LeWeb3: More stuff from Paris

The second part of the LeWeb3.0 morning session allowed David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati to pimp up his company. Which was fine but I learned nothing new other than the more you blog, and the longer you have blogged, and more sites that link to you means that you will have more authority as a source.

I’ve never understood this argument unless you accept that the more links to you means you have more authority – do links mean quality though? No. There are is a large British contingent here but it is still dominated by the French and the vast majority of the big name speakers are American. They appear to be here on missionary work and you get the feeling our ex-Colonial friends don’t give a damn about the Old World – with our different cultures and languages we are just too amorphous to attract their interest or their investment dollars. If the Americans are asking themselves how can we make money out of these guys the truth is they probably can’t not unless they spot a successful business and then buy it up. This point was made by some of the local VCs.

Alexis Helcmanockl – of IPSOS - was interesting and presented a neat piece of research on how bloggers are influencing internet users' buying decisions. He said that in the EU 61 per cent of internet users read blogs and 52 per cent use the interent to make a decision about a purchase.

Moreover, the more you purchase over the internet the more you trust internet purchases and that a third of surfers will not buy a product if it has a bad review on a blog. More than half would buy on a positive comment. No surprise there then!

For some reason the e-commerce stuff and web2.0 was too lame that I had to leave. Perhaps I’m getting to old and just don’t want to make any more money.