Something very odd is happening in Paris. A number of prominent bloggers (plus the likes of Ewan, Antony, Ian and Simon :-P) have all turned up for the Le Web 3 conference. But it seems that any talk about blogs, Web 2.0, startups and so forth has been curtailed by the appearance of former Israeli PM Shimon Peres closely followed by two or three French presidential candidates drumming up support for the election in early 2007. None were on the agenda for the conference which cost €600 per head.
BBC man Robin Hamman reports live on his blog, despite heavy artillery fire from les politiciens envahissants:
This is truly extraordinary. Le Web has become, well, something rather different to what I and many other conference goers expected.
Shimon Peres kicked off the morning and now we’re being treated, if you can call it that, to a parade of French politicians making their bids for the leadership of France in the elections being held in early 2007.
François Bayrou (in photo), president of the centrist Union for French Democracy has just given a talk that showed he really gets the whole blogging thing. We’ve been told that later today we’ll also be seeing Nicolas Sarkozy, leader of French President Jacques Chirac’s centre-right UMP party, his arch-rival Socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royal.
What, one could ask, are all these politicians doing at a blog conference turned marketplace for web 2.0 startups?
Well, quite. Vraiment extraordinaire. It all sounds very entertaining, though not, perhaps, to the tune of €600. Another attendee, Snipperoo main man Ivan Pope, seems to sum up the mood of most reports I’ve read: “I think the organisers should put their egos away and resist the blandishments of all politicians and let us get on with our navel gazing”.
We read every day about old media and old organisations trying to get onto the Web 2.0 bandwagon. This conference seems to be a very visible and offensive example of just that.
Updated: Tom Morris’ commentary is golden — “this is bollocks”.
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Extraordinary.
I was planning to go to the event but in the end decided not to because of the cost. Sounds like I made the right call.
Yes, indeed. €600 plus travel and accommodation is a fair whack. I’d really want to be told how I can make that money back, plus a bit more, in the next year. Or meet the contacts to make that happen. Not to vote Centre-Right in a country I don’t have voting rights in and in a language I’m not fluent in.
Still in Paris. While I agree with all the criticism I actually enjoyed hearing Peres and Sarkozy speak.
A lot of people forget that prior to the excitement of a former Israeli PM the conference had consisted of panel discussions with utterly vacuous corporate types dicussing will blogs kill old media!!
Peres et al were a diversion from a conference that had lost its way long before.