Jonas Luster: “Outside the main hall, cigarette or beer or water in hand, a Jew and an Arab discuss AJAX, an Irishman and an Englishman have a fag and reminisce about the Goonies and their influence into Britcom development at the BBC, a Frenchman and an Englishman exchange friendly ribbings while the American writes down a fondue recipe he coerced out of the Swiss engineer he met a few hours earlier. They scrape, they struggle, using hands, feet, and any language at disposition they communicate, converse… Inside, a man, refusing to converse, insisting, for nationalist, separatist, reasons to speak in a language not everyone understands, unwilling to take questions, touts the virtues of HIS lifestyle. Sorry, dude, I’ll take the guys outside a[n]y day over your idea of an enlightened future.”
Research 2.0: “The first surprise was the fact that most of the presentations were vague marketing pitches without much content or time allowed for Q&A and interaction. One presenter from last year, Mena Trott, was so nervous she gave a 5 minute talk and ran off stage rather than offer Q&A; this despite the fact that her firm, Six Apart, was staging the event… Certainly the worst aspect of the conference was the fact that the man leading it, Loic Le Meur , is a self-absorbed technology entertainer. So much so that he aborted the scheduled conference program to insert French politicians who came and gave stump speeches without even offering an open forum to discuss the many policy issues holding back commercial technology innovation in France.”
There is more coverage of Le Web 3 on my blog on 13/12/2006, 11/12/2006 and 14/12/2006.
Ian Fenn: “If the true nature of the conference of had been communicated from the start, then many of those objecting to it would simply never have registered.”
Forward Blog: “If you assemble a huge collection of influential bloggers from around the world, the last thing you want to do is treat them with arrogance.”
Shel Israel: “To Loic and Michael, I simply give the advice, we blogging advocates keep harping on. Listen to your customers. Listen very carefully and understand that whatever power and influence you have comes from them.” (Shel also thinks that Sam Sethi will emerge as the winner from this controversy. I repeat what I said yesterday: PodTech should hire him).
Le Web 3: Reactions comic
See my Flickr post for original.
Tags: leweb3, sam sethi, samsethi, techcrunch, michael arrington, michaelarrington, loic le meur, loiclemeur, ben metcalfe, benmetcalfe, mena trott, menatrott, asshole, paris
“Leweb3” is still number one on Technorati’s Top Searches. Take that, Britney Spears!
