Roland Tanglao, who I really wanted to meet, but missed, at BloggerCon III, writes a bit about the SNAFU between Dave Winer and a couple of the Vendors at BloggerCon (I hinted at this before), stating:

"My take on the vendor pseudo controversy. Bob was speaking in "developer" talk and Dave in the heat of the moment shut him down by saying it was "vendor" talk when he meant developer talk. And at this and all future BloggerCons both developer and vendor talk are not allowed for good reasons.

Still, it would be nice to have an extra "developer partying with user"s day and I would have loved to have gone to the after BC martini/vendor back backchannel con but instead I went back to Sunnyvale to spend some time with Barb and Simon (it's always awesome to see our smiling son at the end of the day). "

So, here's how I remember it (I don't have the luxury of an MP3 replay...), with all appropriate caveats...

- David Sifry stood up and introduced himself: "I'm David Sifry, with Technorati, [two seconds of blah blah], with Technorati, you can..."
- Dave interrupted him there, rightly, because he was about to pitch a Technorati, vs. industry solution to the users
- Bob Wyman, from PubSub, stood up and introduced himself: "I'm Bob Wyman from PubSub..."
- Dave interrupted him, and jumped on him , even though Bob hadn't done what David did... he'd only been doing what all of us had been doing all day: Declaring our name and affiliation before saying our bit

Because of this, all vendors were silenced (counter to the audience's wishes) for the rest of the show.

Developer chat was allowed, provided it came from the inside; normal "users" don't scream out "attention.xml" in answer to a discussion topic... right?

It's not as though I begrudge Dave Winer for this; he did a great job putting on an interesting show where I met some amazing people and caught up with some I haven't seen in a while.

And, I chose to participate in a different way.

Dave should just publicly apologize to Bob and move on. No harm, no foul, the industry's young, let's be purple states, not red or blue.