I guess that’s the journalist training. If you are hearing strong emotions going one way, try to find out the other side of the story. I don’t always do that and when I don’t, and I really am honest with myself, and go back and look at it later, my audience is always underserved. So, I’ve been looking for a positive view of Le Web. Hugh Macleod gave one. Thanks Hugh. That brings back memories of last year’s Le Blog conference.

Personally I agree with Hugh. The time for blogging conferences to end is here. I’m getting tired of them. Why? I rarely learn something new.

But there is something in the air. Spending a few hours at Google got me excited again. I’m playing with a Blogger blog just to play around away from public view.

I am playing with JavaScript and all the latest gadgets and gidgets and widgets and code (Mark Lucovsky hates calling them anything but code, by the way, cause he says looking at it any other way starts to limit your thinking. He pointed out that most gadgets on blogs are rectangular. He asked me “why do they need to do that?” Then he showed me lots of examples where code sprayed results into the page in a totally non-rectangular way. And the stuff he demoed on maps is cool. I’ll get that video up for Christmas so we can all spend Christmas break copying JavaScripts from each other and playing around.

I want to go to a conference that Mark Lucovsky plans. One where he just shows me tip after tip of things I could do on my blog with code.

Why is JavaScript interesting to me? Because I can go to a site like Google’s Code site, check out the samples, have it generate code for me, and copy and paste that code into my blog’s template.

If I start to get more advanced, I can even built a little gadget for Windows Vista’s sidebar. Or, build a gadget for inclusion in Goowy, Pageflakes, Live.com, MyYahoo, or a raft of other gadget hosts.

I’m seeing a TON of innovation hitting in this space. Even Microsoft, who is seen as behind in the Internet space, has something like 470 gadgets, most of which were created by folks in the community.

The recent Gadget conference planned by Niall Kennedy sold out, without much PR or marketing.

So, maybe it’s time for “Blogging 2007 Style.” Hint: it ain’t your standard old blog anymore.

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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While it looks as though the socializing was a success, it seems that you can’t say the same for the conference itself.

Some quite astonishing accounts of how the event was hijacked by French politicians. A lot of anger is being expressed in blog posts by bloggers across Europe, directed at Loic for allowing this to happen.

The photo here by Ben Metcalfe probably sums up those angry feelings.

German blogger and podcaster Nicole Simon (who I know well) has a damning indictment:

[] This event has been hijacked to be a pit stop of the french presidential election campaign. I do not go to a EUROPEAN conference to listen to a guy in french talking about french politics. I do not care as they do not care. I would have had less problem with having this scheduled on the program, it being in french and having the rest in order.

I did not go to a conference to have to show my id to get in. I did not intent to go to a tech conference and find myself having barred out of the big room because some security wants to search it.

I do not tolerate that a lot of my friends who are supposed to be speaking for 20 min got told the day of the speaking that oh they have to make it in like 10 minutes to make space for some “last minute changes” while as the same time it was possible to organize translation headsets and translaters for those french politicians. I will not tolerate that for another politician questions are cut off of people coming to this conference for a totally different thing.

I will not get taken hostage being part of an audience where the headline actually can be “politician in front of 1000 of europe’s top technology attendees.”

While I did get a free pass for the conference I still have expenses of several hundred dollars in travel expenses plus my time. This event was set up to be a great conference. But nearly everybody I was talking to was disgusted, disappointed and especially personally disappointed with Loic in this. French too btw.

Plenty of others, too – Dieter Rappold in Austria, for instance, whose post includes a long list of links to other bloggers’ commentaries. Shane Richmond, news editor of The Daily Telegraph, says:

[] I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. Like many here I can’t help feeling robbed of what I came to see. Today’s topics were far more interesting than yesterday’s but I don’t think the rearranged schedule has done them justice.

I’ve heard that the session about Second Life I was due to present on was cancelled at the last minute, I guess to make way for a politician as Nicole mentions.

And I’ve not seen any positive commentary about the conference from anyone, all overshadowed by anger.

That’s not to say that nothing positive happened. On the contrary, a couple of interesting products and services were launched at Le Web 3:

• Luxembourg based Wikio, a user-contributed news company, launched Wikio.com, Wikio.de and Wikio.es, aimed respectively at the US, Germany, and Spain.
• US wiki company Socialtext launched Socialtext Unplugged, a tool that lets you download pages from your wiki and work on it when you’re not connected to the internet.

Guillaume du Gardier has some good video interviews.

Still, wow.

Clearly Loic’s reputation and credibility are firmly on the line. Looking forward to seeing what he has to say about things.

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

I have one more interview to do today, but looks like Loic has a full meltdown of attendee feelings (people are VERY angry, on first look at posts from the conference, because Loic had a couple of politicians who spoke in French, didn’t take questions, and gave a political speech where attendees expected talk of blogging and technology). I have no idea what I’d do if I were in his position. One thing it tells me: don’t give your audience something they didn’t expect.

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

Go to Scobleizer …

Le Web 3 is the successor conference to the two “Les Blogs” events that took place in 2005, all organized by Loic Le Meur.

This third conference has some impressive sponsors and looks like it will be the blockbuster event in this series. There’s an outstanding programme and around 930 people attending from across the world.

If you’d planned to be there and haven’t signed up yet, you’re now too late as it’s sold out and registration closed today.

I’ll be there as a speaker, taking part in a session entitled “When will virtual life be better than our real life?”

Good question

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.