gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

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.)

Over the last two years, Le Web [formerly known as “Les Blogs”] has evolved more and more towards what Loic finds interesting

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.

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...

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.

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'.

"It seems all that needs to be said about blogs has already been said"

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.

"Laurent remarked, “I don’t think some people quite understand JUST HOW DAMN HARD it is to put on a show like this"

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?

"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."

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. :-).

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.