I posted a few weeks ago about the battle of words between the organisers of the TechCrunch50 and Demo conference organisers.

You’ll recall that there was much bitching between the respective organisers over who stole whose ideas, whose thunder ad whose business advice posts.

The latest development in the battle (and bear in mind that the conferences are both over now) came from both sides of the divide. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington said that demo was an unethical set-up. Over at Demo Kara Swisher from the Wall Street Journal replied saying that ;

Being lectured on journalism ethics by Michael Arrington is like getting parenting advice from Britney Spears

Ouch – and pathetic – on both sides.

Let’s see a little balance here – this is a small (albeit lucrative) industry. The tech bloggers and conference organisers are a niche of a niche of that industry – people turning themselves into rockstars is frankly just sad. I mean if your life claim to fame is that 30k people follow you on Twitter – I’d like to humbly suggest that you need to get out a bit more.

Sure it’s exciting being known and recognised (hell a few famous peeps knew of me at Office 2.0) but I mean really – we’re not up to Bono’s freaking level yet – balance boys and girls balance.

Rant over.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

2 Comments
  • Ben…you’re a difficult man to contact 🙂 I can’t find a contact listing for you anywhere 🙂

    Terry Siddall here….VP of Sales and Marketing with the Web Help Desk software solution (WHD). I just ran upon your blog from a couple months ago (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/zendesk_saas_help_desk.php) and wanted to introduce myself and our SaaS help desk solution…and see if you would be interested in executing an unbiased review of our solution.

    (A couple of the folks on that blog were pretty rough, after reviewing Zendesk…and I understand why…Zendesk is a VERY simplistic, but attractive, incident management solution at a dirt cheap price…and service-now is a VERY expensive ITIL holy grail, if you want to give into the implementation consultants money-pit (fyi – service-now doesn’t take orders for less than 40 technical staff organisations!!!) Our WHD is truly a SMB and greater ITIL-friendly solution.)

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    Terry Siddall | Web Help Desk | VP – Sales & Marketing

  • Well put.. keep the focus on the tech and not on the hollywood style attention grabbing that seems to be going on..

    RWW seems to keep it real and focused on tech rather than getting involved in all the garbage..

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