December 13, 2006
le web 3
Got back to London from Paris at lunchtime.
I had a superb time at Le Web 3. Thank you, Loic and Geraldine Le Meur, for putting on such a good show. And thanks also to Jeff Clavier for helping out. Always a pleasure to see you guys.
Here are my thoughts, in no particular order:
1. This was definitely Loic’s show. Over the last two years, Le Web [formerly known as “Les Blogs”] has evolved more and more towards what Loic finds interesting, not necessarily what “The Bloggers” may find interesting. Loic likes entrepreneurship and politics, perhaps even more than he likes the geek-techie thing. 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 Loic 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.
2. A thousand people is an impressive number to have show up at your party, though I found that a wee bit too large for my tastes. Luckily I’m an old hand at these kinds of events, so I knew plenty of people already. By Day Two I had gotten quite used to the size.
3. Sorry to say, I did not care for the big party Monday night. The music was simply too loud. Serves me right for being such a saddo, middle-aged curmudgeon.
4. Several techie people expressed their displeasure to me privately about having the course of the show totally diverted by the needs of the politicians on the second day, throwing everyone’s schedule into disarray. Yeah, I could see how some folk would find that annoying [especially the more geekier among us], though I felt more philosophical. To me what was interesting wasn’t so much what the politicians had to say, but the fact that they were talking to us at all. Three years ago they wouldn’t have given us the time of day. And a lot of the credit on this side of the Atlantic belongs quite rightly with Loic.
5. 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.
6. I love Paris, but I can only handle it for about 48 hours, then I’m ready to leave. It’s a beautiful city, but there’s this deep, pissed-off anger to the place that exudes from every pore. As a friend of mine once said, “The Parisians like to make simple things difficult”. Parisians are a charismatic, sexy bunch, but I wouldn’t describe them as happy. But hey, on Monday night, down in Saint Germaine, I had one of the most amazing dinners of my life for less than 30 Euros a head. The restaurant had about twelve tables, and the person buying me dinner, wanting to keep this little hidden treasure secret for eternity, made me take an oath not to blog about it. For these kind of experiences, Paris has no equal.
7. The most unfortunate aspect of the show was the lack of wi-fi on the first day. Bloggers will forgive just about anything except bad wi-fi. Luckily the wi-fi was working better the second day, which improved the general mood considerably.
8. I was hanging out with Laurent Haug, who also has a very fine conference in Geneva every February, called LIFT. Commenting on the negative reaction Les Web was getting in the blogosphere, Laurent remarked, “I don’t think some people quite understand JUST HOW DAMN HARD it is to put on a show like this, even a much smaller one than this.” I concur. Another thing which I thought wasn’t mentioned enough: Loic has an enthusiasm and a generosity of spirit which is off the scale. It is EXTREMELY rare for a man of that drive, talent and accomplishment to go such lengths to make good things happen for people like me and my friends, and yet ask for so relatively little in return. Frankly, I wish more of us were more like him. OK, so Le Web had a few setbacks. Errare humanem est. Move on.
9. I spent a lot of time with Ross Mayfield. I found him delightful and interesting company. He told me his company, Social Text, had thirty employees. Wow. That’s a lot bigger than I thought. Very impressive.
10. Marc Canter is beginning to grow on me.
11. Doing a presentation with Anina is always fun. She’s a real sweetheart.
12. After the speaker’s dinner on Sunday, David Sifry and I grabbed a cab and headed for a late night bar in Montparnasse. David is as passionate as he is lucid, not to mentiona wonderful photographer. I’ve been a fan of his company, Technorati for years, and it was absolutely terrific to hear him talking about his work first-hand. The highlight of the evening was, staggering home in the very early hours of the morning, we both suddenly started feeling very hungry. If this had been New York we would’ve found a all-night deli within two minutes, of course. But this being Paris, nothing was open. We finally lucked out when we came across a baker’s van, dropping off deliveries. The kind delivery man sold us some croissants for a couple of Euros, right there on the street. They were still warm from the ovens. Until then, I really hadn’t known croissants could be that delicious, even in France. Intense.
13. I really enjoyed getting to know David Weinberger better. Interesting, funny, passionate and very, very smart.
14. I don’t go to these shows so I can sit in an auditorium and listen to folk speaking for hours on end. I’m lucky if I average two hours per day. So what if the schedule changed this time, that’s not why we shell out the money to attend. I go to these events to meet and hang out with people like Sifry, Mayfield and Weinberger, over a cup of coffee or a beer behind the scenes. I got there to commune with my professional tribe. I go there because I like and believe in the people organizing the event. I go there because I like and believe in the other people attending. The stuff in the auditorium is just the hub, as far as I’m concerned. The real action is in the spokes. The real action is in the corridor conversations. And one thing Le Web provided was: plenty of those.
15. Thanks Again, Loic. You rock.
[UPDATE:] Thursday afternoon. Dennis Howlett left a great comment below:
There is another take– if Loic has political ambitions and is successful — then I will be up there cheering him on. He knows France is in a mess and believes Sarkozy represents the kind of thinking that changes things. Having lived in France for 7+ years I think I have some perspective.
If the venom being spat at Loic is the best ‘we’ can do then no wonder people think the blogs are a bunch of assholes.
Amen. And of course, this is the part nobody is mentioning. They’d rather prattle on about faulty wi-fi.
Having gotten to know Loic these last few years, and seeing first-hand what drives him, I find the lynch-mob that has emerged since yesterday utterly appalling. Anyone who thinks Loic just used the conference soley and selfishly to feed his own vanity and political career…
…is an utter fool.
Hugh,
I finally get you!!! The Gillmor Gang didn’t do you justice.
Your performance on stage was great (one of the occasions that I wished for ten more minutes) and this post is very generous and more or less right.
Why are we obsessing about 15 mins of Sarko when so many other great things happened? He invited three politicans. One great, one OK but who opened my eyes to the gap between them and us, and one disaster. We should complain about Sarko and not Loic.
Doing this kind of — huge for Europe — event is a great performance by itself.
As you said : errare humanum est… Some of them are because of Loïc and others aren’t (such as Wifi, for example).
But as he is ‘sucessful”, it is so easy to burn him, specially in France.
I hope I will attend Le Web 4 or 3.1 or Reloaded !
It sounds like great fun! Thank you for sharing the experience with us!
I think this post was very important to add some balance to the current debate.
I would, however make a few observations:
(I also stress for others I wasn’t there, so these are only remote observations.)
That’s cool, as long as the event is clearly billed as such. It’s pretty clear that Gnomedex is what Chris Pirillo finds interesting, and therefore people who attend know that’s the case.
I think the biggest issue was the way it was done — last minute, speakers dropped etc. But c’mon Hugh. The two politicians on day 2 were there to electioneer, which is fairly insigificant to non-French attendees (the majority). They also spoke in French, which is hardly inclusive. “Three years ago they wouldn’t have given us the time of day”… Well they hardly were giving the non French attendees the ‘time of day’.
Wow, I completely disagree. I don’t believe you can say ‘all has been said’ about anything in this industry. There are always advances and new things to talk about. And, frankly, new people to bring in to this arena too.
Nah, I think most people have a fair idea. I also know that people have paid a conference ticket accordingly for that amount of hardwork. Equally, in Europe especially, maybe people should be asking just how hard it is for bloggers and some small companies to find the 600Euros required to attend?
Sure, but that’s because you’re in a privileged position — clearly that value doesn’t scale to 1000 people… Sifry can only have so many beers behind the scenes with so many people! And from that perspective you’re easier to please as you’re not even attending the conference ‘full time’.
For some people the conference is the conference. They don’t know anyone else there, don’t have a large enough contact network to hook up with the A-listers, their employer is expecting them to write up a review of each session — not go drinking and schmoozing.
Those are the people who would ultimately be peeved with some of the stuff that went on at LeWeb3.
thanks hugh
point 9 — yes interesting guy thanks for the link — I enjoyed his interview with scoble at http://www.personalbee.com/322/7341693 — cleared up a few things for me very succinctly; it was in English too — who needs French?
Ben, anyone who treats what Loic does as “just a conference” won’t get a lot of sympathy from me. And you know that
Seems to me a lot of the anti-Loic crowd are arguing their case from the point-of-view that Loic was no more than a mere vendor, and the attendees were no more than mere customers, expecting certain prescribed deliverables.
What a crock. That’s never been what Loic/Les Blogs/Le Web was about.
Secondly: So, you’re saying you have to be an A-Lister to have interesting corridor conversations? That IS utter bullshit. Shame on you, Metcalfe
Ben,
Surely the point is not to “meet A-listers”, but to meet people? Without doubt the highlight of the conference for me was the range of people I met from the-more-accessible-than-you’d-think “A-listers” (Mssrs MacLeod & Mayfield, in a bar) to something of a web 2.0 virgin. All were interesting, enlightening and useful
Great summary.
Not sure if anyone else has this problem, but the encoding for your RSS feed jumbles the text. Shows fine in IE, but no inside my RSS reader.
Hugh, I’ve blogged my thoughts on Le Web 3.
Hmm, perhaps next year it should be renamed Le Loic 4. Personally, I had never heard of Loic Le Meur before attending this conference and bought a ticket to a European Web conference based on the listed schedule. I didn’t buy a ticket to someone’s ego party.
Perhaps the problem is that having grown to 1,000 attendees means that the majority of us who actually paid to get in are like me, in not signing up because of Loic, but because of the content.
I have mixed views on the presence of the politicians. I agree with you that the mere fact that they came to talk to us is amazing. What irks me, however, is that they didn’t come to listen, especially Sarkozy. To breeze in, deliver a campaign speech and then bugger off before Loic could even finish his gushing thank-you just seemed pointless and a waste of time.
I think Orange are getting off lightly, btw. The furore over Loic and the politicians is completely drowning out the crapness of their service (which mirrors my own personal experience of their home broadband). Maybe you had a better time of the wifi on Tuesday but I found it just as bad and frustrating as Monday. Having Loic stand on stage and laugh at people who were complaining didn’t help, either.
Doug, people turning up and soaking up “content” in exchange for Euros was never the point of Les Blogs or Le Web.
I hardly think that the presidential candidates attended with the intention of “giving the time of day” to the audience, or even connecting with them in any way. This is one of the problems with the way that modern politics is executed – the talking heads have no concern for the needs of the audience. The spin doctors are only concerned with getting the right PR, e.g. “Sarkozy addresses International high-tech audience”, with the implication that the audience gathered specifically to listen to Sarkozy.
It’s a shame that Loic laid down to let the political steamroller drive over him. I hope he gets whatever payback he was looking for from his political masters, after all it’s been paid for with the good will of the conference attendees.
I’ve taken my fair share of criticism on this elsewhere.
There is another take — if Loic has political ambitions and is successful — then I will be up there cheering him on. He knows France is in a mess and believes Sarkozy represents the kind of thinking that changes things. Having lived in France for 7+ years I think I have some perspective.
If the venom being spat at Loic is the best ‘we’ can do then no wonder people think the blogs are a bunch of assholes.
Hugh, Some of the criticism is justified, some of it’s not. I think the key difficulty was that the conference was never really explained beyond the programme. You clearly had a good understanding of what Loic was trying to do, but this doesn’t seem to have been shared by a vocal proportion of the audience there.
Hugh — “Vive le difference!” Well said.
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Your presentation with Anina was a highlight of LeWeb3. You were entertaining and insightful. I introduced myself following the event. You were in a rush and asked that I follow up. Let’s catch up one of these days when you have a moment.