Le Web 3 second day
Day started with video as the medium. People discussed what’s the relation going to be between videoblogging, TV and the web. Some fun video podcasts were shown, but it was a bit unclear to me where the business is in that whole videoblog thing.
Shimon Peres was profoundly interesting. He painted vivid pictures of how the world is “pregnant with a new era” and governments are going to be much less important. And the way to peace and prosperity is not through one ideology winning over another, but just enabling people live their lives through daily work and business. And that Western businesses should simply come to the Middle East. He struck me as a profoundly interesting and wise person, having a long political career and seen all of the world. He is one of those rare politicians who is actually interesting to listen to and has something to say about the world.
Danah Boyd talked about the “myspace phenomenon”, how it all started from Friendster and they then kicked people out who went to myspace. And being on myspace in the US for teens is the equivalent of having a mobile phone in Europe — if you don’t have it, you don’t exist. This was interesting to me because I’m still having a hard time wrapping my head around this whole “social sites” thing and understanding what parts of it matter and what don’t. So Danah did a good job of making this clearer.
The French presidential candidates Sarkozy and one other didn’t really impress with much and were clearly for the local audience. They at least knew what the Internet and blogs are. It was cool that even though Loic Le Meur, organizer of the conference, declared he supports Sarkozy, one other candidate still showed up and took the trouble to talk with people and even answer a questions. Sarkozy only ran in, delivered a speech and left. (And before that, the whole room was searched by dogs and bomb squads, I guess that’s because he’s a minister who’s currently in office. There was no hard security before Peres, just an ID and bag check to get in the room, but no metal scanners or other more intrusive stuff. Being constantly through intrusive airport security, this was a nice surprise for me.
The gaming sessions were interesting, talking about major online games like Second Life and World of Warcraft, and also location-placed games in real world. Then there were some two crazy funny big dudes in Scottish kilts who liked playing World of Warcraft and had done Combat Cards that is basically World of Warcraft-type combat game INSIDE Second Life 
Then the Finnish people took over for a while. Ranging from Blyk, the ad-funded free mobile network operator, to Jaiku that I would call “public mood messages from your mobile”, to Thinglink, a real-life things tagger. I can’t really remember any recent cool stuff from Finland before these. Nokia aside who is increasingly global/non-Finnish anyway, the last interesting things I can think of were F-Secure and SSH and Linus Torvalds. So it’s great to see some activity on the Finnish startup scene.
David Weinberger gave a great show of how blogging and politics are connected and how the Howard Dean campaign, despite not getting the candidate elected, was nevertheless a great example of leveraging blogging.
Hossein Derakhshan explained how Internet filtering works in Iran. He thought that a P2P RSS reader should exist to promote news reading privacy. How about Anothr.com?
Then there was a great panel about net filtering in China. Bo Y. Shao is the guy who sold his company to eBay in China. He explained why many Western companies fail in China, citing also the eBay example. They try to get by without local operations, for example eBay bought his company and then moved the servers and people to their HQ in San Jose, hoping to run it from there. This of course meant that all their traffic was now being filtered by GFW (Great Firewall of China) that previously was not a problem because it did not apply to domestic traffic. Also similar comments about people and decision making. Bo said that a good way to succeed in China is “find a good general manager who you can trust, and then just let him run”, not interfering into daily operations.
Feed
Eesti keeles