Curry-Winer split

It’s public and irrevocable now. The podfathers, Adam Curry and Dave Winer, have seriously gone their separate ways. The split at root may have been over money, but the stress lines have been there for months. It was compunded by Winer wanting podcasting to stay completely uncommercial and Curry  jumping in and starting podcasting businesses. Plus, as always, personalities can get in the way.

My take: Judging from watching Winer at Gnomedex 5.0,  he’s a brilliant programmer and conceptualizer and might well be  difficult to work with. And Curry has never said he wasn’t looking to make money from podcasting, in fact he’s been quite upfront about it.

IMO, The split was inevitable and had been coming for months.

As a sidebar to this kerfuffle, Curry recently edited his entry the podcasting entry on Wikipedia as he thought it was biased. Some said, wow, he’s so vain. Well, maybe not. I track some political entries on Wikipedia, and when obvious ax-to-grind biases appear, I try to reverse them. Wikipedia is meant to be unbiased and factual. Sometimes the entries are anything but. The communal editing process does eventually eliminate much of this, but I’ve seen more than a few serious editorial slants in supposedly unbiased Wikipedia entries.

Update: a comment here suggests Curry did slant it his way. This still highlights the Wikipedia problem, that open publishing with no internal controls can lead to slanting the articles – which will make a good topic for a future post.  

Tags: Adam Curry Dave Winer