Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Audience of Twittering Assholes

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

Jill — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:58:40 -0000

If the conferences I go to were this damn fun, even if I were Sarah Lacey, I'd be pretty pleased there was that much passion about my chosen subject.

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

TimTheFoolMan — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:07:57 -0000

Re: UPDATE

In fairness, your interview by Winer clarified many things, most specifically the expectations of the audience, and why it was different from other conferences. - Tim

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

TimTheFoolMan — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:35:14 -0000

Re: UPDATE

Robert, Wendy Piersall and Amy made comments on Brian's blog entry that are a lot more interesting and informative than Brian's spin of Lacy's performance. The comments speak volumes. Brian did not. - Tim

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

Justus P. — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 09:34:31 -0000

If its a performance, (like a theater piece or a sports event) then the audience has the right to heckle the bad performancer and cheer a good moment.

If its a professional interview, then the audience should stay quiet or get up and leave.

So was this interview a PR stunt or a professional conference session? It seems to me the former....

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

mark lacey — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 04:23:55 -0000

http://www.youtube.com/watc...
mark's clarifications it sums up everything at best and to mark - dude you are in thing now, try to losen up a bit try learning from steve ballmer, steve jobs and others in your trade

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

tq — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:52:07 -0000

Dittos to Coulter. Or should I say 'twittos'? Mega-twittos.

We had the right to expect a professionally executed and interesting interview and did not get that.

Jeff is expressing some confusion here as to what 'rights' we possess, or should rightfully possess. And I'm not trying to be crypto-libertarian, it's just that 'buyer beware' is operative at these conferences. Cut your losses and walk out if you don't like the speaker or her presentation.

And really, no dressing up of the adverorial-slash-keynote is going to make the ZUCKERBOT 3000 look good in a public speaking setting. He's just young and inexperienced on stage. You get what you pay for. More cliches at 11.

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

Guy Kawasaki — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:15:42 -0000

Remind me to cut my hair before a big onstage interview and cover my legs. That and to never "need" to be in the good graces of the interviewee.

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

Zach Inglis — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:39:30 -0000

Sexism is such a cop out. It had nothing to do with her sex. If a guy was in the same position, I'd of said the same thing.

Secondly, if she wanted to be seen as an equal, she'd not act like she wanted to drop her pants every 5 minutes. Moderate flirting is good but she acted like a teenager.

The crowd did turn into a mob, because when people told her her interviewing sucked, she didn't care what they thought and it was her interview, so screw them.

She went into that interview for herself, and probably for her book. Not for the crowd, and that's where it went bad.

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

Christopher Coulter — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:03:05 -0000

We had the right to expect a professionally executed and interesting interview

Ummm, when have conference or panel interviews EVER been professionally executed and interesting? They are PR-dressed-up garb, with the real story and/or real action happening off-stage, as a "journalist" you should know that.

You have a right to attend the performance, nothing more, you cannot confer a personal quality indicator, and then go mob-rule crazy when things don't somehow meet your subjective standards. View the performance, then write the review, savage or praise.

Try the same method in a Broadway play or movie theater, and you will be banned from the chain(s) for life. Your ticket gets you in, nothing more. And if "professionally executed and interesting" is your criteria, not much in Hollywood would ever qualify. If you dislike it that much, being a coward and not seeing it through to the end, then leave.

As for Scoble burning down the house and then rushing to firehose it out, that's always been his style, two sides of the coin, switching when the blog-wind picks a winner. The controversy gets hits, and the kiss and make-up does too. Your surprised indignation makes me wonder again about the alleged "journalist" part, as Scoble's been that way since day one.

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

Jeff Jarvis — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 20:09:00 -0000

Robert,
How dare you decree that everyone in the audience were "assholes." F that. It was a bad interview. You don't have sufficient spine to stand by your opinion because she called you down. But respect the opinions of the rest of us who agreed with your first opinion, not the revisionist you. Even if we do disagree, that doesn't make us assholes. We were customers. We had the right to expect a professionally executed and interesting interview and did not get that. I gave a clear, unemotional -- not not sexist, damnit -- analysis of what went wrong from a journalistic perspective (and thank you for the link) and to criticize her bad job is not to be a sexist asshole. Now after hitting the car in front of you, you're going in reverse and hitting the car behind. That's not a rational judgment. And it is an insult to the hundreds there who had a legitimate opinion of her bad job.

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

Get over it — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 18:09:53 -0000

Sexism??

Get out of the 1950s, what's wrong with pointing out the fact that this "journalist/columnist" simply did not know how to properly interview?

Don't throw red herrings all over the place for everyone else to slip on. Go by the facts: it was a horrible interview (by any gender standards)

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

John C. Dvorak — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 13:21:23 -0000

HAR "pull a Lacy..."

Sarah is going to love that one!

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

Solacetech — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 13:16:04 -0000

The Phrase of the Year should be,"Ask me a question." If everyone knew the format,why was "Zuck" so clueless?

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

Simon Brocklehurst — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 12:42:26 -0000

"Her legs were still visible though, I think she did this on purpose"

Yes, cetainly she "did this on purpose"; as opposed to getting dressed in the dark, and picking clothes out from a random clothing dispenser. Obviously, this is outrageous behaviour, because, as you say, her legs aren't invisible.

What truly amazes me is that people who consider themselves intelligent (many might beg to differ) would even bother to comment on Sarah's choice of clothing; and how she was touching her hair... let alone get uptight about it. It's laughable, but it must say something about them. Insecure? Repressed? Socially inadequate? All of the above?

Truly un-****-ing believable...

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

tq — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 10:37:32 -0000

Lacy is to blame for not doing her homework on the ZUCKERBOT 3000. A cursory review of its previous interviews shows that it was not programmed to respond vocally to conversational statements. It can only process sentences containing interrogative determiners that conclude with a raised tone (minimum half-octave).

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

Robert Scoble — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:14:44 -0000

american: yeah, I was in the overflow room and on the TV screens I just saw her legs, so didn't know whether it was pants or a skirt. Thanks for the correction.

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

american — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 06:52:33 -0000

Hi scoble,

Sarah did not wear short skirt as you have mentioned here, she was wearing tight half pants(see the video agian) , her legs were still visible tough, I think she did this on purpose though.

"There is quite a bit of sexism that is a subtext here. Lots of people in the hallways commented on her choice of clothing (she wore a short skirt that made her legs very prominently displayed"

certianly with all the tall talks of women's liberation in america there is much more it

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

Simon Brocklehurst — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 06:03:02 -0000

Interesting that some people are making the analogy that attending a conference session they don't like is similar to receiving poor customer service from a company. They seem to think that being rude is an acceptable response to receiving a service that they're not happy with.

Well, it's not acceptable. And it doesn't result in getting good customer service either.

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

kypar — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 04:47:01 -0000

Her book for preorder on Amazon just doubled in price!!!! Just kidding!

What do they say? Humans are smart, people are stupid. I think what you witnessed Humans are smart, people are stupid!! And I think a "mob mentality" typically seen in a riot let's say as people filled one another with the twitter jabs and it escalated from there.

Yea, Lacy is HOT!! She knows it and since most people in the room have never kissed a girl or at least one like that, they penalized her for coming into *their* House and f**king things up!!!

Think from the psychology aspect this is an interesting case study, hence my post, but simple lesson is she wasnt the right interviewer for the subgeek! (lol)

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

Swift2 — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 03:43:27 -0000

No idea what went on here, and I'm not sure I care. It's a pity to see the twitterization of tech culture, though. Y'all seem to be worshipping the hive mind. You think you can reach Nirvana on 144 characters, traveling in packs with people you scarcely know. It seems to distort consciousness, whatever else it does. It reminds me of nothing other than the equivalent of the latest drug in the '60s. Hey, man, if you look at your hand while you're twittering, you can see the Moon!
I tried Twitter for a month, and it seemed to me seductive and boring at the same time. Why do you want to pretend to know people you don't?

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

geekmommy — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 02:50:58 -0000

Well said.

And utterly without the bias so many others have shown, while examining the reasons the bias took the forefront.

Kudos, Robert - MAJOR kudos!

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

Dan Buell — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 02:07:33 -0000

I wasn't there. I watched the video a couple of times. Is it sexism if she puts it out there as such a predominate part of her whole "thing"? I don't think so...

Robert, I understand that you're doing some damage control and that you see both sides of the issue. It's so 2.0 to do this. Give an honest, be it scathing review of something and then spend the next couple of days retracting big chunks of it. TechCrunch, Mashable, Valleywag, Fred Wilson, everybody falls into this trap.

Bottom line, it was a really bad interview. Sure the subject was tough but a good interviewer gets past that. Stick with your first, gut reaction of this, it was right!

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

Frank — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 01:34:02 -0000

Quoted from above, "I understand that maybe the presentation was bad in the minds of some of the audience, but they have a choice to either stay or leave. Go ahead and Twitter, blog and do whatever you can during the presentation that isn’t intrusive, but for the civility of the event, keep your mouth shut until asked to do so otherwise. Anything else is just rude."

When I go to the movies and the view is out of focus or someone is interrupting my entertainment by talking or distracting from the point of being there. I am not going to civilly remain silent to appease "Miss Manners" book of etiquette. I paid for a service and have certain expectations to receive something in kind. And usually I don't rent an expensive hotel room, pay for a round-trip flight, or charge my time to my business when I go to the movies. This isn't about civility. It is about customer service and fairness.

This interview was way out of focus and the interviewer herself was causing noise and distraction from the main event and why people where there in the first place (to hear about Facebook). I am surprised that they waited as long as they did before they told the "projector operator" that the show was grossly out of focus, and before they told the person causing the distraction to stop. I would have done this within 5 minutes of the start of the show, not wait until the last 5 minutes ... at that point I'd be REALLY frustrated (perhaps they practiced civility as long as they could, expecting an eventual payoff that never came). And no, I have paid ... and taken the time to be there, I shouldn't have to walk out disappointed. Put the blame with the problem, not with those wrongly impacted. The fact that the audience's needs were totally dismissed (in pursuit of self interests) is the story here, not the audience's reaction to that.

And this downplaying of her non-verbal communications as woman-hating is both confusing and disturbing. 80% of human communication is body language, facial expressions, intonation, and other non-verbal clues .. ask any schooled linguist. It isn't what you say as much as how you say and show it, and what your intentions are. So email and microblogging are not even good examples to use for loss of civility as 80% of what is being said isn't even included. Of course all attention is directed towards her now and then, that is about her, whether planned or born of inexperience.

Good customer service makes people content and satisfied and civil. Bad customer service is just plain irritating, insulting and disrespectful, regardless of the motivations.

And, why not continue talking about this? This is a great example of the power of digital communications and social aspects of the Web for dialog and convergent and divergent thinking. Who is afraid of diversity of thought and voices here? Not me! Why the need by some to control and punish points of view? There is plenty of room on the Web for both left- and right-brainers.

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

Eric Rice — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:37:55 -0000

@dawnkey what, were you expecting ideas, concepts, thought leadership and futurism to be the HOT TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Train wrecks are much more easily monetized. So sayeth Google Analytics.

Re: Audience of Twittering Assholes

heather — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:35:01 -0000

I completely disagree that the interview was about sexism. I am sensitive to sexism ($0.75/$1.00). I thought a lot about it and if it was a man interviewing a woman, he would have been just as panned. In fact, something very similar happened on a much smaller scale in another panel I went to.(Look at CNN Money article for details http://tinyurl.com/2psjzr). I urge you to WATCH the Lacy/Zuckerberg interview. I couldn't get a signal in the room so I wasn't on twitter but I was sms texting my colleague with the same reaction as the audience.