Before Le Web: Conference, Curation and Creation

Traditionally, I’ve come to Le Web at the last minute – the night before the conference kicks off – and stayed a day afterwards. This time I did it the other way around, and I’m glad I did. I’d missed the degree to which a culture of peripheral events has grown up around the main conference. For example, I had lunch with the good people of Pearltrees, discussing curation of content over a spectacularly good meal at Alcazar.

I had a long conversation with Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher, a former FT journalist, about the shift from the only publishing cost bases and revenue models to the emergent ones in the new information ecosystem that was quite fascinating, especially Tom’s perspective as someone who has made the jump from the old model to the new…

I suppose the key thing I took away from the conversation is how fundamentally the lack of permission needed to publish today has changed every aspect of media, from traditional publishing, to ad buyers, to corporate communications and PR teams. The information channels have opened right up, and we’re still only just scratching the surface of what that could mean for our society – as the current Wikileaks cablegate controversy amply illustrates. And, at a conference with so many habitual creators present, the potential impacts are made flesh, at least for a few days.

The Blogger Party on a boat in the Seine was one of those events where you saw a camera, video or still, in action wherever you looked. Bloggers chatted, jokes, shared Twitter names and blog URLs, and generally had a fun, showy time. I found it great fun, despite a small “incident” with some red wine and a white backdrop (ahem). The grown-up photobooth provided by You by Egobox proved a particular hit, as you can see from the video below:

People who voluntarily choose to self-publish enjoying a device which allowed them to pose narcissistically? Who’d have believed it. 🙂