Civility Kerfuffle

Instapundit.com's Glenn Reynolds recently attended a blogger’s convention in Knoxville, Tennessee. Noted blogger Dave Winer moderated a session that has received a lot of notoriety. Winer was condescending, belittling, and self-obsessed -- an immoderate moderator, if you will. What makes the whole kerfuffle even more precious is the subject of the session: "Respectful Disagreement"! Reynolds notes this in his usual cool, dispassionate manner. In addition to Instapundit's articles, you can read Les Jones session minutes for examples of Winer's tantrums. Winer, none the wiser from his own session, writes this crude response. Eyeonwiner has more.

This caught my eye because in the mid-90’s, Dave used a Macintosh-focused technical journal’’s mailing list to send out an invitation to his journal to all subscribers. The mailing list copy was a one-time mistake, and this was before spam made this kind of broadcasting inappropriate. Not knowing this guy from Adam, I figured I'd check it out and subscribed. I forget the title but the premise was the off-the-cuff ramblings of Dave Winer. He was clearly talented enough and I initially kept up with his posts, but his tone was a bit self-important and eventually I lost interest. Now we see him responding uncivilly when someone has the temerity to disagree with him -- ironically in a forum intended to promote online civility.