Monday 11 and Tuesday 12 December I was in Paris, attending Le Web 3. It is the follow-up of Le Blog 2, which was last year in Paris, organised again by Loic Le Meur. Loic told that he organised it in only 8 weeks time and used no marketing to get an audience. Appearently he didn't need it, because about 1000 participants found their ways to Paris. The topic of this year was broader than (just) blogs, it covered all kinds of topics related to Web 3 (whatever that may be - is it the Web of the future or does it already exist?).
I'm still thinking how to summarise the conference. As with every conference, there are a lot of things you can say, about the speakers, the things they say, the organisation, the audience, the atmosphere, the food (this is France, food is important!) and so on.
What I certainly will not forget is the (pleasant) chaos on the second day. At certain moment I had no idea what the program was, presentations were skipped or moved to a later moment. Only because some extra "very important" visitors arrived. "Sorry, you have to stop your presentation, mister Peres has arrived". Well, I would not mind ending my presentation for Shimon Peres, but for a French election candidate (like Francois Bayrou or Nicolas Sarkozy), that is a different story. What they have to do with Web 3 is a good question, of course they have an opinion about it (or, about Internet in general) - is it however an interesting opinion? This was Loics idea: he sent out an e-mail to a few candidates, telling Peres is coming, will you come as well? It is clear: it's Loic's party and he likes us to be part of it.
A question: what is Web 3.0, or, where are developments going? It seems to be all about content. Not the static one-way content we saw in the first generation web, but user-generated text (blogs), videos (vlogs), audio (podcasts) or virtual objects (Second Life). Whether it is offered through the computer or mobile is no issue. I don't know how different this is from Web 2.0, which I think is more aimed at communication and collaboration (and sharing, but that is the overlap with the content-focus I heard for Web 3). Hardly anybody spoke about communication and collaboration - it was all content (which surprised me).
Another striking thing: obviously users cannot pay for this content. At least, that's what I learned from the business models that were presented. Companies look for advertisers or sponsors, but the users get the content for free. My question here: why can't users pay, if there is really added value for them? Or maybe for the service that leads them to the content. Is that impossible these days?
A last remark (more to Loic): where are the female presenters? You may call me feminist, but there were a lot of women in the audience but only few on the stage.