Great (if sparse) lunch here – lots of chances for stimulating conversations, I talked to Lee Bryant, Anu Gupta, Loic LeMeur, Euan Semple, Martin Dugage (briefly) and Doc Searls – got lots of audio for a podcast for later – will need editing down. Lots of talk about the format and how we could/should do something different in London – but also about the range of people and how difficult it is to pitch presentations. These are just my first impressions and I’m sure more mature reflection will show that it’s really not that bad at all – it’s a great opportunity to meet people I read everyday and even some who read me – and Loic has done a fantastic job here – wifi, backchannel, good control of the main screen during talk sessions, I don’t want to play that down at all, it just doesn’t feel bloggy enough – but as I said to Euan, you have to do it this way in order to know that you’d like to do it differently.

I think there’s also a huge diversity of experience and understanding here. There are guys who’d been blogging 4 years when I started. There are people who have no blog. There are people who weren’t quite sure what a blog is – let’s hope they are sure now.

tag: lesblogs

LoicLeMeur Wiki – Internet 2.0

Took us some time to get in, I arrived at 8.30 and there was already quite a line didn’t get seated until 9.15 and Joi Ito got started around 9.45 – you can see some of the people who arrived in the line before me and those after me on flickr.

so far we’ve had Joi, Caterina Fake, Meg Hourhan, Barak & Charlie, some corporate bloggers where I tuned out and now Ross, Lee and Euan are talking about social software.

my battery may die soon so don’t know how long I’ll manage. Also had no coffee since breakfast.

Lee is showing a slide saying traditional enterprise software bad, social software good. Nobody has mentioned yet the irony of the format – 3 smart guys talking to 200 smart guys and gals.

lesblogs

So I’m in Gay Purreee for LesBlogs. Arrived at Gare du Nord at 17h00 and took a far too leisurely stroll down to my hotel in the 6th – not too bad a distance in a city that you know well, but I’ve never walked around in Paris in my life. So ended up being late for dinner with my brother’s girlfriend but not too late for a delicious Roti de porc farci au duxellois (dunno what farci or duxellois are but it was delicious) and the company and conversation were lovely too.

Slight grrrs because the electric adapters I bought in London don’t work (they haven’t a requisite hole) and I told them specifically where I was going. Luckily the hotel reception is well stocked, but the chap looked a little shocked when I asked for two – one for my laptop, one for my minidisc of course.

Other grrr is that since my last trip abroad (shows how infrequently I travel) vodafone seem to have introduced a “roaming bar” that I didn’t know about and therefore did nothing about and so my mobile won’t connect.

Ahh well, a whole day of frogblogs tomorrow. Photos will be on flickr tagged lesblogs. I hope to be live blogging as long as my battery holds out/I can leech power and I shall be gathering audio for a conference podcast and also planning a podwalk for Tuesday morning.

Bath and sleep, registration starts at 08h00!!

tags: Lesblogs & Paris

to, well not really the ridiculous – it was for charidee after all (and so naturally I don’t want to talk about it) – but it certainly was surreal.

After starting the day so well (see below), I popped over to South Kensington with my friend Helen to attend London’s first Sheep Race. There weren’t any real sheep in South Ken, natch, but we were treated to lunch and recorded highlights of a race that took place last week in the Welsh borders. We were reminded several times that this was London’s first Sheep Race, were spared too many jokes about sheep and randy Welshmen and happily got to give Children with Leukemia some money – overall the event raised just over £1,000.

A good morning for podcast listening on the train into London.

First up Morning Coffee Notes for April 14th from Dave Winer, in which he answers questions for Robert Scoble and Shel Israel about how and why he started blogging and what was the story with the creation of RSS, oh yeah and remembers he hasn’t paid his taxes…yet.

Then into Bicycle Mark‘s first Portugese-only Audio Communique #27 – “fantastica”…was just one of the words I managed to understand – but why does he talk about Madge so much – madge this, madge that. My experience of Portuguese (apart from my inability to spell it straight off – keep forgetting the second u, putting it in and then taking it out again) is that some words are easier to understand written down and some are easier to understand when spoken – so perhaps I’d be able to understand more of a film with subtitles – don’t know until you try.

Finally an IT Conversations/Tech Nation with Moira Gunn interviewing Keith Devlin from Stanford University about innate mathematical ability in humans and many other animals. It’s a really interesting conversation that walks the line between saying “Well….duh!” and “Hey there’s probably something interesting in this” Bonus point – Keith Devlin has a similar Northern English accent (at least to my ear) to David Gurteen – Now I’ll find that one’s from Liverpool and the other one’s from Hull!

Tag: podcasts