Most of the weblogging events I've been to over the last few years – and I've done my share – do well to be in a chain hotel ballroom. Most, especially in Britain, seem to end up in bar basements, where shouted conversations – "What's your weblog? Your w-e-b-l-o-g?" – are had over remarkably loud music.
Today is slightly different. I'm in Paris, at the rather grand Palais du Luxembourg, home to the French Senat and some rather fine gardens. The event is called Les Blogs and 300 of the world's best known bloggers and interested observers have converged on the luxuriously appointed palace to talk about the future of blogging and the broader world of social software, of which blogging is a subset. French media is hailing this as the day the world of blogs comes to Paris.
I'll be updating on events here through the day.
0900 Bloggers not typically being types to hide their lights under bushels, it's a noisy gathering. But not everyone wants to actually talk to the other people in the room. Half the room have laptops open, and many are using an official conference "backchannel" – a chatroom – to communicate. They'll do that all day, while the speakers do their thing.
And, just to up the pressure on the speakers, the "backchannel" is projected on to a screen in the room, so everyone can see. Don't like what you're hearing? Tell the room. Bored? Tell the room. Found a factual error in the current presentation? Tell the room – while the presenter's still blundering on.
This is normally quite entertaining to watch, but I'll be on the receiving end later. I'm on a panel this afternoon, all about what mainstream media is doing with weblogs, talking about our blog programme here. I think my public speaking anxiety is, on this occasion, justified.
1100 With a wireless internet connection serving the whole room (and, one suspects, gently cooking our innards) the backchannel is buzzing away. A late start means people are currently using it to complain that we've lost the coffee break - something of a big thing in Paris, I'm told.
Meanwhile we get to see another blog conference phenomenon: live blogging. The fastest typists among the blogorati sit hammering away at their keyboards, recording proceedings at a near verbatim speed. You can keep track thanks to the magic of Technorati.
At the moment Ross Mayfield of software company Socialtext has some interesting comments on collaborative working in business: 90% of collaboration exists in email, and 75% of knowledge sits in email. He, of course, is selling Wikis - editable web pages - as a better way to collaborate. These are what his company's software produces. One of his selling points introduces a new buzzword - "occupational spam" - which is the kind of CC'd email you get all the time. He says Wikis cut down on that stuff by 30%.
1620: Still here, and just finished the mainstream media session. Things were dominated by questions aimed at the panel members from Le Monde and Skyrock, a French radio station, who host blogs on their servers for their readers/listeners. They were getting quite a bit of stick for censoring their blogs, and (in Le Monde's case) even banning the support of political parties. The politics rule is not a policy I could imagine working in the UK - but then, given the UK's libel laws, I'm not sure being a blog publisher for millions of people is necessarily a great business many UK radio stations or newspapers would jump at.
The Big Blog Company folk from London are recording, in some detail, events here if you're interested in the nitty-gritty of the event. And if you really want to see what it all looks like, you'll find some images from the conference here.
