I spent the entire day at Webcom Montreal. Most of the presentations were in French and, truth be told, I don’t think I can do as good of a job as Sylvain Carle did over at the Webcom Montreal Blog.
Carle sat there, front row, Blogging the entire conference live on one of the two big screens as the speaker’s presented. He even managed to multi-task and show websites or Wikipedia articles related to what the speaker’s were saying. It added a very powerful element to the conference.
I was very impressed with the passion of Loic LeMeur. LeMeur is regarded as one of the top French Bloggers in the world and is the organizer for the Les Blogs Conference. He did an excellent job of demonstrating the democratization of news and challenging people to better understand the major role that citizen journalists play in how the news rolls out.
LeMeur was also quick to demonstrate how verticalized information has become, and how some of the Blogging superstars are covering the types of stories that are only of interest to a small segment of the population. We’re seeing that exact same scenario right now in the world of Podcasting. The notions of mass media are really not as relevant as niche media.
One of the only presentations in English was provided by David Philip Dunne from Edelman. Dunne is based in New York and is the EVP Director of Worldwide Operations for this social-media-embracing public relations firm. Dunne gave a great overview of social media and how it is affecting the PR industry, journalists and traditional media outlets. I fired some questions at him, which you can check out here: Questions à  David Philip Dunne.
I spent most of the day sitting with Marie-Chantale Turgeon (aka M-C) and Christian Car from meidia, Stars Of The Web, and Turgeon’s highly-trafficked, Vu D’ici – Seen From Here Podcast. We had some great laughs over stories of exploration in Second Life (C.C., I told them the American Pie-like incident we had when you purchased a pair of boots for me in Second Life).
Final note on the day: I had left the power supply for my Sony Vaio at home. This ultra portable laptop (VGN-TX751P) has a seven hour-plus battery life, and I spent the entire day on the wi-fi at Webcom. Awesome. I can’t recommend this laptop enough.