Remember The Interceptor? Treasure Hunt? Challenge Anneka?* Well, next week we'll be joining in with a live Treasure Hunt that's going to be more thrilling than all three combined. (Who even knew that was possible, right? I know.)

Hunt organiser, Vodafone, has got us on board to help out with giving clues and searching for the "Live Guy", who will be rushing round to most of the major cities of Great Britain, giving away Dell Inspiron mini 9 netbooks to anyone who can catch him.

We'll be bringing you more exciting details on Friday, but in the meantime, you can check out the Live Guy website.

*Yes you do - you're just pretending to make me feel old.

Yes, it's true! Tech Digest is recruiting a new editor (steel yourselves, people, your beloved editor, Kat, is moving on to pastures new). We're looking for a tech-loving web-head who knows and loves Tech Digest, who understands all kinds of geekery, and who feels an overwhelming urge to write funny and irreverent (but at the same time, intelligent) posts all day long. If you think that you'd make a great editor for Shiny Media's oldest and biggest blog, see overleaf for details of how to bring yourself to our attention. You'll be following in the illustrious footsteps of Stuart Dredge, Dave Walker, Al Warmington, Katherine Hannaford, Ashley Norris, and... err... me.

According to the programme, the panel members are as follows: Benjamin Bejbaum, Daily Motion, Nir Ofir, BlogTV Robert Scoble – PodTech, Conrad Riggs – Mark Burnett Productions (LongelyGirl15), Jeff Pulver – Pulver Media. But thanks to this new fangled trend for not bothering to introduce yourself properly, I'm pretty sure we have someone from Seesmic instead of someone from Daily Motion.

So far it mainly seems to consist of them showing us their geek TV services, including Scobleizer and Pulver Media. If this is what we'll all be watching on a Sunday evening instead of Cranford, shoot me now. But I'm suffering an afternoon slump brought on by too much French cheese at lunchtime, so have decided to move proceedings to Shiny Shiny's Twitter page instead (usually inhabited by Susi). If you'd like to listen to me chattering unnecessarily (along with all the hundreds of other Le Web 3 Twitterers) you can join me here.

Pigeons are faster than ADSL. And so are snails.

Yes, it's true, Yossi Vardi, easily the funniest and most engaging speaker of the conference "did a test" and compared the transfer speeds of carrier pigeons carrying a memory card from one town in Israel to another (aka Wi-Fly) and a standard ADSL connection transferring the data from computer to computer, and the Pigeon travelled the distance faster. At least, that's what he said and I believe everything he says.

And a snail strapped to a cart made of DVDs could drag the data across the room faster. I have no idea what's true and what isn't in the world any more, but all I know is Yossi Vardi is my new hero and I love him simply for showing me stupid videos of pigeons and snails. And all the people who blah blah blahed and over-ran and obliged him to skip most of his presentation are now my mortal enemies.

[edit: god bless the internet - someone has uploaded Yossi's talk to YouTube. video after the jump]

Question: if you create an open system that allows people to upload whatever they want, how do you stop those systems from just becoming huge spam fests that ruin search results? Obviously Jason Calacanis is going to tell you that the answer is Maholo, his new people powered search engine.

He's given the speech many times before, but this time he took the opportunity to name and shame the people he felt were responsible for the spamfest that is the internet, including the founder of Blogger, Ev Williams, Seth Goldin, entrepreneur and founder of Squidoo and Dave Sifry, founder of Technorati.

So, after that long preamble from the judging panel, the winners were announced at lightning speed, leaving us desperately scrabbling around trying to work out how to spell half of the winners. So, without any more preamble from me, here are the winners:

First Place
GooJet – Mobile live (pictured)

Second Place
PLYmedia - Monetise your video.

Third Place
G.ho.st - Complete virtual computer in your web browser

Runners up
Erepublik – Massive online strategy game.
Split Games – Network of gamers. Share reviews and games. "We give the gamers everything they need."

TF1 award
Holistis

Meanwhile, Ashley sat in on the actual pitching, so click over the jump for his report...

So here we are, Day Two of Le Web 3, 2007. While I spent the day sat in the main conference hall listening to the speakers, my fellow Shiny, Ashley Norris, has been over in the Start-up Dock listening to new businesses pitch their ideas to a panel of judges.

Now, back with me in the main hall, the judging panel have congregated to announce the winners. Members of the panel include Robert Scoble and a number of venture capitalists and other web entrepreneurs, including Jean-David Chamboredon from 3i, Saul Klein from Index Ventures and Seedcamp.

I'm currently privy to a very interesting and tightly argued discussion about whether the web is killing our society. It seems that Emily Bell (of The Guardian Unlimited) and controversial author Andrew Keen (most famous for 'Cult of the Amateur') have argued this many many times before and seem to have a very easy relationship where they feel comfortable insulting each other like some sort of bickering elderly couple.

I've put in some of their key points below, but for a short precis of how the argument went: Andrew makes a point about how the internet is rubbish (in one way or another), Emily calmly points out why he is wrong whilst rolling her eyes and laughing; Andrew says “yeah, I mean, I agree with you, I couldn't cope without the internet any more than anyone else”, and so on...