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The third event seems to be a tipping point for yearly conferences: Finally word has gotten from the insiders to the mainstream that it’s the place to be. That’s why there were more than 1000 people at this year’s Le Web 3 conference. For me, the action was clearly in the hallway. Much like at any good Internet gathering, I spent most of the time talking to people about the industry and meeting new entrepreneurs or colleagues. That’s why it was worthwhile for me to come to Paris, but if you’d like to learn more about the sessions I’d recommend a quick technorati search for people who didn’t skip as many as I did. It doesn’t seem to me that I missed too much, though, and there were a little too many sponsors or people close to the organizers up on stage as well.
To me, the question is what this conference will look like next year - if the conference gets any bigger, it’ll probably become too big for my taste…so there is a risk that this year was the peak or - hopefully - Loic will build Le Web into a sustainable, long term conference format such as some of the big US Internet conferences like DEMO or PC Forum.

A lot has been said on the blogs about the political component on the second conference day, which peaked in what I thought was an unacceptable performance by Nicolas Sarkozy. Not only was his speech high-level and didn’t seem to reach beyond a trivially abstract level, it was also read from a manuscript that he seemed to see for the first time. Worst of all, after the speech Sarkozy literally fled the stage without taking a single question.
Now I think it’s a good thing to enter a discourse with politics on such an event, and it’s great that Loic LeMeur manages to get people like Sarkozy to show up. Yet, it was a slap in the face of the open discussion culture of such an event. It looked like Loic was doing Sarkozy a favor by giving him a chance to promote his agenda in front of an international audience and a bunch of TV cameras. Well, maybe that makes Loic look good, but it certainly makes no sense that Sarkozy is the only speaker at such a conference that doesn’t have to take questions.
And yes, it is possible to integrate a political discussion in such an event in a better way: I remember being to Esther Dyson’s PC Forum and if I remember right it was the head of the largest US union who was invited. He gave a speech that was to the point and had obviously been prepared with the audience’s background in mind. More importantly, after the speech the floor was opened for questions and a lively discussion followed. That’s interaction. Sarkozy’s speech was pure campaigning and, sorry, that’s not what I came to Paris for.

technorati tags: leweb3, conference