Multithreaded

I’ve just watched a political speech by Nicolas Sarkozy at the Le Web 3 conference. I have very mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, this was clearly a political speech (Sarkozy is a strong possible presidential candidate) and was delivered in French with simultaneous translation. Sarkozy came on, gave the speech, and was out the door before Loic could even deliver his ‘thank you’ piece. It seemed to me that what he said was basically “these are my policies, presented in a format that has a bit of relevance to the subject of your conference”. I would have been much happier if he’d stuck around to answer questions or join a forum.

On the other hand, I believe it is useful to have input from people who’s focus is not necessarily the same as ours. It is easy to get wrapped up in the ideas and technology of the web and forget how to relate it to the rest of the world and to be reminded that a lot of what we are doing is changing the world and that those changes have effects on the lives of a lot of people.