A pungent mix of programming, philosophy, pedanticism, procrastination, perplexity, peripheral political polemic, and platters of preposterousness.
Jean Kazez: After eight long years of Bush, it would be a delight to have a thoughtful, articulate, calm, inspiring person in the White House.
Hear hear!
I have been invited this year to be an accredited blogger at the Le Web ‘08 conference in Paris in December. Subject to travel arrangements working out, I’m planning on taking this up. First, a little about the conference.
Le Web is an interesting conference: it’s run and hosted by Loïc Le Meur, one of the pioneers of blogging in France and currently the founder of Silicon Valley-based video startup Seesmic. It’s original incarnation was as a blogging conference - Les Blogs - in 2004 and 2005. In the last two years, it has morphed into being a commercial Web conference, one of the largest in Europe in fact. Even with the heavy commercial angle, it has still managed to have an interesting complement of speakers from both inside and outside of the technology/business world. In 2006 and 2007, Professor Hans Rosling gave an amazing talk at the conference about global health statistics and how one can change the world’s health for the most disadvantaged. Other speakers from outside the tech space have included the designer Philippe Starck, a debate between The Guardian’s Emily Bell and Andrew “it’s all going to hell in a handcart! Buy my book to find out why!” Keen, and the exploratory hacking of Dave Winer.
This year promises to carry on this tradition with people like Brian Cox, a British particle physicist who has worked on the Large Hadron Collidor, the best-selling author and esoteric spiritualist Paulo Coelho and the American anthropologist Helen Fisher, as well as the more traditional tech and business related sessions and discussions.
The event has not been without controversy. At Les Blogs 2 in 2005, a firestorm of controversy blew up over comments made in the IRC backchannel (which you can read about here). And in 2006, while France was deep in the middle of the presidential election cycle, President Sarkozy was shuffled on to the stage to give a stump speech (as well as former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres) causing outcry and anger among bloggers - myself included.
I am hoping this year I will be able to give critical and interesting coverage both to the things said on stage and the other things going on at the conference, as well as tracking the reaction of the wider Web. I will be on whatever backchannels appear (IRC and the inevitable Twitter) trying to bridge what goes on at the conference and the opinions of the wider web. I have been given access to the conference on the basis of promising a no-bullshit, critical approach. I hope to stick to those as my terms of reference. If I think someone is full of it, I will be blogging about it. As a disclaimer, this post and the banner on the right are part of the accreditation agreement.
If you wish to come along to the conference, I will soon also have a discount code to offer you, dear readers. I’m also planning to create a feed which is just for my coverage of Le Web 08. I’d appreciate people’s feedback as to what forms of coverage they want: just text or audio also?
One thing I’ve still not figured out yet is how I am going to deal with Internet access at the conference. My hotel has Internet access in the lobby, and the conference will have (possibly shaky) wifi. I’d like to be able to get 3G access while in France, and I wonder if anyone could give me any suggestions of how to get a SIM card that would give me Internet access for a few days just to provide coverage where it’s unavailable. Also greatly appreciated would be recommendations of places I should see in Paris before the conference, and good vegetarian places to eat.
