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Bill Brown

A complicated man.

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The blogging world’s two biggest opponents are scraping it up again in the comments section of Don Park’s post on the Winer Watcher. I’m participating more than I usually do.

An interesting thing about this just happened: Dave was responding to my response to his response—sorry no permalinks in the comments section—and then launched off into a diatribe directed towards Mark that suggested a willful designing of his RSS validator to undermine Dave’s authority on the RSS spec. It was lengthy and accusatory. He essentially said that Mark’s flaming of Dave was a cover for his duplicity on the RSS validator.

I replied to a couple of the points he made in his reply, hit post, and then that part of Dave’s response was gone. Deleted. Vanished. Where’d it go? It’s odd to me because Don Park probably wouldn’t edit comments left on his site unless they were way off the wall. Dave’s comment was not off the wall. How then could Dave’s comment disappear? Well, I think that the answer lies with the fact that Don’s comments are hosted on UserLand’s servers. Interesting! Dave’s penchant for editing apparently extends to other people’s blogs and comments that he makes in haste. This is strong bad stuff!

[UPDATE: Winer Watcher—I liked Winer Watch better, though I guess Watcher conveys more of an active and automatic stance—has been updated with a disclaimer affirming its fair use nature in quite convincing terms. I think Mark’s put it on sufficiently strong foundations to shield him from whatever Dave can throw his way. Kudos!]

[UPDATE 2: Holy crap! The discussions expanded to several additional sites. Dave himself has commented on the matter, trying to bait Mark into ‘splaining himself. It’s kind of funny: each time Dave posts a link to someone’s site that agrees with editing your entries throughout the day, the same people go over to that site and start up the same conversation that they had on the last site. I like to think that I’ve added a little something each time, but I leave that to your judgement (whoever you might be).]