Time Magazine’s annual Person of Year takes a neat turn in 2006 by nominating You this year.According to Time’s Lev Grossman: “The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.“But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story .. it’s the story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from...
What a complete f**k up. Sam Sethi has been sacked for blogging negatively about LeWeb3 on Techcrunch UK&Ireland by Michael Arrington – one of the event’s sponsors. The site has now been put on hold.Meanwhile, Loic Le Meur is being vilified throughout the blogosphere by all those who wanted to open up a conversation which he chose to close down – this from the guy responsible for one of the main blogging platforms in Europe.I for one thought that LeWeb3 was going to an un-conference with lots of conversation feedback, bust-ups, arguments, fights and disagreements – which is fine. However, the fall out from Loic's political fumblings has been to completely undermine his own position with the very audience he should be engaging with.My colleague Simon, in this matter, believes...
We will shortly be leaving Paris and LeWeb3. Did we learn anything new? Well we learned that the big corporates have now woken up to the opportunities of Web2.0 and social media and are now seeking to muscle in on the scene by claiming to have wonderful new products that will make us shiny happy people?We have learned that the Americans like to talk down to the Europeans – and you cant really blame them when we set our ambitions to low. We learned that China is getting bigger and that the English language is taking of the world – which is nice for us Brits.We learned that French politicians will pick a coin out of piece of dogshit with their teeth if it will get them a vote (I paraphrase this quote from Flaubert).For those of you who didn’t know most of the audience at LeWeb3 are...
Earlier in the year I was seriously considering attending Loic LeMeur’s Le Web 3 conference at the start of this week. I’m disappointed I missed David Weinberger’s presentation, but I’m glad I missed out the rest. There seems to be a lot of resentment over the way the conference was handled, and hijacked by French Politicians. Dennis has a positive spin on what Loic was trying to achieve, but I imagine the backlash from many of the core constituents will make number 4 a very difficult event to sell. Robin Hamman is a journalist for BBC English Regions and co-ordinator of the BBC Blogs Network. I was reading his blog, and BBC article on David Weinberger’s presentation “Blogging Our Way to Democracy”. He is...
Simon Collister shows Katie Jenkins - the founder of Live The Lingo - the different blogging options available to would-be bloggers at LeWeb3 in Paris. Typepad or Blogger - which way will she go?MUSING ON THE COMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRY AND THE MEDIA IN GENERAL. NO AGENDA. NO THEORIES. NO PHILOSOPHY. JUST TRYING TO UNDERSTAND WHAT'S HAPPENING IN THE WORLD. PR, Media, Blogs, blogging, press,...
It’s always a dangerous thing to meet someone you’ve admired from afar – so I wasn’t sure how I would react when I met Gaping Void’s Hugh MacLeod.He’s due two wrap up the conference with a talk on micro-branding I think. I’ve just met him in the coffee area and can report he is a top bloke. I like the way has created, in Stormhoek and English Cut, two very different stories that were seeded on the internet to grow into two successful businesses by basically sticking two fingers up to business convention.I think we both agreed that as soon as you start telling a story about your brand or product – they will come. That has been the case with Wensleydale and Ladybank Company of Distillers.By the way there has been some interest at the conference about Ladybank and the whole...
The second part of the morning session allowed David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati to pimp up his company. Which was fine but I learned nothing new other than the more you blog, and the longer you have blogged, and more site that link to you means that you will have more authority as a source.I’ve never understood this argument unless you accept that the more links you means you have more authority – do links mean quality though? No. There are is a large British contingent here but it is still dominated by the Fren ch and the vasy majority of the big name speakers are American. They appear to be here on missionary work and you get the feeling our ex-Colonial friends don’t give a damn about the Old World – with our different cultures and languages we are just too amorphous...
LeWeb3.0 – Early morning session.Brilliant no internet connection as Orange managed to cut the wire. So far it’s all be a bit underwhelming. Have I learned anything new? No I don’t think so – just had a few prejudices and beliefs confirmed. So then who has said what? Niklas Zennstrom, founder of Skype and Kazaa said that English will be the language of the interent – which probably didn’t please our French hosts, adding that the developing countries will become more competitive by harnessing their skills in English through the best use of the internet. He added that anything that can be digitized will be digitized . Four out of five stars for content.Lorraine Twohill, Marketing Director EMEA, Google. Message was Google is great. Two stars. Has Rosling, Professor...
So I’ve been in Paris all week. I was here last week and will be here for three days next week. I’m so totally sad, I’ve been commuting out to the burbs on the RER, working all day and then coming back to the hotel and working the evenings as well. I’ve had to cancel my going to LesBlogs3 and have done no strolling around soaking up the sights, no catching up with folk, no doing Christmas shopping etc. all a bit weird really…
Anyhow, I haven’t had a mo to publish much and I’ve been grabbing the odd snap en passant but the Shozu uploader is disabled in roaming mode to prevent me having more bandwidth-related punch-ups with mobile phone companies. Normal picture stream behaviour resumes Friday night (geolocation by...
