The Le Web 3 effect

Le Web 3 was a conference with quite the aftermath.

After Loïc Le Meur getting wat he asked for, I doubt there'll be a Le Web 4. It'll certainly take a lot of guts, apologies, explanations, etc. from Loïc towards the attendees & sponsors of the previous editions, and I'm afraid a lot of them will tell him off. I can't help but feel a little sorry for him, because I'm sure he put a lot of work and time into Le Web 3. Goes to show how horribly wrong things can turn out when you loose touch with your community and show little respect: it burns bridges that took a lot of work building. I'm looking forward to his side of the story, and his views on the effect the conference had (what Peter Forret calls the Babel effect).

Because who would have seen this coming?

TechCrunch UK's Sam Sethi being fired by Michael Arrington, apparently not because he wrote a fair review of the event, but because he had some sort of 'hidden' agenda regarding startup and Web 2.0 conferences in the UK and Ireland.

Only, comments on both TechCrunch UK and CrunchNotes by Sam's following indicate that there was no hidden agenda at all ... Sam had been planning his 'Money Mondays' for quite some time, publicly on the blog and clearly with a lot of support from the entrepreneur and VC community in the UK and Ireland. I doubt Mr. Arrington followed up on what Sam had been writing on TechCrunch UK all this time, which shows poor management. No wonder the guy had a shitty day yesterday.

I wonder what Six Apart has to say about deleting Sam Sethi's Typepad account though, preventing him from posting on his personal blog. If that's not censorship, what is? You can follow up on Sam via his Twitter acount.

UPDATE - Maarten Schenk from Six Apart explained in comments that Sam's account wasn't deleted, and it's still online.

 

UDPATE 2 - This whole thing is getting a lot of coverage:

Technorati (tag: leweb3 and samsethi)
E-Consultancy
Naked Conversations
Dave Winer (Scripting)
Techmeme
Mathew Ingram

Comments

[Maarten Schenk]

For the record, Sam's site was not deleted by Six Apart and is in fact still on-line: http://samsethi.typepad.com/sethi/2006/12/lost_in_transla.html

It seems this rumor got started when some people were not able to reach the site but this was most likely due to local connectivity problems at the time.

[Robin Wauters]

Ok Maarten, updated the post. Thanks for dropping by!

[matthew]

We would like to inform you that your blog has now been added to the Megite index. We kindly invite you to explore Megite's latest version at http://www.megite.com

[Robin Wauters]

Matthew - not sure what that means, but thanks...