Back from a very interesting, intense 48 hours in Paris. Les Blogs was well worth it - not least for meeting lots of people for the first time, including Euan, Halley and Doc, and having good chats with folk I’ve known (a little) longer, like Hossein and Adriana. There’s so much interesting stuff coming from these people and others, and the general chatter around and about blogs just isn’t picking it up yet.

So that’s probably why I was left slightly frustrated by the "Mainstream media strikes back" panel I was part of - the discussion was dominated by questions around how Le Monde and a French radio station are moderating / censoring their very popular blog services. It shouldn’t have been surprising, I suppose, given we were in Paris, and the questions from the floor were driving the session. And the people asking the questions were certainly very passionate about the thought of media companies regulating blogs, even if the companies were honest about having to do so (as I remarked on the back channel during the talk, I felt very glad I wasn’t in my French panel colleagues’ shoes - the questioning was the most hostile of the day).

The thing is, however, that I’m sure that having your own blog hosting service is the 2005 equivalent of the 1995 trend to start your own ISP - which is to say it utterly misses the point of the underlying, more important changes that are going on, and that it won’t seem like a great strategy for very long. I think we might look back on that debate as a little beside the point in a year or so.

I’d have also liked to hear more about the quality of what’s going up from big media companies, or other companies interested in publishing blogs either as a remix of the niche magazine business (Gawker) or as a PR thing (General Motors et al).

But these are relatively minor complaints about an event which was very stimulating, and really well run by our host Loic Le Meur [pictured with Hossein]. The real gold for those of us who have been fretting over blogs for years was always going to be over lunch or drinks later on - and it’s down to us to move the debate on to the substantive stuff. Inspired by Les Blogs, I’m going to have a go here in the days and weeks ahead - but only right after I’ve dealt with this pesky exam tomorrow. To the books!

[Tons 'o pics here, including moi]

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