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In the past days there was a discussion going on after Robert Scoble’s attack to ALL the startups attending Demo08.

Pat Phelan and Alec Saunders posted a reply in their own blogs stating Robert should have been more tactful in highlighting the cons of those startups, since there is surely a lot of work behind each of them and he’s not in the position to criticize them since he never built a startup himself.

My opinion is slightly different. While I do believe Robert has not been tactful at all and maybe he has never been in the position of those 72 entrepreneurs behind those companies, his opinion has to be respected anyway. The real point here is that he has a lot of influence in the tech world and in the blogsphere so his opinion weighs much and it can lead to reactions like those by Alec or Pat.

All that said, I think one of the main advantages of blogging is the ability to say what you think sincerely, without the fear to be censored but, ath the same time, with the risk to be criticized. If all those companies were wise enough, they would take much care of what Robert said, since at the end of the day he’s a power consumer of anything is on the web so his opinion is worth more than that of other users. Robert also pointed out that his opinion was about the websites of those companies, not the products and when I read  his post a second time, I didn’t really found any brutal attack to those entrepreneurs.

By the way, Robert took all this criticism in a constructive way and posted all the comments he received in his blog. The best one? This:

“I love how people think Robert Scoble is famous. He’s not - he’s just a talentless, fat, annoying, douche bag.”

He also finally posted a “nice thing” for each of those companies. Check them out.

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Technorati Tags: alec saunders, demo, demo08, luca filigheddu, pat phelan, robert scoble, startups