I’m not going to address the fallout from my comments, as I consider that matter closed and have made peace with the organisers. But I will talk about why I won’t retract or apologise for what I said on twitter and why I think you’ve missed the point by talking about dumbing down.

When you go on stage, you have a choice. You can present your argument, or you can preach your dogma. I would not imagine that any conference worthy of the name would want the latter. But dConstruct left no time in the schedule for Q&A or right to reply, so twitter was the only choice.

The notion that an audience should be polite about talks that fall short of the mark is a curious one to the tech industry. If a comedian had lost the room the way Craig did, they would have been heckled off. If a musician had so fundamentally misjudged a crowd they’d have been *bottled* off. That is how they learn the craft of live performance. So frankly the notion that barbed comments on twitter “ain’t helping anyone” rather surprises me. I’ve been accused of being harsh, which I accept but do not apologise for. As one of the London rioters was quoted as saying “If I hadn’t been, we wouldn’t be talking now.”

But I won’t pretend that my tone on twitter is the summit of some grand media strategy – it was a failure if it was, because I ended up losing followers overall. Twitter is a broadcast medium and my voice – my persona on twitter if you want – is fitted to that medium. You may consider my tone harsh but you should note that my critical tweets never resorted to personal insult. I made cracks about Craig’s content, his delivery, and the way he judged the room, but never Craig himself. I don’t know the dude. I’m not in a position to judge anything but how he presented in that time he was on the stage. And as an attendee of a conference either I am in a position to judge that, or we should all give up on dConstruct and go to church instead.

As for this argument that disliking the talk meant a failure to understand it, this is an accusation I encountered on the day. Let me let you into a little trick here. If you want to understand what Craig’s metaphor was about, he actually explained it in the first five minutes of his talk. It was, in broad terms, about the evolution of knowledge, access to it, the dangers thereof, the totemisation thereof, and now the universal access to… though I must admit, I don’t see what “book stew” represents if not a metaphor taken too far. Or recipe books. By the way, if you’d like to see a similar metaphor done in a competent way, I recommend the Iain Banks novel, Walking On Glass.

My complaint was not that the talk was too hard to understand, or even that it was wrong. My complaint was that it was too *easy* to understand, to the point where Craig had to wrap it in a massively overwrought metaphor to fill his half hour. And his writing lacked the ability to engage an audience in that metaphor. I appreciate some people got something from Craig’s talk. I’m sure some people are getting something from the performances of comedians that get heckled off. That doesn’t mean the room hasn’t been lost, and Craig lost the room, badly. The tweet stream, the number of screens live in the auditorium, the loud and pointed yawning coming from the third row, these were all indications of the state of his talk, which he missed.

I take your point that dConstruct tries to be the TED of the web industry. It’s an admirable goal and one that I think the afternoon sessions approached. But if it wants to be that, then it needs speakers whose content and delivery is novel and engaging. Craig’s talk was neither. That’s not a failing of the audience.

I was a first timer at the 2011 conference – I rated it 9 out of 10 or perhaps even a fraction more than 9. And whilst the majority of delegates no doubt gained something, a vocal minority made it hard work wading through the litany of tweets on the day.

And in turn, the malcontents merit a comment in my own blogpost on the matter.

http://www.secretsofsuccess.co.uk/?p=246

@ProactivePaul