Web 2 Ireland

Is this a wind up?

coped it at exactly the same time.
great story

[...] Sam Sethi fired for not deleting a comment? Published December 13th, 2006 in Technology. Tags: arrington, leweb3, sethi, techcrunch, techcunchuk, Technology. arrington leweb3 sethi techcrunch techcunchuk TechnologyThere is a post on the web2ireland blog claiming that Techcrunch UK’s Sam Sethi has been fired by Mike Arrington! [...]

Thanks Pat,

I was actually on a Skype call with Sam throughout this remarkable event. I synchronised my post with Sam's last note – which itself has been deleted! There's no stopping Mike's filtering

I think Sam will be the one to come out smelling of roses though as this one is likely to do the rounds for a while.

I promised Sam that I wouldn't give away the reason for his departure, but I can now point you to his own comment on twitter http://www.twitter.com/ssethi/statuses/1070443

[...] Just an update courtesy of Paul Walsh, a screengrab of Sam’s Twitter entry found here [...]

Paul, brillant, a world exclusive. I love it. You crack me up. I just re-read Sams original post – I thought it was really mild. Not sure what all the flack is about. I said it months ago, Techcrunch jumped the shark again.

Just coming back from a TCUK sponsored event. Was surprised not to find Sam there actually… and I come back… to this? What an absolute disgrace. Funny enough I had spend a good part of the evening talking about ethics in the Blogosphere. Sam’s name came up as being of the only ones who could still hold his ground and raise interesting points rather than brown-nosing the wannabe ‘digerati’ that pollutes our industry. So much for ethics and independent journalism.

Hey Ivan,

I thought some of you would like it

What do you mean by ‘jumped the shark again’? Sorry, I’m a bit thick

—

Hi Stephan,

It’s a shame but hey, it was Sam sponsoring the event, I'm confident that TechCrunch didn't pay (as far as I know), so we’ll just have to put together another brand that people can trust and respect. Perhaps this is a good springboard to jumpstart something new?

I've sponsored stuff like those events in the past so I'm sure we can rally a few of the troops together.

All it takes is for a few good people (and me )…

Jumping the Shark refers to the episode of Happy days where Fonzie waterskis over a shark. It was at that point that everyone knew the show had gone beyond ridiculous and needed to be cancelled.

Sadly the whole Arrington/Sethi thing has damaged the TC brand and reputation, particularly in Europe. I don’t know how long lasting the negative feelings will be over here but if TCUK&I is canned then I think Mike will lose a lot more than just readership. Sam, Mike Butcher and the gang were really getting into their stride in the past few weeks (and I’m not just saying that because they covered me ), it would be a terrible shame for all of that to be thrown away. But Mike is a businessman and that will presumably dictate what happens next.

The LeWeb3 impact on Six Apart, as you pointed out Paul, has the potential to be much worse. If you were in the market for a blogging platform and had studied the blogosphere a bit and you had read Naked Conversations and then you saw how Loic handled the criticism of the event, how likely are you to buy a Six Apart product? Rather than engaging everyone who blogged about it and putting over his case and apologising for some aspects, he made a personal attack on one commenter and then went to ground. This is blogging 101 stuff and we all have long memories.

All attendees who paid to go to Le Web are Loic’s customers. If we are grumpy, for whatever reason, then he needs to deal with it. Does he understand that? Does he understand the concept of Customer Service? Of Quality of Service? I don’t think I’ll be looking for a refund like Tom but if I don’t see some comments on blogs from the organisers in the next 48 hours then I’ll know exactly what Loic thinks of his customers and he’ll never be getting any repeat business from me in any sphere.

Les mots de jour: trust, reputation, authority, reliability, customer, engagement, relationship.

“Jumping the shark” – of course, in fact Ivan had already explained that one at a gig in Manchester. Although it was probably well into the night…

Regarding the gang at TechCrunch UK&I, it includes Daniel Appelquist who I know very well he's a great guy who created Momolondon (now coming to Dublin via .Mobi) and Mobile 2.0 in the valley. He’s also the Chair of the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices working group, oh and he’s well placed within Vodafone Group = someone with a few contacts…

Our friends @ TechCrunch and Six apart obviously don’t get it – it’s all about “people”. You’d think that would be obvious given the line of business they’re in.

By the way, Sam’s account with Six apart was canned last night! So, if you say something they don’t like they’ll throw their toys out of the pram, cry and then cancel your account so you can’t tell anyone.

[...] People talking: Ben, Eirepreneur, Pat, Paul. [...]

[...] My main motivation for writing this post is to record why Jamie recognised my name. He probably witnessed my commentating about TechCrunch UK closing for business a story that took the blogsphere by storm. [...]

[...] My main motivation for writing this post is to record why Jamie recognised my name. He probably witnessed my commentating about TechCrunch UK closing for business a story that took the blogsphere by storm. [...]