Lesblogs redux

I woke up this morning, and with no girlfriend to look disapprovingly at me, turned on the hotel TV almost at once, and was able to continue for a few more minutes without engaging my brain.

Sequentially flicking through the channels I thought I heard someone (on TV) say "blug". And sure enough, as if I'd asked my deity of the week to send me a sign, there on national TV, was a little segment on blugging, sorry - blogging. A young(ish) kid, complete with ponytail, gave a quick, and engaging, walkthrough on how to setup a blog, using BlogLibre. Made it look really easy - if I was a blogging neophyte, I wouldn't have been at all intimidated by that (I think). Good piece, and very appropriate after the long good LesBlogs day.

More interestingly, it was on national, terrestrial TV - I think TF5. Can't imagine an equivalent piece on British morning TV yet - which shows that blogging seems to be further along the adoption curve in France than in Britain - something I hadn't even considered until yesterday. Eye opening.

Spent a lovely morning walking around St-Germain de Pres, buying chocolate tartes, lovely long thin bread, foie gras and smelly cheese.

As for the conference itself - in the main enjoyable and worthwhile. Same issues as Blogs in Action from last month: not enough time for real conversation, too much emphasis put on putting people up on a stage and having them teach us, when in reality we all could really do with learning from each other. Wasn't alone in thinking that - Lloyd, Euan, Lee were amongst the folk thinking the same.

Organisation was slightly chaotic, but one constant was the smiling happy face of Loic le Meur who was simply charming the whole day. Not sure if that makes up for the non-existance of coffee for the whole day !

We were also treated to the slightly unedifying spectacle of Jason Calacanis and Gaby Darbyshire of Weblogs Inc and Gawker respectively, descending into a bunfight over Gizmodo vs Engadet, luring authors away, and a whole load of stuff that was mostly unimportant and trivial.

For so much time to be devoted to such a facile use of blogs did depress me: blogs as a replacement media for printed paper with the sole aim of selling ads is hardly a revolution, is it ?

Lee Bryant, Euan Semple and Ross Mayfield's panel on internal blogging got sadly squeezed by the move to lunch and the late starting, so ended up being rushed. Also, it may have been a bit out of tune with the audience who were much more into the Gawker/Engadget "let's make money" theme. Someone in the Maiinstream Media panel said something about €5 million per year, which prompted an excited yelp from the 2 French girls next to me followed by 25 minutes of quite loud conversation which only ended once the "boring stuff" started and they left.

But the "boring stuff" saved the day for me - Yossi Vardi pleading with us to recognise that "we are wired for collaboration", Hossein Derakshan showing us how blogs are windows into Iran as it is today - and the act of viewing cannot but help perturb the thing being viewed, followed by an eye-opening 10 minute drive-by from Yat Siu look at the state of the Asian blog and internet world. Most of the focus was on China,Japan, and Korea - I couldn't help think about India's 1.7% internet penetration and think about the opportunities and challenges there.

Doc Searls gave a interesting end-note, meandering (in a good way) around a number of topics while making the point that blogs should be treated as speech and protected as such.

All finished off by cocktails and more finger food at Alcazar - where I chatted with some people, found out that hugh gapingvoid mccloud was nothing like I thought he would be (little things like i thought he was an English guy who lived in London - whereas he's basically an American in Cumbria). Neil McIntosh and Euan Semple seemed like they'd known each other for years, despite only having physically met that day, and Alistair Shrimpton from Six Apart is another really nice guy. I

'll post pictures when I find my connecting cable.

technorati tag: lesblogs although I don't know why I bother as technorati is ignoring me at the moment!