In Paris last week, a couple of thousand people attended Le Web 3, organised by Loic and Geraldine Lemeur. It was a grand affair, with buses, its own specially-laid internet pipe, excellent food and drink, all spread out over three large conference buildings in Les Docks.

Having spent approximately 3% of my time in sessions, I am not best qualified to comment on the many short sessions and (rather self-congratulatory) panels; but I did follow many of them in peripheral vision on the video screens, so I got a flavour of the content. Mostly, I had a great time catching up with friends from around the world and also did some meetings organised by our Parisian Headshift. But hey - I paid to attend this one, so I was entitled to slack a little ;-)

For me, the only really noteworthy sessions were Kevin Rose from Digg arguing for less is more in terms of software features, and also JP Rangaswami's musings on why Enterprises don't get the concept of individual benefits and sharing. There were other good talks, like Doc Searls on VRM, but for someone who has been to a lot of conferences this year there was almost nothing new or original at all, especially if you discount all the celebrity fluff, as I do.

Aside from all the other friends, colleagues and partners at the event, it was especially heartening to see some great launches of good products at the event. The lovely Chris Alden, CEO of Six Apart, was in town with our good friends from the Paris office to announce that Movable Type has now been open sourced, and also to demonstrate the wildly popular Community Solution for MT4, which we are using on several projects right now. Matt Bidulph from Dopplr announced the end of the closed beta for everybody's favourite little online coincidensity tool. Also, Jeremy Ruston and the BT Osmosoft crew (plus JP of course) were around to show off RippleRap, a small but perfectly formed offiline-capable personal wiki for collaborative note-taking at conferences. Elsewhere, Tariq Krim demoed a new version of the brilliant personal aggregator/portal Netvibes.

There are better write-ups from Padawan, Bruno Guissani's guest blogger Susan Kish, Read/Write Web and many more, plus videos from French TV and David Dworsky, among others. There are more posts about the conference available via Technorati.

As ever, Loic has written up his own thoughts on the event and asked for feedback and help in preparing Le Web for 2008. But as is traditional at this time of the year, he also finds himself saying sorry to people who were inadvertently offended, such as Meg from the Guardian, who rightly took him to task for linking to a patronising video about "the girls of le web" that does little to dispel the image of technology people having the values of maladjusted teenage boys. Typically for Loic, he apologised quickly and clearly, and removed the offending post.

So, in the spirit of Loic's call for feedback, here is what I think went well:

• Location, logisitcs, venue, catering, hospitality, organisation - all brilliant!
• Some good speakers and a great crowd
• Great atmosphere

Here is what I would seek to improve:

• Quality of talks - there were too many and some were too short - and none had any real depth
• The reification of me-too wannabee startups - there was very little innovation and even less business relevance in those that were given a platform
• The celebrity panels - it is a conference, not a mutual appreciation society - who cares whether Robert Scoble (nice though he is) has changed his job?!
• More innovation and challenging ideas, especially from inside companies (which is what the Enterprise panel should have been last year ;-)
• More action of the world-changing rhetoric

The last point relates to the rather downbeat way the conference ended. At the 2007 event, Loic announced that he would use the Le Web network to try to make a difference in the world, and the last session of Le Web this year was supposed to report back on the UNHCR's ninemillion.org project aimed at raising help and awareness for child refugees. But the session was almost a non-event. The UNHCR speaker couldn't make it, presumably because of events in Algeria, and aside from some basic platitudes, an entirely predictable video and a call for us to create nine million links to the ninemillion.org site, we were left with nothing at all to do. Apparently, some of the celeb bloggers had advised UNHCR on how to do this, but it looked like none could spare the time to stay for the session. And in a 2,000-strong conference containing some quite seriously wealthy people, I have to admit that I felt rather ashamed that the best "we" could do was sending some link love to UNHCR. I find it sad that this session was so badly attended and undertstated - maybe it should have been placed in the middle of the first day when people were less likely to to be thinking about their journey home. I for one am happy to help do some of the legwork for this.

So, if you are reading this, then as a minimum please go to ninemillion.org (built by our friends at Apperceptive in New York, by the way) and give some money, time or link love; if you are on Facebook, there is a cause here - recruit your friends. There are too many child refugees in the world, and more are being created every day.

Thanks again Loic and Geraldine for another great Le Web experience and hope to see you all again net year!