Le Web 3 Review

This is a fairly long review of the le web conference. I understand some of you may be busy, or not very interested. For those people I’ll offer this shortened version

“paris.geeks.big companies.bad wifi.user generated content.communities.networking.spreadshirt.parties.beer.geeks.presidential candidates?.easyjet.home.”

And now the full version…

I know its been everywhere and its that time of year but I’m sure your a little tired of it too (especially if you were at leweb), so I’m going to try and do an entire post without using the C word. Yep, community. Better late than never, its time to review the leweb3 conference in Paris.

You’d have to have been living under a wifi less rock not to have seen the reaction to the late inclusion of the french presidential candidates. I’d rather keep this post on the positive, enough has been said about the organiser Loic Le Meur’s choices and he answers his critics here

Spreadshirt were a small sponsor of the event supplying some merchandise, in the form of a modified La Fraise design t-shirt. Its seemed to go down pretty well and its great to see an event open to doing something much more interesting than a normal conference branded t-shirt. The event was also attended by Ami, me and Emmanual the french country manager. Not to be overshadowed Lukasz bagged a spot on one of the panels entitled “e-commerce 2.0″ (thats him on the big screen below)

He came across well on a bad panel. I thought the key message of how Spreadshirt provides a platform from the creativity of our community (damn, failed!) was conveyed. Surely thats the point of e-commerce 2.0?Another highlight from this panel was during the q&a in which an audience member asked

“This is all very interesting, but why should I care? I work in the public sector, how is this of interest to me?”.

Lukasz responded: “two words - long tail”.

Other highlights:

Hans Rosling. Wow. For anyone new to his work he’s a swedish professor from the world health organisation. He gave a fascinating presentation offering real insight about world poverty and the distribution of wealth through globalisation. I’d reccomend anyone to watch some of his presentations, heres one from TED earlier this year. Alot of the data and graphs he used (these were incredibly detailed and interesting, honest!) can be found here

It was all little off-topic but a poignant and fascinating detour and stark comparison to some of the duller presentations. Google being the worst offender, thanks for the history lesson guys.

Bruno Bonell , CEO Atari - really interesting views on game creation. Said he was tired of great graphics, perfect rendering and the future is user generated content. Simple, highly innovative games are the future and they will be created by the masses not a few experienced game developers and studios. Online distribution is more efficent and lowers all the boundaries. At last, someone that might me want to play computer games again.

David Weinberger - co-author of the cluetrain manifesto, did a talk entitled “blogging our way to democracy”. I thought he as the best of the whole event, as did many other people. He talked about the difference between blogging and traditional media. He believes the key difference is in the complex web of linkages built between blogs from blogrolls for example. Traditional media never links in the same way the blogosphere does. The blogosphere sends people away, saying “these are the sites I reccomend” or I found this via “x”, because were sure that if the content is good enough visitors will come back. In this way we are building communities. Traditional media doesnt offer this, it runs ads in spare spaces, never recommending other sites. He calls the blogosphere a worldwide conversation. I couldnt agree more, but please dont leave incase you don’t come back You can find some video’s from the event here

Favourite Quotes from the event:
A question from an audience member to the giants of web 2.0 panel (microsoft, yahoo, orange and nokia)

“3d worlds and communities do they matter and how will the shape the future of the internet?”

Totally stumped the view of the giants panel and everyone looked round nervously for someone to take it. I guess no-ones thought about how 3d worlds will shape the internet, in other words none of these companies have brought one yet.

Quote from one of the panelists on enterprise 2.0 “really nastly applications like Sharepoint which are trying to spread across organisations like a nasty flu.” As a an ex-microsofty this one cracked me up.

I’m not sure who said this one - “Every organisation should have a scoble, someone to be visible, active and listening to the community. these people should be given a voice within the company to make changes and represent the community within the organisation.”

What did we learn?
Well the big learning for me was that no-one really knows whats coming next. We’ve stretched web 2.0 forever, we understand the value of communities, we build platforms for user generated content and shock horror we listen to our customers. Beyond that everyone is a little clueless and just happy that we have communities to distract us until we can buy the next company that figures it out. Along with User Generated Content, Community was the other phrases mentioned far to often, in every panel, and every presentation. Ami and I started a count but it hit over 20 for each from one 30 minute panel and we gave up. For me there’s much more to web 2.0 than user generated content and communities. A community is not a solution, or the magic bullet of the future of the internet. Myspace and Youtube attract the masses but are they really the most interesting things to emerge from web 2.0?

Anyway it was great to see Spreadshirt represented amongst such big technology companies. It was a real buzz to see so many people interested in what we do.

Thanks for reading this far