Le Web 3. Why are there politicians here?
I’m at the Le Web 3 conference in Paris. Loic Lemeur has managed to gather around a thousand people all deeply involved in the latest cutting-edge web technologies. It should be a conference about the cutting-edge issues and problems facing the IT industry.
But for some reason, Loic has decided to turn this conference into a venue where French politicians and presidential candidates can use the stage (that I’ve paid €300 to view) as a platform for starting their presidential bids. So far, we’ve had Bayou and in a minute right-winger Nicolas Sarkozy will appear on stage. He will speak in French, just like Bayou did. Which is strange, considering that half of the audience does not speak French. Many probably don’t know who Sarkozy is, and even more people don’t know who Bayou is. And let me make one thing clear. French politicians cannot teach me anything about “Le Web”. So far, I’ve heard nothing but clich� statements about the “importance of the Internet” and the “emergency of new media”. Oh, really. I know that. I’ve known that for seven years.
Some things have been good, though. A presentation of Second Life by Linden Labs was interesting, but failed miserably because of a dreadfully slow internet connection. Shame on the organisers. A young american researcher made a great presentation of Myspace’s virtues and failings and yesterday the presentations of Technorati and Gapminder were particularly good.
But the tone of today’s meetings were established this morning by a very strange appearance by former israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, who rambled about everything from nanotechnology to evil “terrorists”. Strange. And pointless. Unless it was just for kicks.
But as James Higgs says, the food is good.
However, the overall impression was neatly summed up on stage just now. A scottish World of Warcraft player declared his profound dislike for French politicians talking about things they know nothing about. And there was great applause.
Sarkozy is finishing his remarks now. As I suspected, I learned nothing. And he is taking no questions. Amazing.