Man! That was a day… I didn’ know when I asked on my day 1 review “Let’s see if we can do better tomorrow…” that we’d have such an event. I didn’t blog earlier because I wanted to write only after a day or two to be sure my writings were based on facts and not on emotions.

It all started with Mena Trott, introduced as president of Six Apart, having her session about “civility in blogging” where she basically complained about a Yahoo guy who made some time ago bad comments about Six Apart’s PR agency and that now on Google this PR agency has a bad reputation. So she asked bloggers to think more about the consequences of their writings.
This problem is sure important for Six Apart but it started to irritate some part of the audience who thought the speech was really too personal, patronising, inappropriate and that the main point was “don’t scare future customers and investors”. Someone, with the nickname of dotBen, wrote on the IRC backchannel that basically all of this was bullshit. Of course, Mena didn’t like it but instead of dealing with it and explaining to the audience why she thought her point was valid she asked this “asshole” to stand up and used the F-word. In a session about civility, it’s was certainly not a good move.
But dotBen didn’t shy away, he asked for the microphone and identified himself. He explained quite well why he wrote this and both agreed that it’d be better to continue that discussion after the session.
You can read Ben’s blog entry and Mena’s one about all of this.
If you want there’s also all the blogosphere’s chit chat…

The rest of the day was pretty calm (not really hard compared to what we had in the morning) but really interesting. The best session was the one with Ben Hammersley called “Eight ideas that will really revolutionize the 21st century (and why blogging isn’t one of them)”. Ben explained that:

We’re lucky bastards. We live in the first days of Renaissance. We’re unlucky bastards. There will always have people to screw it up. Forces trying to stop this to happening, and we have huge responsability”

Here is his list of 8 ideas and with the opposing force which can destroy it.

1. Information wants to be free -> Copyright
2. Zero distance -> Borders
3. Mass amateurisation -> Censorship
4. More is much more -> Network blocking
5. True names -> Idendity cards & databases
6. Viral behaviour -> More network blocking
7. Everything is personal -> Everything is trackable
8. Ubiquitous computing -> No privacy

We will see how all of this will grow and we will certainly have more information in LesBlogs 3.0…

See you all there….

Update: Mena posted another response on her blog…