The sale of weblogs.com was one of the unalloyed successes of Dave Winer's brilliant but acrimonious career. Too bad it just seemed that way.

The ping server, which provided a central register of the weblog sites which had recently updated, went, in 2005, to Versign. The proceeds, $2.3m, helped Winer — who has never made significant money from his key role in blogging, web feeds and podcasting — buy a property in Berkeley. The house that RSS built, he called it, after the syndication architecture to which weblogs.com was related. Winer's arguments over the RSS standard had become particularly bitter and personal; so the sale of weblogs.com seemed a touching denouement.

Except, as the irascible Valley veteran just disclosed, he's since had to spend $40,000 defending himself against a former associate who held Winer didn't own the service when he sold it. Lessons learned? Winer says he now knows to document all agreements. It's probably also wiser, when collaborating with others, not to be Dave Winer at all.