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dave winer explains dean's demise

In a nutshell: Dean did not win because, while his campaign did run a weblog, they did not run a real weblog. As in, they did not follow the Winer rules of blogging. I'll pass that on to the people who worked hard running Dean's blog, Dave. [Does everything Winer writes/talks about revolve around Dave Winer? Seems that way, doesn't it?]

Comments

If Dave Winer is the center of the universe, then it is truly torus-shaped.

or shaped like a big fat bearded weirdo who finally thinks he is getting his comeuppance by posturing as the king of all things blog or rss.

Mr. Winer is clearly more comfortable with the tiny percentage of Americans reading his weblog (or any weblog) choosing a candidate than the unwashed masses (all 150 million of them) who haven't a stinking clue what a weblog is.

Myself, I'd rather cast my vote for someone working on real issues rather devoting his time figuring how best to leverage the latest and greatest in technology. I get lied to by politicians all the time, I hardly see the need to add another medium.

All these pundits are missing one crucial fact. The Dean campaign fell apart for one and only one reason -- the majority of Democrats do not want him for a candidate. Those people who voted for Kerry didn't do it because they liked his website better.

After reading Dave Winer's pompous analysis (via InstaGlenn), I was hoping you'd have some commentary, 'cus it fit so well with your original post. My favorite part:

"I'm an engineer and a writer, and after years of work on content management, editorial interfaces, syndication and desktop tools, delivering a variety of viewpoints to thinking citizens is something we can now engineer."

Before I became a "recovering engineer", I used to be an "engineer snob". You know the type, looking down on civil and industrial engineers, and laughing at computer science guys that claimed to be engineers. I now believe that "computer engineers" (sorry, can't help the quotes), have at least developed the attitude to become an "engineer snob".

Winer obviously doesn't understand that his knowledge of computers doesn't make him an expert in behavioral science, marketing, human psychology, advanced statistics or economics.

"If I engineer it, they will come" doesn't always work in the real world.

Heck, in physics we laughed at the engineers (and in math, we laughed at everybody else).

It would probably be rude to mention at this point that all the rest of us have been laughing at mathematicians, physicists and engineers. So I won't mention it.

Is there anyone, other than Dave Winer, who doesn't think Dave Winer is an asshole? Every time I have ever read his name, it's been in the context of what an arrogant jackass he is. Somehow, I get the impression he's one of those people that knows nobody really likes him but takes some sort of sick pride in knowing that's how people think of him.

Dave Winer blows goats.

And I'll bet the goats are none too happy about it.

There's a few reasons that come to mind when I think of why Dean lost it all. His anger. The American public in general doesn't want a candidate that goes off the handle on things and never lets go of the unimportant facts. This won Dean alot of diehard fans but...lost the majority.

Then there's the fact that Dean's concept for foreign policy was really terrible early on. He's started to change it but it wasn't enough to win back the people who actually see foreign policy as essential to our security.

Finally, he lost it because pretty much every single media institution saw him as a threat and did everything they could to discredit him. Hell, we heard more about his rebel yell than we have about how the war in Iraq is going. Considering that most Americans are still sheep its no wonder they'll go with the stable, peaceful candidate but please, does anyone else think that Kerry looks like a zombie?

Eh. Dave Winer lost all respect in my eyes when he stated on his blog that women are hardwired for being librarian types, and men are hardwired for mathematics.

Anything after that is just redundant.

Last I heard about Dave Winer (I'm not quite enough of a masochist to actually keep up with these things myself) was when he made a Big Huge Deal about how we was Never Going to Blog Again and then changed his mind after about, ummm, four hours.