OPEN

(Photo by Andreas Milles)

The controversy around Le Web 3 (a.k.a. Les Blogs 3, a.k.a. French Presidential hustings) continues to rumble on.

I still can’t quite believe what happened, and now with the rather dramatic firing of Techcrunch UK’s editor Sam Sethi by Michael Arrington.

It feels like we are watching new media hierarchies of power and influence emerging and trying to replace old ones idea here. Except that just as people start acting like the aristocracy of the blogosphere and get heavy handed, there are immediately thousands of voices of (mainly) dissent and discontent at actions and behviour which seem very much out of place in this community.

In an age of networks, of super-abundant content and conversation choices, subscriber bases and networks can disappear as quickly as they are built.

Of the conference, Shane Richmond said it well today when he reflects that the speech by Sarkozy was very much like a pop-up ad: “I couldn’t skip it, close it or interact with it in any way but I had to sit through it to get to the content I wanted.”

Shane also links to a great summary of the two Le Web 3 related controversies from Shel Israel, who has strong words of warning for both Le Meur and Arrington: “Loic promised one thing and provided another,” and “…Mike… should act in a way that lets observers believe that editorial analysis is not being shaped by the publication’s financial interests.”