How new web technologies will change your business

I am just about to leave for the Les Blogs 2.0 conference which will be taking place on december 5 and 6 in Paris and i thought it would be interesting to list here the main points about why todays conferences are different from the ones you might know.

New web technologies are changing the usual conference mostly because people can communicate between each other before, during and after the conference:

Before: Who’s who
Once the conference has been announced, each people subscribing to the event are listed on the participant page, thus letting everyone know who’s gonna be there. Subscriber mostly use their blog address so its fairly easy to get to know what each participant is about. Really interesting point here is to see the country where are participant from: France, USA, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Netherland, England, Spain, Canada (!), Denmark and so on.

Same goes with the speakers list growing every week, aside from the conference schedule.

So basically, anyone interested in the conference can see the organisation and the schedule around the event growing every week. I am watching whats happening around Les Blogs 2.0 conference since it was first announced in august.

During the conference: Bloggers attack
This is a conference about blogs, so guess what, loads of people in there will be blogging the event live (i will) and list on their blogs info that they want to keep as an archive or stuff they want to share with their readers.

In this case, soon before the conference someone created a list of all participant and speakers RSS feeds (RSS feed are a way to subscribe to blogs so you can keep up with the blogs you are interested into. Read more about RSS feed here). This list will be used mostly by people who can’t attend the conference but want to be kept in the loop of what’s happening over the conference.

The conference in text, pictures, audio and video
Participants will blog text, pictures, audio (podcast) and video (vlog) from the conference and what’s happening around, so you’ll basically feel like if you were there.

Pictures of the conference will all be tagged under a definite code, which in this case could be ‘lesblogs2’ – so by visiting the flickr page associated with the tag ‘lesblogs2‘ you’ll be able to see all pictures posted.

Here are all pictures tagged with ‘lesblogs’ from the previous conference: lesblogs on flickr;

here are all blog post tagged with ‘lesblogs’: lesblogs on technorati;

here is a page listing all participant posts now and during the conference;

here is a Linkedin group that was created for all participants to network before and after the conference.

That’s about it for a round up, i’m sure i am missing some things but i think you’ll get the idea. My point here was to show how new web technologies changed many things, one being the way communities are created and are growing, how the information is now spread all over and not kept into walls anymore. Our planet is getting smaller every day, we’re now all neighbors.

I’ll be off to Paris soon, and will be blogging here, posting pictures on my flickr account, and what else, take some time off!