Le Web 08: The Opening Sessions

And so, Le Web 08 gets underway. Loïc and Geraldine kicked things off slightly late, as they struggled to drag people away from the (rather good) coffee and croissants. The mood of the conference is rather different this year, given the uncertain economic times.

The pre-coffee sessions this morning were distinctly corporate, so I blogged them over on my Computer Weekly blog. Presentations from Google and Microsoft were relatively predictable – either plugging a product (Bizspark and Azure from Microsoft) or just fairly anodyne, as was Google’s talk. Mind you, neither were as dull as the MySpace presentation which I couldn’t be bothered blogging.

However, the most interesting one was, not surprisingly, Dave Weinberger’s, who unleashed a torrent of ideas about leadership in his 20 minutes which challenges many of our current preconceptions. It makes mw think about what a post-web journalistic organisation might look like, if we move beyond command and control from an editor/leader…

And things only got better after the coffee…