Loic tells his side of the story

Loic has posted a lengthy, eloquent passionate and reasoned response to his actions regarding his production decisions at the recent controversial  LeWeb3. He also seems to imply that  some of the criticism directed at him was because conferences about blogging per se are over and blogging insiders were pissed off about his going beyond the core topic, which he feels has become overworked.

Maybe so.  Maybe so.  But I sure wish he had presented this argument before the event not after. That way, people attending the event would have known what to expect.

On a personal level, I think I would have preferred the expanded agenda over the one originally planned. But the issue is setting expectations on what one will get for his or her money. For example, I enjoy both rock and symphony.

But if I went to a rock concert to discover the lead off group was a string octet playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons. I would be confused and disappointed.  As so many of Le Web 3 attendee seem to have felt.

Technorati Tags: leweb3, loiclemeur

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Comments

[jeremy wright]

I guess I didn't really think of it as a blogging conference, since he changed the name and everything. Kinda like Iron Maiden changing their name to Vivaldi Maiden or something ;-) Still, I would never have expected politicos unless specifically warned, y'know?

[Dimitar Vesselinov]

Loic is a force for good in France and Europe. We need more people and entrepreneurs like him...

[alex]

Shel,

I guess the key points in the criticism was (a) the disparity between the agenda that was advertised and what happened and (b) the complete lack of consistency between what the web-enabled world of "naked conversations" is all about and the outdated style of at least one of the politicians. The interesting question is "how do we use what happened at this conference to build something better next time?" and I got some pretty interesting input in the comments of one of my recent posts (http://blog.businessquests.com/2006/12/web_conference_.html).

[Nicole Simon]

There might have been a lot of people expecting a 'blogging' conference, but more than enough people on the attendee list are regular folks on the kind of conferences which are called tech but are in essence the strong search for things far beyond 'just blogging'.

If at all, Leweb was supposed to be the 'untechiest, ungeekiest' event of the year, just by the pure numbers. So trying to put people like me in the corner of "oh she was expecting a blogging conference where she could talk about the newest trackback fashion poor thing ..." is wrong on so many levels but hey if somebody needs this well that is their problem.