Le Web 3: La la la
Still no response from the Le Web organisers despite the overwhelmingly huge response from bloggers both in English, French and other languages and the presence of headlines on TailRank and TechMeme, and from Scoble and Stowe Boyd and many, many more - they might want to say something.
Egg truly is on someone’s face. Based on the fact that people are setting up blogs in response to yesterday (there’s one new French blog, apparently, called Loique Jemeur parodying Mr. Le Meur), I don’t think it’s my face the egg is on.
I sincerely hope that if this kind of thing happens at conferences which suck more often, perhaps we can finally just stop having them - or at least the conferences can stop sucking and start being more interesting.
The Guardian is calling it Le Backlash.
There is a comment purporting to come from Loïc Le Meur over at TechCrunch UK: “Sam. There is no word to qualify you and this post. You are just an asshole.”
Is that your final word, Loïc? Are you going to call me and the many other people who are pissed off assholes too? Or shall we have a conversation about it?
You’d think that if you work for Six Apart - a company which sells blog software - you might be interested in having a conversation.
Tags: leweb3, loiclemeur, loic le meur
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Ivan Pope has more comments and some great ideas on how to improve conferences, as has Jeremiah Owyang.
Some of the commentary I linked to yesterday (and some of my own) has been translated in to French by Vincent Abry, vmaurin and at Doyoubuzz.com. In Spanish, there is Lisbon Lab who has provided links back and some comments in Portugese. Heise Online has a write-up in German - as does Nicole Simon’s beissholz.de.
Parisist has a good roundup of the posts (in English).
Hans Metrum: “It did not disturb me that his ego is important for him. Till yesterday. I think his ego has misled him to make great mistakes. He did not listen to the wind which was blowing to a wrong direction. And now he has created his own blogstorm.”
Sam Sethi has confirmed that the blog comment he received from Loic calling him an asshole is from Loïc. That’s professionalism right there. Sam is announcing a number of new events that will be sponsored by TechCrunch UK - and they look interesting (especially the Feb 22 one). I still think we need a EuroBloggerCon.
Ewan Spence: “Jonas on stage had made a brief comment to the effect of “everyone is different, for example I don’t like French politicians,” which provoked one of the loudest positive reactions from the audience that day. Perhaps Le Muir should have picked up on this rather than his one over-riding concern of getting his friends on stage to further their (his?) political ambitions?”
Madge Weinstein has an interview with The Gay Expat - who was at Le Web 3 - on the latest Yeast Radio (warning - not worksafe, kidsafe etc).
The Gay Expat has more good comments and a link to this excellent picture - does that look like an unconference? “;->”
Fred Destin says “This is not-for-profit after all”. Tell that to MasterCard for me, why don’t you? The conference certainly was for profit for Google and Yahoo and Microsoft and Six Apart and Nokia. Oh, and if Le Web 4 is invite only, be sure not to invite anyone with a blog - they’re far too much hassle.
Nicolas at Spintank: “Many , so many pissed -off comments on the conference. Why ? Because customers have been forgotten. 300/500 Euro is a price. You expect a service. It is expensive, and you expect a high level of service.”
James Corbett: “I don’t mean to pile on the criticism but seeing as I helped hype it up in the first place and I feel very sorry for the Irish startups who wasted their resources, it’s only fair to point to some of their objections.”
Libération.fr - the newspaper that Jean-Paul Sartre founded - has an article titled “La révolte des blogueurs contre une récupération politique”
Le Web 3 fallout: Hijinks at Crunch towers!
Note to Loïc Le Meur and Mike Arrington: firing Sam Sethi, or at least playing chicken over it (the blog entry has gone down but you can still see comments here), will not stop the flow of criticism. In fact, it will only prove what I have been saying all along - that Le Web was a “boy’s club” of sorts. The only way to stop the criticism is for Loïc to apologise, for Six Apart to send some money back to whoever wants a refund and to stop putting on crap conferences.
Here is what Sam wrote in his “Sam Sethi leaves TechCrunch UK” post which was promptly pulled:
Following yesterday’s post about Le Web and Loic’s retort. It seems Mike Arrington has disagreed with my post and opinion believing my actions to be vindictive towards Loic. What was said between Mike and I will remain confidential but suffice to say I can no longer remain with TechCrunch UK & Ireland. It is a very sad after all the work that has gone into TechCrunch UK and Ireland. I wish all of the UK and Irish entrepreneurs well. I will be personally blogging back at www.vecosys.com and looking for something new to keep me busy. Bye
I’ve met Sam, and I apologise to him if I’m not really supposed to pubish this.
But the fact that Arrington presumably saw fit to fire Sam after he disagreed with Loïc Le Meur adds fuel to the fire that this is just Old Boys Club 2.0.
Firing people for “disagreeing” is not conversational media, especially if they happen to be right. Loïc: we’re still here. We want to have a conversation.
Elsewhere: Ian also has the story, as does fedafi.com.
Tags: leweb3, techcrunch, michael arrington, tcuk, loic le meur, sam sethi
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TechCrunch UK is on hold
So sayeth The Arrington. Sam is out. I reckon that PodTech ought to hire him to do a show about innovation in UK/IE/EU.
It looks like TechCrunch UK may be needing new staff. If you want to stop having opinions and start obeying the party line, I’m sure you can figure out a way of contacting Mike Arrington.
Tags: techcrunch, michael arrington, tcuk, sam sethi
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