Le Web 3 Live. The funniest thing I've heard at Le Web 3 so far…

pigeon-street.jpgPigeons 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.

Le Web 3: Highlights from the French web 2.0 conference, plus the all-important explanation

This rather dishy Frenchman, Loïc Le Meur? Not only can he woo you with blue cheeses and strong wine, he’s also France’s most prolific blogger, and organiser of the Le Web conferences, of which two of Shiny Media’s directors, Katie Lee and Chris Price, have been live-blogging today.

In its third incarnation this year, organiser Loïc Le Meur has thrown a two-day conference in Paris, with panels consisting of the creme de la creme of the online world.

As Katie eloquently said in her first live-blog post this morning, ‘I always feel a little forlorn that the internet has turned into crowds of consultants and people like us with our Web 2.0 companies, Twittering, Digging, Liveblogging…

Le Web 3: Andrew Keen and Emily Bell ask if social media is killing our society?


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…

Le Web 3: According to June Cohen of TED Media, user-generated content is not new: it’s old media that’s the upstart


June Cohen, the CEO of TED Media talks about the way that our media is changing – and that it’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’ve done my best to capture what she said in her own words.

There are 110 million blogs online. Lots of us say things like that, but rarely stop to think just how incredible that number is. It’s seen as something that is beginning to dilute and replace old media. But Old Media is actually astonishingly new. If you took the extent of human history and condensed it into a single day, all of the media we use (books, tv, newspapers) would have been invented in the last 2 seconds before midnight.

Communities, however, have always existed…

Le Web 3: Possibly the most tense panel discussion I've ever witnessed!

nabaztag-style-shake.jpg
What happens when you get Mattias Leufkens, moderator of the World Economic Forum, Rafi Haladjian of Nabaztag, Iris Ben David, of Style Shake (a site that allows you to create your own clothes using an interactive design service online), and Brent Hoberman from Last Minute and mydeco sitting on a sofa together?

A vague sense of unease, that’s what. They’ve just spent the past 30 minutes talking about the impact of design on the web, and thanks…

The best thing I've heard so far at Le Web 3 – Hans Rosling, founder of Médecins Sans Frontières


“There are hundreds of types of wine, but I only know two types: red and white. I’m not interested in wines. I don’t know wines – but I know more than two hundred types of countries. My neighbour, he knows hundreds of different types of wines, but he only knows two types of countries: western countries and third world countries. There are too many people who know wine and too few people who know countries.”

If there’s one thing you would ask of bloggers, what would you ask?
“Consider how all these blogging communites may enforce the ethnic homogeny of western europe and America. Break that…