During the Les Blogs 2.0 conference today -which I did not attend- there was a smackdown between Mena Trott (Founder of Six Apart) and Ben Metcalfe (Project leader at the BBC) which you can dowload here. Apparently Ben was using the backchannel to badmouth the speakers; Loïc Le Meur, as chief moderator of the IRC, showed it on screen; and Mena went ballistic. Miss Rogue (or whatever her real name is) wrote a very insightful post about it.
It is always interesting to witness an outburst of violence generated by conflicting egos. Mena was on stage, as the founder of an outstanding start-up company. She thus was exposed and was careful about what she said to an audience of clients, prospects or investors. Ben was in the audience, as one of the many bloggers present. He wanted some attention and thus was playing wise guy on the backchannel discussion. The communication bandwidth between them was bound to be small, and Loïc made it visible by showing it on screen. Loïc knew what he was doing by the way. Hence the clash.
This shows that some people attending the Les Blogs 2.0 conference may have deluded themselves into thinking that they still were part of an elite of early practitioners of a emerging phenomenon as it was only two years ago. But blogging has become a mainstream practice like writing or speaking. This sense of belonging to a community of pioneers we felt as early bloggers two years ago is gone. The original blogging community -as a community of practice- which really existed when I started blogging has split into sub-communities with very different perspectives, and very little issues in common. What fascinates me is blogging with respect to collaborative leadership, i.e. how blogs are used within the strategic scope of learning and intelligence gathering. I am quite bored with the debates about blogs vs. the press, blogs and marketing, or blogs in politics.
It also makes me wonder about the rationale behind this conference. Was it really a meeting of like-minded practitioners coming to learn from one another, or was it really a big celebration party where attendees can meet young, successful, and sometimes attractive people and socialize with them around cocktails and petits-fours? People come to conferences to build their social network. For this network to be truly useful and actionable, it must be based on trust, and thus be made of competent and benevolent people. When both competence and benevolence are high, conversations really become interesting. On the other hand, if you invite brilliant speakers, bad listeners, business leaders, rookies, ugly people, top models etc. all at the same time, it's more like a party. And from my experience, when you allow your friends to bring their friends to your party, people tend not to behave too well.
Whether this event is to be reported in the Economist or in Gala is still to be debated, but in any case, I believe Loïc has been successful in making attendees feel special, and he deserves the credit for that.
