One Last Thing...

Before the LeWeb controversy is totally cold: I don't understand the weird form of support that Loic Lemeur and SixApart are getting for the mess that leWeb became. One theme I see over and over is something like "Don't people understand how hard it is to put on a conference, even a small one? Loic and SixApart tired really, really hard!"

This is so stupid it hurts.

Everything worth doing is difficult to do well. Conferences, playing the bongos, tap dancing, sex, whatever. Developing software is hard. Should we start buying bad music because the performers tried real hard? I guess I should go easier on the companies launching new Web apps, because it's so hard to get it right?

Nuts.

A lot of people are conflicted since they personally like Loic or Mena, or have had such a great time in Paris at the previous Les Blog events (I enjoyed my time at the first). But nonetheless, if the movie sucks, its best if you just say "that movie is low-grade dog food" and get on with your life.

tags: leweb, shilly-shallying, stupidity, conferences, events, loic+lemeur, mena+trott

Comments

[André Ribeirinho]

I'm with you Stowe. Of course there will always be positive and negative things in something like this. But too many people are taking the opportunity to show support for Loic and they are forgetting the *big* sh*t that shouldn't have happen.

[Ivan Pope]

Oh thank you. Exactly. The conference was bad. It could and should have been brilliant. It was bad because it didn't care about or think about the audience. It was dismissive of the audience.

[ouriel ohayon]

what is seriously ridiculous is that people like you that did not even attend the conference can be critical. You have no idea what you are talking about. Come on stowe give us a break!

[Stowe Boyd]

Ouriel -

Of course I have an opinion. I attend dozens of conferences each year, and I have worked on many program committees. I don't have to attend to develop an opinion, especially considering the degree of controversy and coverage going on.

And, by the way, you are missing the point that I am making: it's dumb to not criticize a poor performance -- of whatever sort -- because it is hard to do a good job.

[Melinda Casino]

"This is so stupid it hurts."

:D

"A lot of people are conflicted since they personally like Loic or Mena, or have had such a great time in Paris at the previous Les Blog events (I enjoyed my time at the first)."

Yes, you hit on it here. I thought the point of blogging was to say what you thought -- not what you feel pressured to say. If the latter is the case we might as well all be typing from a pre-approved script that is emailed to bloggers.

[Jonas M Luster]

Been there, wrote about it. Numerous times. Too much for my own comfort, actually. My latest (and last) post I consider to be the one that ends the discussion for me. And, whoa, Jonas doesn't slam Loic. I believe we'll have to measure Loic by how he reacts to the criticism and by how LW4 will look, not by how his plans panned out. I really do. I don't do this out of friendship with Loic, and from my calling people hacks and more in the entry it should be clear that I don't have much problems calling weenies weenies when I see them, but I believe some of the criticism is ill-deserved.

So there, we seem to disagree for the first time :P.

[ouriel]

i don't buy it. This does not make sense.

Criticizing an event you did not attend, even if you are an "even expert" does not make the critics right. Just explore a bit more the blogosphere and you will see how many people enjoyed it. if you want some help read those http://ouriel.typepad.com/myblog/2006/12/leweb3_was_a_su.html

Btw i can see that those criticizing are either the same one on every post i read or people that just did not attend.

[Jeff Clavier]

I guess that you are missing an important point: yes there were a lot of people who were unhappy about the conference, mostly bloggers, but a very large number of attendees were happy to ecstatic about it. As usual, unhappiness is expressed first - and there was a lot of negative feedback that Loic adressed in his response today. But where Ouriel has a point is that you have built a single-sided view of Le Web 3. Despite its shortcomings, it was an important event and allowed a lot of European entrepreneurs to meet investors, potential partners and executives of large companies for 1/4 of the price of the Web 2.0 Conference.
There is a ton of positive feedback about the conference, and it is too easy to ignore to focus on the negative aspects.

[Eric Rice]

Yup, agreed, I see this out here in SF... you can almost stitch together a social network of a few to see where the hype meter will go.

I've seen one company do some amazingly Bad Stuff, and yet the praise came in-- the trick was making the list ahead of time of who the people were that would say it was Good Stuff, and match up the results.

Yup, inflammatory. Juvenile. Sophomoric.

And Drop Dead Accurate. (try it with VC peoples + bad ideas, there's something else at play. Heh)