Recently in Le Web 3 Category

For an opening session focusing on eeeevil on the web, it proved to be rather quiet. I think everybody was knackered, thanks to the early start...

Laurent Haug of LIFT kicked things off by asking if there is a thirst for evil on the net?

"It's another form of human expression - prone to human frailty like any other conduit," said Chris Alden, CEO of Six Apart. The internet can have a distancing effect on communication and anonymity brings out the ruder aspects of human natures. "You have more interesting conversations when you have a sense of identity."

Jaewoong Lee of Daum Communications pointed out that there are 14m Koreans using internet. 99% of young people use it for more than an hour a day. And the privacy problem is bigger for users, leading to very, very few people writing bad comments. Why? There's a history of identity in each site, and that's driven by the users not the government.

Dan Rose of Facebook got given something of a rough ride. The social network has been on the recieving end of some bad publicity around privacy issues of late. His response to behaviour concerns? "50% of users come every day - that's true now and was true in the early days," he said. "It's not a social network, it's 50k+ individual networks. and so people behave on Facebook as they would in real world."

Doc Searls gave what turned into a rapid fire presentation about 11 ideas he had about the future of the web. Here they are, in their abbreviated glory:

1. Bullshit will lose leveredge - advertising does not scale to the sky
2. Advertising as we know it will die - Google does not get irony or metaphor
3. Herding people into walled gardens and guessing about what makes them social will seem absurd - and it already is
4. We'll realize that the most valuable producers are what used to be called consumers
5. The value chain will be replaced by the value constellation
6. What's your business model will no longer be asked of everything - not everything is a business, something is just useful.
7. We'll make money by maximising "because effects"
8. Markets will be understood in terms of relations
9. The Live web is more important than Web X.n
10. We will marry the Live Web to the value constellation. The individual is the real platfom
11. We'll be able to manage vendors at least as well as they manage us

Just as I did last year, I've come back from Le Web 3 with a few unfinished posts sitting in ecto. Unlike last year, I'm actually going to get them up on the blog this year.

So get ready for some cool, week-old stuff.

Liveblogging: I lose.

Art & Laptops @ Le Web 3 '07, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

I'm in the process of uploading all my photos from Paris to Flickr. It'll take me a few days to get through them all, but you can enjoy the 50-odd that are already up in my Le Web 3 '07 Flickr set.

Tags are open for editing, if anyone feels like adding relevant ones.

The presentation that most people have mentioned to me as changing the way they think about something was Joi Ito's talk on gaming. Me? I loved it, but then the talk was about World of Warcraft, and I'm a player. ("Hi, my name's Adam Tinworth and I'm a night elf druid").

Ito started of with a crowd-pleasing assault on the perception of gaming in society as a whole.

"We still say 'addicted to games'," he said. "We don't say 'addicted to church' if people go to church every week."

He's quite right - it's a non-useful way of viewing the situation. It's rooted, he explained, in the way we use language around the internet, at least in the English-speaking world. We have this word "cyberspace", which implies a separation between the online world and the "real" world. We have "real" friends and "virtual" friends.

"For kids the internet is ubiquitous. It's not something you log into or out of," said Ito. And, to them, gaming is certainly not the "masturbation-like activity" many adults seem to view it as. For one thing, people are often interacting with existing friends in the game...

So what is it?

Robert Scoble has just confirmed the TechCrunch story that he's leaving PodTech.

During the question and answers section of the video session he was challenged on the story, and confessed that he's leaving PodTech in January.

He wouldn't confirm that he was joining Fast Company Company, but did say that it was one of the offers on the table, but as it wasn't signed yet, he couldn't say for sure.

Ewan's report on day one of Le Web 3 '07 is up on the BBC site.

…there's always pizza!

There were a couple of interesting, but ill-attended talks yesterday before lunch, which I wanted to draw together.

June Cohen of the TED Conference made some interesting points about media, and in particular, about technology just drawing it back full circle.

"We think new media is new," she said. And it is. "But old media is astonishingly new in the whole of human history."

Using the clock metaphor for human existence, "old media" appears about two minutes to midnight.

"Before that, all media was social," she suggests. Without mass media to carry messages, people communicate on an individual or group basis, in the same place as each other. The mass media age has, against expectations, created an anti-social media. Media delivered from on high is new and "frankly, really horrible". TV has isolated us, Cohen suggested..

"US 50 year olds watch 40 hours of TV a week - that's a full time job".

Alas, for those of us who were here last year, the wonderful Hans Rosling's presentation was much the same as last year.

A few points of interest - his narrative statistics software has been bought by Google. Hope they make it available for free…

He also thinks that interactive websites don't work to communicate messages - the TED video of his talk has been the storytelling tool that works.

One of the most peripheral presentations has just turned into one of the most interesting. Robert Scoble briefly hijacked Philippe Starck's presentation by presenting him with an Amazon Kindle, in the interests of getting a design critique. Starck's verdict? He suggested you need the minimum of elements around the interesting thing, in this case, the screen. "The designer not humble enough to disappear," he said. "The design is less modern than the concept. It is almost modern."

He thinks Steve Jobs is "a genius. I look like a genius because of the leather pants."

What else did Starck have to share with us? Well, it was something of a philosophical discussion, about lifestyle, business and design. He envisions a more ethical future, where we leave behind the age of the "targeted consumer" and object where they are "10% used and 90% shit".

In the fine tradition of Le Web 3 softball interviews, Sarah Lacy just gave Kevin Rose of Digg a warm, fluffy loving feeling up on stage, and she asked him again and again why he's so awesome. I made a few notes in between the moments of nausea:

There was "no Web 2.0" when Rose started Digg. He would have been happy with it paying his rent through AdSense. At the time there were a handful of editors controlling the front pages - he wanted to empower the masses. (The masses being the top 100 users, presumably)

He recommends that you don't start three companies at once. He also thinks that people raise investment capital too early sometimes - when they don't need it. Scares me when ideas are unproven. All three start-ups grown organically. Rose was working a day job when started he Digg. Pownce, was launched the same way.

Lacy asked how he keeps control of the company now venture capital is involved. Apparently it's a matter of picking the right investor. Yes, but how?

This hasn't been announced on stage yet, but a little (Belgian) birdie tells me there's a Le Web 3 Community Site.

Lots of mini-keynotes today. Evan Williams, late of Blogger and now dark lord of Twitter just gave one. and, surprise, surprise, it looks like the majority of people here use Twitter.

Ev had a very simple message, or if you like, a message of simplicity. Twitter was born of keeping it simple - they developed for SMS because it was simpler. Helped keep web interface simple. And, interestingly, most people now use the the web interface - but starting with SMS forced them to keep it simple. So little to think about with that simple interface that it encourages frequent use. (One might say obsessive use…)

"What can you create by taking things away?" asked Ev.

Examples:

Photolog - one pic a day - more comments. 11 comments per photo - like crack for web users. Much more addictive than uploading multiple photos..

Google - simplified Yahoo?

Plenty of questions from the floor:

Bandwidth is somewhat flaky (just like last year). I'll get posts up when I can.

And off we go. After a horribly early start and a decent Metro and coach ride, I'm in the conference centre and this year's Le web 3 is underway. The Le Meurs took the stage first, and Loïc gave us a quick potted history of the conference, with some good-natured barracking from the stalls about last year. Geraldine gave an account of how they've changed the conference based on feedback (some of it rather vigourous last year…): more networking space, more space to meet entrepreneurs.

And we can follow the conference horizontally, apparently, if we're in the networking area. Well, it is France.

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off to Paris I go...

I probably won't get much chance for posting today, unless I manage to grab some WiFi at Ebbsfleet.

I think it's good to praise and well as complain so, in that spirit, I'd like to point out that Loïc is busy planning Le Web 3 2007 in public, both on his blog and over on Facebook. It seems only fair after what I posted about last year's event.

Loïc's just posted the idea pool he's drawing from at the moment and it looks… interesting. It doesn't feel like it's really addressing the problem of a very diverse group of attendees, which was one of the big issues last year, but that can't really be solved without moving to a multi-track conference, which is a more complicated undertaking. However, there's a good pool of speakers already, and a welcome move away from anodyne panels.

At least this year, nobody's going to be able to complain that they didn't really know what they were getting. (I can't help thinking that calling the conference Le Web 3 2007 rather than Le Web 4 suggests that, given enough time, all publicity is good publicity.)

Loïc Le Meur has responded to the criticism made about Le Web 3 in a long, thoughtful post.

I do want to directly address some of the issues mentioned, but I'll save that for another post. I do, however, want to get my own, personal feelings about the conference down, just for the record.

I had a blast. The conference was far from perfect, but I had an enjoyable, stimulating and though-provoking few days. I probably come from a slightly different perspective from many people there. I uneasily straddle the line between the old media (I've been a business journalist for 13 years now) and the new (I've been blogging in one form of another for the past five years, and am now a blog evangelist within a business publisher). In many ways, this conference was built for me, because it was an uneasy meeting of the core of long-term bloggers and the wider, mainstream world who have gone from mockery and cynicism about blogging to a business interest.

Was there an inherent conflict there? Yes, of course. There's been a strong streak of "down with the mainstream media, down with existing business" in much of the early blogging rhetoric, and many people are deeply committed to those ideas. Seeing such an obvious point of meeting between the mainstream and the revolutionary is not going to be to everybody's taste. But, if blogging, and Web 2.0 in general, is going to be as revolutionary as the claims made of it suggest, it needs to enter the mainstream somehow, either by destroying the existing mainstream, or by subverting it from within. And given my job right now, you can guess which method I favour…

Wow. I completely missed this brief interview with Mena Trott and Andrew Anker of Six Apart. It's a great wee posting, because it give some real insight into where the company's going over the next six to nine months (which is something I care about seeing as I use every single one of their products from Vox to Movable Type Enterprise).

It also gives some initial, and quite amusing, reaction to the L'affaire Loïc:

Mena Trott: I don't think anyone thinks that as a company we're pushing a French political agenda. Loic's a very large personality, but we trust our team members and groups to act independently.

AA: It's a bit like a case of “we don't mind what people say as long as they spell our names right”: we don't mind what people say, good or bad, as long as they're using our tools to do it.

NIce work, Mr Johnson.

Technorati Tags: leweb3,loiclemeur, menatrott, movabletype, sixapart, vox

Loïc Le Meur is dead* (knowledge of French handy, if you follow that link)

And, through a blogging medium, no doubt, he speaks from beyond the grave on the Sam Sethi issue.

*not really

Technorati Tags: leweb3

Today I've realised that there are multiple stages to a really good blog storm.

1. Criticism
2. Pile on the band wagon
3. Defenders wade in
4. The rise of humour

We've clearly just reached stage 4. Boris pointed me towards this very unofficial merchandise. And Tom has contributed this little gem:

Also on Flickr.

Technorati Tags: leweb3, loiclemeur, mikearrington, samsethi, techcrunch

The Gay Expat is the first to take up the Le Web 4 Beta challenge.

Who's next? Remember, just say what you'd like to see in a theoretical Le Web 4 and tag your post leweb4beta.

Technorati Tags: leweb3

The Internet Entrepreneur is running a poll on how much people enjoyed Le Web 3. The results so far are… interesting.

Technorati Tags: leweb3

Mike Arrington has put up a long post on CrunchNotes explaining why Sam Sethi was sacked, from his point of view. It's a very different one to the story Sethi has been promoting:

The actions that resulted in his dismissal were additional comments he wrote on that second post, announcing "that TechCrunch UK will be doing a series of seminars and a conference next year as well as a series of smaller meetings in conjunction with friends & partners which have been in the planning for sometime now."

These events were not discussed with me, and certainly were not approved. The fact that he announced and promoted them while trashing a competing event was a clear conflict of interest and was not appropriate. I do not consider this to be ethical behavior.

The Guardian's media blog, Organ Grinder, has some coverage of the story, too.

Y'know, I'm not a great fan of relentless criticism.

It's obvious that there are a lot of people who were unhappy about what happened at Le Web 3. But, by now, most people have already expressed what they though about it and what made them happy. And, until Loïc recovers enough to post, I'm not sure there's huge amount extra to add.

Now, how about we turn that on its head, and start saying what they'd like to see in a Le Web 4 (or equivalent) conference. And I do mean “conference” here, rather than unconference. I think there's room for both a good unconference and a good conference in Europe.

So, post what you'd like to see at a theoretical Le Web 4, and tag your posts leweb4beta.

And let's see if the blogosphere can do creativity as well as criticism.

Technorati Tags: leweb3, leweb4beta

Hugh MacLeod makes some 15 good points about Le Web 3. Here are the two that struck me the most:

I think what some of my fellow bloggers failed to understand is that we bloggers are not his only constituency, and with Le Web 3 Loïc was trying to put a show on for all of his constituencies, not just our little niche. That explains why he changed the name of the event from Les Blogs to Le Web. That explains the curious mashup of folk that were there: bloggers, techies, VCs, politicians, entrepreneurs, mainstream media etc. Evolution is a good thing. Vive le difference.

And:

I feel that the golden age of “The Blog Conference” is passed. It seems all that needs to be said about blogs has already been said, and said well. Now it’s time to stop talking about the blogs themselves, and start finding new stuff to do with them. Blogs are great, but real life is more interesting. From the way Loic had organized the conference, I think he would agree.

Mucho food for thought there.

Technorati Tags: leweb3

Pat Phelan at Roam4free has confirmed that the "disappearing post" I noticed in the TechCrunch UK feed earlier does indeed mean that Sam Sethi has been fired for his posts about Le Web 3.

Update: OK, now this post has vanished. What the hell is going on here?

Update 2: Pat assures me that the post linked above should still be online, but I can't see it. Still, there's other confirmation of Sethi's firing on Cubicgarden.

Update 3:Confirmation from TechCrunch UK and Pat's post is visible again.

Looks like Loïc will be responding to the criticisms. From a comment he left on TechCrunch UK:

I will post more on my blog later,

Excellent news. He also gives a reason for his earlier, brief comment on the same blog.

take the insult as an exhausted organizer after a few crazy weeks.

I hate to think what it must have been like, coming back from an exhausting few days to find a shitstorm of criticism waiting…

Technorati Tags: leweb3

Anthony Mayfield, who was great company during the Le Web 3, has posted his measured reactions to what happened.

Nicole Simon singles out Orange for criticism about the WiFi in the hall. I'd like to go further than that, because not only did their WiFi in my hotel periodically log me out for no reason, the WiFi in Gare du Nord refused to recognise my week-long account while I was waiting for my train. Really, I will avoid Orange whenever possible in future.

Ewan Spence gives a speaker's eye view of the problem:

Unfortunately Loïc Le Muir, the organiser, (…) cancelled my session for another ’surprise speaker.’ By deciding (for whatever reasons) to provide a platform to the ex-Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Perezm and French Presidential candidates Nikolas Sarkozy and François Bayrou, Le Web 3 was turned into a political rally, all the attendees and sponsors will now be used to provide legitimacy for the candidates views, a good number of speakers have not been able to put on a great show, and the general feeling from attendees is as close to a lynch mob that the blogosphere can muster.

Ewan managed to put on a superb show anyway, and I'll be blogging about that later, as gaming is a subject close to my heart.

Scoble noticed.

And his Naked Conversations co-author has wise words:

Ian, enjoy the conference. Meet people. Share thoughts. I hope the food is better. At the end of the event look back. I have a hunch you will feel you got your 600 Euros worth.

You know, what? I have many criticisms of the conference, but the chance to meet people like Tom and Stephanie and Hugh and Maarten and others made it more than worthwhile for me.

Technorati Tags: leweb3

I'm back in RBI towers after my sojourn in Paris, and finally had the chance to check my feeds. My, oh my, the reaction is just growing and growing isn't it? Tom Morris is continuing his superb job of collating the reaction to LePolitics3.

Oh, and Loïc has (allegedly) made his first response to the criticisms… And, interestingly, a post has popped up in my feed reader saying that the author of the post, Sam Sethi, has been asked to leave TechCrunch because of his comments about Loïc. The post has since disappeared from the site.

I've got a few more posts to make on the subject, and I'll get to those once I've had the chance to deal with a few problems that have cropped up in my absence.

Dave Weinberger started with the acute observation that politicians don't own the internet - we do. And that many of today's visitors seem to have missed that.

But moving on, he's talking about the Howard Dean as an example of the potential power of the internet in bringing people back into democracy. Broadcast has a distorting effect on democracy, he asserts.

There are three key ideas in his argument that the web and mainstream media are very different:

The media is self-contained. Media sits on its own. Blogging is built out of links and a little bit of generosity. Gives an example of the NYT not linking out. It is “narcissism”. “We're bigger than they are!”

The web uses metadata to help determine what is good and relevant, which is the distributed equivalent of the panel of white middle class men making decisions.

Externalization: We're building an infrastructure of meaning by externalising opinions and information.

(Of course, one has to ask if there's any good reason why professional media can't do all this.

Technorati Tags: leweb3

Maarten's WebCam Perch
Originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

Technorati Tags: leweb3

So, the political roadshow continues with the arrival of not-yet-a-French Presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy arriving with a huge media pack in tow.

So, what does he have to say to us eager bloggers? Well, I can't help feeling he's not talking to us, but to the attending French TV cameras. But here's a taster of the relevant stuff.

France is lagging behind on internet, he says. “We are trying to catch up. The access rate to high speed internet is good. We have exceptional bloggers.

”We are lagging behind in culture and government. The state did not create the conditions to make France a country of innovation. It wasn't ready.“

He mounted a defence of copyright and respecting people's right to be paid for the work. The internet must be one of the priority sectors along with life sciences.

There are some interesting ideas here, such as free sites with the digitised public archives on them, but fundamentally he's making an election speech to the cameras. Not much he's saying is relevant to the 50% of the audience that isn't French.

He does say that he wants to make France a more hospitable place for entrepreneurs, instead of people fleeing to the UK, Switzerland and the like.

Most controversially, he's making an impassioned flee for regulation and censorship of the internet. He's using the standard bogie man: eeeevil people abusing the internet for nefarious ends. Having ethics is not the same as restraining liberty, apparently. We must be aware that our liberty is bound (liberty is bound??) by responsibility.

In summary: he thinks we are the future and he plans on regulating the hell out of us.

Nice.

And now he's gone, without a chance for discussion. A hit and run speech.

Technorati Tags: leweb3, nicholassarkozy, nicholas Sarkozy