On monday, we attended one of the craziest events I've been to in recent memory. Super BLoic (copyright nounours) har organized a blogging event that everyone should remember as one tipping point in web 2.0 for Europe.
Imagine (actually have a look at pictures on Flickr with LesBlogs tag) about 300 people, packed in one of the underground rooms of the French Senate. SixApart had ordered a 2Mb/s leased line for the day to allow all of us to blog live. There were sooooooooo many laptops on that day, that there were not enough electrical plugs (I had brought my own wire ;), not enough wifi bandwidth (we were surfing at about 3-4Kb/s), and there was NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO coffeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
Aside from those logistical matters, the day was absolutely great.
On the one hand, Loic had arranged a back channel with Canalchat so that us, bloggers, could interact live with the panelists and the audience, giving examples to illustrate the discussion, commenting points with jokes, etc. Jacon Calacanis from Weblogs Inc (engadget!!!), even started chatting with us while on the panel - great sense of humor! You could tell this is a new way to interact in a conference. It's not a passive encounter, but a full active interaction between the panelists and the audience, making a very lively and enriching interaction between all participants. Somehow, it's back to democracy as Athenians knew it: once man, one voice.
On the other hand, it was great to meet at last Jeff Clavier and Julio Alonso whom I had been chatting up for many months, exchanging with some shakers and doers from Web 2.0 such as Jason Calacanis (mentionned above), Ross Mayfield of Socialtext, Caterina Fake - cofounder of SocialText. I had the real pleasure of listening for the first time to Doc Searls (whom Inma Martinez had asked me to convey her best regards) - really inspiring [update: his slides are here] (of course, he's the same dude writing at Linux Journal), and Yossi Vardi - founder of ICQ. And of course always great to see Joi Ito again, Yat Siu, Barak Berkovitz, Charlie Schick and the usual crowd of Parisian bloggers such as Jacques Froissant, Richard Menneveux, Anina, Fanny Bouton, Marie Hulin, Jean-Michel Billaut, Cyril Fievet, Mark Cabiling, Richard Menneveux, Jérôme Bouteillier, Frédéric Casagrande and all the others!
Now back to my title: I had been reading and reflecting on meta-tags for a while. I really had not realized their potential until today, as I relied more often than not on serach engines to search for information, documents, and multimedia items. After experiencing what tags can do, when dozens of folks exchange pictures, blog posts, links with just one tag (in our case LesBlogs), I have now realized all the potential behind this innovation. Of course from now on I will support the fast that all content must be meta-tagged, so that we can index, search & find easily digital content in the future.
Some side effects appear though: for instance, there are over 1492 pictures (latest count) on Flickr sharing the same tag. How do you separate signal from noise ?
Anyway, great ideas for new applications have come out from that day. There were also some key thoughts shared by the panelists. If you missed it, don't worry. Some of the people were recording live both audio and video, and you should be able to reconstruct the whole day with more information (several points of view) than if you were just there.
See ? Can you start imagining the new applications I'm thinking about ;) ?
Update on 5/5/05: not convinced? Check this note by Russ!
