Les Blogs: Product Panel

First post regarding Les Blogs. The start of the conference was challeging: limited network coverage, very long process to get all attendees through, etc. So we got going almost an hour late, but that's fine. After a welcome message from "Le Club Senat" and Joi's comments, we got going on the Product panel, which was loosely moderated by Loic and engaged almost immediately with the audience: Were on the panel:

• Barak Berkowitz, Six Apart
• Meg Hourihan, consultant & co-founder, Blogger.com
• Caterina Fake, Flickr
• Charlie Schick, Nokia

Since the panel was not too structured, I am just mentioning snippets of what everyone said.

Caterina: Photographs are easy to produce, share and consume. More and more people will have a blog that will be comprised mostly of photos, shared with a few people, with tagging and social networking features. Videos are more challenging to produce, consume and search.

Meg: Evolution of the concept of "blogging", which will evolve towards the democritization of content production, distribution and remixing. It is a new way of conneting with the world.

Charlie: Growth will be in leveraging media distribution as an excuse to connect and engage in a conversation.

Barak: It is not about Media. Study: "Bloggers are people with too much time on their hands, thinking way too much of themselves". SixApart wants to change this image, and has therefore a large platform strategy.

Stewart: "The Cat blog is fine" (Meg had sort of downplayed the personal blog). And points to Scoble as a unique brand that will make it difficult for Microsoft to "unload".

Caterina: "If I was to have another career, I would want to be fired for blogging - it is a big career blogger".

Caterina: "Key for success: open APIs, be blog friendly, and integrate well with the rest of the ecosystem."

Barak: "There is a huge need for independance, outside of the walled gardens (AOL, Yahoo,...). Hence the possibility for SixApart to thrive. And blogging is a powerful asynchronous communication mechanism.

Question: on fear of changes in the legislature that would stiffle communication. There are a few suits going against bloggers (Joi, Apple suing,...), and there is a debate around providing bloggers with the same legal protections as journalists. Barak points out to the fact that sometime bloggers behave as if they were not subject to law, and then are "chocked" if they get legally challenged.

As a bonus, a few of my pictures of the conference:

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