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A Popularity Poll? I don't think so! Posted by Tim O'Reilly, 9/1/00 at 1:53:14 PM. In Scripting News for August 31, Dave Winer says: "Offlist I'm emailing with Tim O'Reilly. He says we should run a survey asking who's more popular. So here's the survey. Who do you like better, me or Tim O'Reilly?" While I think that doing this poll is one of the kind of crazy things that I like about Dave Winer--he's so out there--it is a complete misrepresentation of what I in fact said. In response to Dave's Scripting News comment on August 29, "O'Reilly plays a pretty nasty game, on a personal level", I had sent mail to Dave, saying: I have to say that I still don't get this. What have we ever done to you that's nasty? From my point of view, what we've done is to fail to include you in things that we do, largely because we never know when you're going to trash us in public, usually without much basis.... So what I don't get is why you keep attributing to me the things that I experience from you. I think it would be fair to say that "Dave plays a pretty nasty game, on a personal level." I think that if you did a poll of a set of neutral developers and asked them to say which of us that was a more true statement about, I'd bet you'd get some eye-opening answers. Each time you've said I was "personal" and "nasty", I was writing you private mail like this, saying "I just don't get it," and "here's how what you're doing appears to me." Because you get outraged every time I give you that feedback, I end up deciding that there's not a lot of room for communication and dialogue. I keep trying; you're the one who keeps rejecting any conversation except one that allows you to criticize me at will and in public, and treats any response from me, even a measured private response, as if it's some kind of attack. I really don't want to get in a public pissing match with Dave, but I'm getting to the point where I feel I'm going to have to start answering his various vague accusations with a detailed recounting of the facts. If Dave's going to attribute something to me, at least he should get it right. I don't mind taking heat over my real positions; I'm not too fond of being used as a straw man. This is a fairly benign misrepresentation compared to some of the other ones he's made over the past few months (although I could argue that it makes me look rather petty). In everything from my positions on open source to the O'Reilly investment in Pyra to the debate over the future of RSS, Dave has consistently presented an extremely distorted view of the facts, and then used that distorted account as the foundation for his criticisms. If I didn't respect Dave so much, I'd just ignore him, but we have far too many interests in common for that to be the ideal solution. So how about it, Dave? Why not go for the real poll? "Is Dave Winer nasty, on a personal level, on mailing lists or in personal email, or in the way he deals with other companies?" "Is Tim O'Reilly nasty, on a personal level, on mailing lists or in personal email, or in the way he deals with other companies?" If people tell me I'm doing what you say I am doing, I'll have a chance to change my behavior. Are you interested in changing yours?