Les Jones:

LATER: At the after hours event John Cox was showing us his sketch book. His comment was that Dave Winer leading a conference on “Respectful Disagreement” was like a drunk leading an AA meeting.

The hissy spell he had from the Blog Nashville talk is monumental—it reminds me of children sitting at the grocer crying for their candy-for-breakfast cereal—in that it proves, yet again, that Dave Winer is really, really into himself.

His talk was about “civility” in the blogosphere, and I sorely wish I was there (I was invited to go by an e-mail buddy but I’m not financial able to) just so that I can go there and heckle him. Truth be told, DW’s personality—even that which bleeds through on his blog—is so vulnerable to heckling on the sheer scale of self-importance.

“I’m Dave Winer, dammit. Now. Be CIVIL!”

The Les Jones account, though, has more tangible first-person evidence of this, but in the interest of posting something substantial for once, I’ll go on record to say that the result of Winer’s sit-down-protest—people discussing freely without killing each other nor telling each other just how wrong they are—proves that the blogosphere will survive even when some of the most major apices of links and traffic go away. Especially the self-important ones.