Les Blogs 2.0

I thought I’d wait until my return from Paris to write about the fantastic international two-day Les Blogs 2.0. (Though I have to admit that I’m feeling a bit inadequate here, having watched many of the other participants simultaneously blogging, chatting on irc and paying attention to the excellent speakers and panels.)

Highlights for me included the panel on Citizen Journalism and mainstream media. I particularly enjoyed hearing about Marcel Reichart’s experience at Hubert Burda Media. The visionary Burda apparently sees building and interacting with audiences as key to the future. The company uses blogs to support the online version of Focus, the popular German news magazine, which now has now has nearly a dozen blogs with daily and weekly contributions from staff and external contributors. Celebrity blogs also seemed a perfect match for entertainment mag Bunte.

Elizabeth Albrycht led a panel discussing RSS, and, it turns out, the panel’s anticipation of the imminent demise of RSS as an entity in itself, as it becomes accepted as mainstream and integral to the web.

The panel on which I sat, Tracking/Listening to the Online World, was a lively session. Guillaume du Gardier’s introduction referred to Market Sentinel’s new white paper, which for the first time sets out to prove the influence of blogging on corporations, using Jeff Jarvis’s Buzz Machine “Dell Hell” and Dell as a case study. While Jeff Jarvis’s status as a journalist would probably have assured that his poor experience would have given rise to some print exposure of Dell’s failings in this instance, the fact that he blogged it – and his cause was taken up by other bloggers with similar experiences – can now be shown to have a strong influence over Dell’s reputation for customer service.

Technorati’s David Sifry gave a powerful account of his vision for a ‘conversation stream’, up-ending the conventional analogy of the web as a ‘library’ with page ranks and indexes, and seeing hyperlinks not so much a link between documents, but as a form of social gesture. Yahoo! Europe’s Yan Motte also shared information about some of the innovative tools coming our way, including Yahoo! Mindset, a search tool which will allow us to determine the degree to which our search returns focus on transactional or research-based sites.

Ben Hammersley gave a fantastic talk about his ‘Eight ideas that will really revolutionise the 21st century’. Glad to have been there.

There are now around 3,500 photos tagged Les Blogs on Flickr. I’m told I’m the one looking poised and intellectual – see if you can spot me!

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