LES BLOGS 2 - Paris December 5-6th 2005: Opening remarks: welcome to Les Blogs 2.0 !

On behalf of Six Apart, the entire team who organized les blogs that I will introduce you in a few minutes and all our partners, welcome to Les Blogs 2.0, welcome to Paris.

I can't believe you have made it all here today ! Here is where you are from to begin with. Let's raise your hands if you like when your Country is named to check we have the right statistics:

France 144
USA 40
U.K. 31
Germany 28
The Netherlands 22
Belgium 12
Italy 11
Switzerland 11
Spain 10
Denmark 8
Canada 6
Hungary 5
Ireland 5
Finland 4
Austria 3
Sweden 3
China 2
Ghana 2
Japan 2
Luxembourg 2
Guinea 1
Iceland 1
Israel 1
Peru 1
Zaire 1

I wonder if our registration system was right... Anyway, thank you all for joining us. We never thought we would fill-in so fast a room of 350 seats and we ended up turning down unfortunately about 150 people in the last two weeks. We really regret that and wish we would have had a bigger room but it was impossible for us to find another one in such a short delay !

What (still) amazes us the most is that we did not send any invitation or worse, paper invitation, we did not send any email spam (!), we did not invest a € in marketing the event itself to have you all join us. Only blog word of mouth. Some people say this new way of thinking is the end of traditional marketing. We're not quite there yet, but sure, there is something else happening.

I recall a person two weeks ago who told me "you did not invite me", I answered, we invited everybody ;-)

We would like to thank our parners, Edelman, MSN UK, vpod.tv (surprise partner !), Nokia, Fon, Hubert Burda Media, Bullguard, Skype, Altaïde, Europe 1 and the International Herald Tribune for making this event possible and providing such a coverage. There will also be around 40 press representatives covering the event from all around the World, thanks for coming too.

We would also like to thank all the speakers for traveling from so far for the event and all of you again for making it, you're all speakers, vpod.tv has setup a backchannel (Ben, will you be the "antiscoble" guy again like in Denmark at Reboot ? Careful, I know Robert wants to be the antiBen this time !) so that you can participate and speak all the time, please just be nice to our speakers except with Jason Calacanis who cancelled last minute even though he was scheduled on the closing session ;-) Oh Jason just apologized for not being with us, I take this back !

The entire on screen animations you'll see are provided as a surprise and a premiere by the team of vpod.tv. I don't even know what to expect, they have hacked the conference screens...

Finally, thank you to the Paris Chamber of Commerce and the Negocia business school for hosting us in this beautiful room in the center of Paris.

Now you may wonder why Six Apart is investing so much time and efforts to organize such an event.

We believe there is a revolution going-on. We believe the World is changing extremely fast with blogging and we see it every day with the 10 million+ bloggers using Live Journal, TypePad and Movable Type. We want to help us all better understand this incredibly fast phenomenon and its consequences.

The reason we have organized this second session of Les Blogs is more than just to network. We believe we have here for the next two days a unique opportunity with 25 Countries in the room to think about how blogging is changing the World.

We have designed the program so that we cover most aspects of this revolution: corporate, media, education, democracy, politics and what are the tools we all use and how they constantly improve. Of course we miss many topics, we would need a full week to add how it impacts religions with the hundreds of churches who are already podcasting just as an example.

We would like all of us to take the opportunity of these two days to write how we feel the world is changing and write how we see the future.

In order to follow what we are all posting, there is the Les Blogs Wiki where you will find all the programme structure and we hope you will contribute to it either directly by writing on it or by linking to your posts and what are your feelings on all the topics covered in the sessions and about the future.

Please also tag all your posts with the "lesblogs" tag, so that we can all follow easily the conversation.

We would like to have more than hundreds of posts about how we see how blogging is changing the World, we would love to see a living document at the end that anybody can read and that would keep updating as we all learn. Should we reach a good enough document, I guess we should then move it back to Wikipedia ? Let's see how well we will do on this one... I hope you like the idea.

Nokia is offering a brand new Nokia n90 to the best contributor to this project. Now I have no idea how to decide who will be the winner: number of links ? best post ? number of delicious links ? vote ? the last panel on future decides ? Give me your suggestions please on the wiki and if we miserably fail we will just have somebody randomly win it.

Let's now dive quickly into what will keep us busy during the conference.

Let me finally introduce you to the team who prepared the conference for you (Guillaume, Elizabeth, Geraldine, Yannick and Ross come on stage). Guillaume and Elizabeth had put together an event on the tools of blogging in Paris a few months earlier Les Blogs and kindly accepted to merge their program into ours and help organizing it especially on the wifi (thanks for all your efforts, Wavestorm and France Telecom even though we had a client/supplier relationship I trust the result will be great). Yannick has done a tremendous work organising everything with us especially liasing with the speakers, the Les Blogs blog and so many other things... Ross will help the wiki grow during the event and link to your best posts. I have not even met Ross yet (or just done so in the morning, magic of the blogs...) Finally Geraldine managed the most, the registration, the room, organzing the lunches, the evening and everything else.

Oh and of course, thanks Nicole for the pre-conf and the during-conf podcast !

We are all here to help you thoughout the conference.

We already know we could have done so many things better. We got remarks that there were not enough bloghers on stage, we'll do better next time we promise. Last time we forgot coffee (!) and the wifi was terrible, so we hope this time it's better, we are taking all your feedback seriously and try to improve.

I'll just finish by a few housekeeping remarks:

• please respect Negocia, the business school of the Paris Chamber of Commerce that receives us, there are students and classes all around
• do not smoke inside the builing outside of the upstairs smoking room
• the funniest part will probably be the backchannel, use it as you wish but please be nice to the speakers again, except Jason
• there is a second room we could just manage to have, on the right hand side of the main room the first day, in the front on tuesday. This room is yours, use it to meet and as you wish, just keep everything in place please or the school will fire us !
• any other housekeeping remarks on the wiki

Enough opening remarks, welcome again everybody and have a great conference !
-Loïc