(Vu chez Jcfrog)

Extraits :

“2000-2008 : le Web 2.0.Depuis 2008 le Web en temps réel” c’est à dire la connexion en temps réel à sa/ses communauté(s)

“Le marketing communautaire”

“Une communauté de 1000 personnes suffit à faire décoller un produit”

“Un bouche à oreilles planétaire”

“Partager des choses qui vont aider les gens”

We didn’t go to Le Web but don’t feel sad for us, neither did lots of people. That hasn’t stopped them talking about it though and so we proudly present the best round-up of Le Web from the non-attendees.

Le Web: Like a web conference, without the web – Venture Beat

Love and hate at Le Web 08 – Neville Hobson

Let’s Settle the uStrem vs. Seesmic Thingie and Stop Bitching About Loic – Kfir Pravda

The Web 2.0 and the electric motor – Dominique Turcq

Did Loic LeMeur just commit a Kevin Rose? – Allen Stern

The chinses whispers upshot seems to be that it was cold, there was no wi-fi and the content was poor, for the first day at least. This is backed up by some people who actually attended, such as Paul Carr, who has ambitious but intriguing plans to host a rival event here in London, using the recently announced £1 billion investment fund for tech start-ups.

Unlike LeWeb, there will be no panels, no “fireside chats”, no goody bags, no live webcasting and absolutly no keynote speakers. Instead I’ll blow the entire budget by constructing a gigantic sauna, right in the middle of London (easier for me to get to, and a beer won’t cost nine euros a bottle) and surrounded by a moat of liquorice vodka. Each attendee will have a big, fat pipe of internet all to themselves and — of course — the whole thing will be completely free, including transport and accommodation. Every entrepreneur in Europe will be invited, and encouraged to bring a long straw.

Paul Carr, Freezing cold, no internet, boring: it’s a French web 2.0 conference, The Guardian 10/12/08

Other attendees were fare more positive and the write up by David Galbraith over at Gigaom is well worth a read, not least for the comparision between American Web 2.0 events and Le Web.

I’ve missed the last couple of Loic’s uber-conferences since they morphed into LeWeb, so it’s actually 3 years since I went to the second LesBlogs. I hear that the food has recovered from the curse of the microlunch… I’m looking forward to finding out more. If you’d like to come too, you can register here.

Last time I was in Paris, I came away quite depressed by it all – it felt like we as Europeans hadn’t found our voice. We knew we had something different to offer from the Americans but weren’t sure what it was. The silliness between Ben Metcalfe and Mena Trott epitomised that. We’ve all learned a lot since then, haven’t we?

I think I’m most comfortable with it now because I no longer have great expectations of participation. I get my participative kicks elsewhere – this is big and it’s going to be like watching telly, it just is and if I don’t feel like watching every minute of what’s on stage, I shan’t be too bothered, because I’ve built my network up now to the point where I know I’ll be able to find plenty of people to hang out with, either online or off.

Having said that, thanks to the excellent blogger outreach programme, I will be there to write about what’s going on and there are some prospective super-goodies in the programme – Brian Cox, David Weinberger, Paolo Coelho, Chris Anderson and Joi Ito stand out for me – I’m glad to see that there’s a split on the second day between the plenary and “deep discussions”

And Marc Canter is running a panel on the second morning, so the book’s open on when he’ll sing and when he’ll be asleep.

Seesmic is a tool allowing you to have video conversations with others, all videos being published online.

It is basically inspired from video podcasting, with a social touch : the videos you post are in a timeline, and other registered users can answer by video, and so on.

It includes some features inspired from Twitter : you can add friends to a list, and as in twitter, you have shortcuts to “follow” all videos posted by your friends.

As YouTube or DailyMotion, video clips could be embedded in a web page, and a WordPress plugin already exists.

The founder of Seesmic, Loic Le Meur, is a blogger well known from the french blogosphere, and has recently bought the Twitter client “Twhirl” (developed initially by a german developer Marco Kaiser, who has been integrated in the Seesmic Team). By the past, Loic was the founder of UBlog, executive VP of Six Apart, board member of Boursorama.

Seesmic is in early  alpha today, but already has a growing community of users.

From my point of view, Seesmic offers features, that by extension could change many things in the future of our communications on the web :

First for blogging: i first think we should distinguish different kinds of blogs. Many blogs , like mine, are used for publishing kind of technical tutorials, and in this case, Seesmic could not help a lot i think: text, sample codes should always be exposed in these kind of articles. I think in this case, tools for eLearning are well adapted , because they generally allow the author to display slides of the presentation , coupled with desktop recording for the demo, and videos shot from the audience showing the speaker. Generally, when you prepare this kind of presentation, video authoring is required later to assemble all these pieces of videos.

With Seesmic you should think of a single shot recording : the tool records one only scene, shot from your webcam : you speak, expose your ideas, ask your questions. Then no authoring is allowed later. You post your video on the site as is. It’s very near from a real conversation, as if you were in front of a real person, asking him some question, or had a conversation with him.

But for kinds of blogs where people write news (about a product), it can be well adapted… imagine a TV speaker broadcasting news on a network channel.

Imagine the comments made on a blog article would be short video clips… could be great.

Now, i see in the seesmic system a great tool that could even be used in enterprise. We all know how it can be difficult some time to reach our managers , because of their heavy planning. It’s not surprising they often cannot answer your phone calls, even do not have time to answer your emails, and it can be also difficult to organize real interviews with them. Some questions or types of conversations are not well adapted for text emails, with a risk of misinterpretation  by the reader… so video is welcome

Imagine now openness,  as Google (and a broad set of members of the web community) today does with Open Social , defining a common set of APIs that any social website can implement; today hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, Oracle, Orkut, Plaxo, Six Apart (Loic LeMeur was executive VP by the past) already implements this API.

Today Seesmic implements already an API called SeesmicAPI : imagine you could use these APIs to integrate in an enterprise (2.0) intranet social features of seesmic, integrate into gadgets/widgets some videos posted on seesmic, that could be addressed publicly or privately to members of your company.

I think seesmic can open many doors, and other great ideas could come. I even think of a Facebook enabled application of Seesmic (as we see with Slide integration on Facebook today, to post videos on the Funwall), to send video messages to your friends.

Seesmic is a  Flex application, for the front-end, based on the Flash technology (the Flash plugin supporting for many months builtin or USB cameras), that expose all the stuff in a single nice Dashboard.

For the little story, yesterday, during the Cannes festival, a member of the Seesmic team (called Vinvin) , organized video conversations with the team of Indiana Jones 4 (Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Harisson Ford, Karen Allen)… here the news on Loic Le Meur’s blog

En este vídeo vemos a Loic Le Meur, fundador de Seesmic, la novedosa comunidad de vídeo conversación, y Vinvin, su simpatiquísimo socio, en una visita en las oficinas de Twitter.

Seesmic, en el que soy el primer español que testea la versión pre-alpha, está siendo la gran novedad para el 2008, y ya obtiene apoyos incondicionales de gurús como Robert Scoble. Parece que el éxito de Seesmic tiene mucho que ver con la gran capacidad de influencia y comunicación de Loic, asesor de Sarkozy. Diariamente produce un vídeo muy esperado por los usuarios en el que personalmente responde respecto a nuevas funcionalidades, diseños y seduce con la ayuda del genial Vinvin a la audiencia. Todo parece indicar que durante el año 2008 viviremos con Seesmic un fenómeno muy parecido al que tuvimos este año con Twitter, que se cerró simbólicamente con la ponencia de Biz Stone en el Evento Blog España 2007. No estaría mal contar para el año que viene con Vinvin y su peculiar sentido del humor. Me ofrezco para realizar una entrevista similar a la que nos ofreció Enrique Dans a través de Twitter.

Leo vía Rober scoble (Mashable) que en los próximos meses el bloguer francés Loic Lemeur tiene previsto lanzar el “Video-Twitter”. Una extrapolación de la limitación del minibloguer de twitter al video.

Se supone que serán vídeos de muy corta duración fácilmente cargables.

El éxito estará determinado porque conjugue la simplicidad de twitter con la facilidad de subir pequeños vídeos directamente desde el móvil.