that Frontier’s (and Manila’s, and Radio’s) idea of a “template” is a single string + associated graphics files. To this day, no UserLand CMS product has the ability to manage external stylesheets as part of a “template”. All of Radio’s (and Manila’s) CSS-based themes use inline CSS in the [style] element of each page, thus precluding all CSS import hiding tricks and negating the bandwidth-saving benefits of CSS.
And here’s where the loop closes and it all becomes clear: any attempt to suggest that CSS really ought to be stored in a separate file is viewed as an attack on his products (which don’t do that), and therefore as an attack on Dave personally.
As for convincing fence-sitters, they will be swayed by examples of specific solutions that show that this stuff is easier than they thought, not harder. The specific problem Dave was having had already been solved by the time you posted; why didn’t you simply point to that instead?
http://www.bryanbell.com/2003/04/17
(As you can see from the associated comments thread, Bryan Bell originally made the templates in question *for free*, and later suggested the correct solution to Dave’s “CSS problem” (really an invalid HTML problem) *for free*, and he was immediately abused *anyway*.)
— Mark
If you put Dave Winer and Joe Clark (www.contenu.nu/nublog.html) into a room together, the universe will explode.
— Anonymous
If you put Dave Winer and Joe Clark (www.contenu.nu/nublog.html) into a room together, the universe will explode.
— Anonymous
The average reader I think will be surprised, since Dave (since the last battle) appeared to at least warm up to CSS, or stop bashing it. Plus all the efforts by Bryan Bell to bring CSS to the Radio and Manilla masses, and the adoption of CSS based templates by users, gave CSS some legitimacy in “user-land”.
So, it was surprising to see him rant so.
The genie is out of the bottle none the less. People will vote with their wallets, or spare time.
— Mike
1/1 here, although I admittedly provoked him with what I thought at the time was a good natured question.
— Mike
Hmm new accorynms..
Instead of Winer number WN should be:
DGN-Digging ‘business’ Grave Number
OSN-Obstacle to Open Standards Number
CTN-Critcal Thinking Number
MN-Mordor Number
Dave sees competition where there is none ..just a desire for using CSS in an easy manner with CMS systems
Mark do we get any points for Dave berating us by email for our phone numbers?
I was only berated by his sock puppet - I guess that only gets me a 2 :(
— Jeffe
LOLOLOLOL Interesting…….he was blasting about CSS last week I am surprised Zeldman has not chimed in.
http://www.zeldman.com (good bit about Dave and CSS)
I wonder if you can be abused by abstraction?
— Don
LOLOLOLOL Interesting…….he was blasting about CSS last week I am surprised Zeldman has not chimed in.
http://www.zeldman.com (good bit about Dave and CSS)
I wonder if you can be abused by abstraction?
— Don
Yay, I’m a 1! On one of the RSS lists a couple-or-three years ago I finally asked a (grumpy) question along the lines of “How the hell does Radio work anyway??”
He responded with general whining about being tired of all the “personal attacks”, why are so many people trying to denigrate his product, blah blah blah. All I was saying was that I couldn’t figure his program out.
Well, John Robb contacted me later and explained that, in order to get Radio working, you had to first stop using Radio. That’s right, he said to get out of the GUI environment that it spawned (with no instructions) and instead connect to a specific port on my local box via a browser.
I guess they are very Zen-like. In order to use the program, you must stop using the program!
— Dave C
WN of 1/2:
1. Groundless threats of lawsuits, delivered over the phone one Sunday morning, because I’d started a mailing list (back in ‘98) to do an open source (back when we just called it free software) clone of Frontier (which was called “Bronco”) — Winer claimed to have “a copyright on all western-themed software products” (no shit)
2. Endless attacks on mailing lists for disagreeing with him on technical issues.
— Anonymous
Something I noticed :
Till the other day, Dave was gungho about Google. Every other day he used to say the nicest things about google.
One fine day, google took over blogger and then onwards you got to read, why we should be afraid of google posts on davenet.
all very amusing :-)
— Anonymous
1/1, or 1/2 if a two-words answer (”Read 1441″) to a full-fledged mail about going to war not being a Good Thing counts… Naaaah, that’s not abuse, that’s just disdain ;)
— Xavier
I once got flamed by Archimedes Plutonium on usenet in 1995. What Winer number does that make me?
Winered.
Hmnn, I fot Winered today. Dave pointed out http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/crimson1/2003/04/24#a99 in his blog to highlight that he had a theory as to why users want open source.
After 22 comments, he turned off comments. Leave it to your imagination. I suspect this was done as a result of my last set of comments pointing out that Product Manager arrogance or lack of skill are fatal issues for a company, or an open source project.
Rather than telling us to “stick our hands under our ass and think” Dave, the unarrogant approach is to engage those who have put effort into communicating ideas. Otherwise, why ask?
People vote either with their wallets or with their time.
— Mike
Dave Winer: “RDF Sucks”
Worldwide RDF Community: “No, it’s the way of the future. You just need to understand it, that’s all.”
Dave Winer: “It can’t be the way of the future! I didn’t invent it!!”
— Anonymous
Mike: I got Winered on that same thread today. In may case, I had just crafted a response to the “PYTHON is a PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE, for crying out loud” rant when I hit submit and lost it all because comments were gone :)
Whee.
I guess we can share the lowering of our Winer numbers, since it wasn’t clear whether his “for crying out loud” was directed at you or me for our Python anecdotes.
— Tripp Lilley
Tripp - I think the bottom line for Dave is that people *are* voting with their wallets and their time. Anyone that digs under the surface finds chemical warfare-like hostility - who needs it!
— Mike
I feel special - I’ve been abused in a private e-mail, and in person (at a conference).
— Bill French
So, what is the Winer number for Microsoft and Google?
— Vishi
Definition of Irony:
DW: “Overheard at a Cambridge pizzeria yesterday. A cop talking to another cop, telling a story about his young son who was cursing him out. Then, the next day, he overheard him saying exactly the same words to a mirror. The cop says “When people say angry words to someone else they’re really angry with themself.”
http://scriptingnews.userland.com/2003/04/30#When:7:25:10AM
Stick that under your a*&
*laughs*
— Mike
My Winer Number is probably negative, because while he flamed me in a short-lived comment last year, I’ve criticized his behavior more often than he’s criticized mine.
However, before this discussion closes I should point out that since Mark wrote comment 46 above, support for external style sheets *has* been introduced into Manila. It was always *technically* possible, by linking to a style sheet kept in your “Gems” folder, but Manila now makes it practical by providing you with a form specifically to edit such a Gem (rather than having to delete it, upload a new one, and change the link every time). I don’t know how much that change is attributable to (1) Mark’s comment itself, (2) a request from Bryan Bell, or (3) unignorable requests from new Manila users at Harvard.
— mpt
what is the Winer number for Microsoft and Google
I’ve come across this before - antropomorphism! At least be realistic and accept that objects (as opposed to people) can only have a virtual WN.
— Anonymous