In many ways, Paris is home to me even though I am not French. I hap­pened to be born in Paris and although I didn’t live here in my youth, I stud­ied in French Lycées in var­i­ous coun­tries as my father ful­filled his career. Much later on, I lived just south of Paris in Fontainebleau, where I stud­ied for my MBA. After a stint in Lon­don and Chicago, I then returned to Paris, where I lived for eight intense years and where I started blogging.

At the time, Paris had a great blog­ging com­mu­nity which met up reg­u­larly. Every week there were one or two events to attend. Through these, I met some great peo­ple, many of whom have remained friends and who I will see again while here for LeWeb 2011.

I first attended LeWeb whenit was called Les Blogs. These were a series of three small mee­tups in 2004, called “Les Blogs & Le Jour­nal­isme,” “Les Blogs & La Poli­tique,” and “Les Blogs & Le Busi­ness.” These mee­tups later mor­phed into the annual Les Blogs con­fer­ence, the first one of which was held at the French Sen­ate in 2005.

After mov­ing back to the US, I missed a num­ber of these events until last year’s con­fer­ence, when I was for­tu­nate to be invited as a blog­ger. I didn’t know what to expect other than see­ing my friends again and wit­ness­ing a great lineup of speak­ers. By the end of the con­fer­ence, I was sim­ply blown away by what I had seen: it felt like a taste­fully pro­duced mix of SxSW and TED. With­out a doubt, LeWeb has risen to the rank of the very few industry-standard, must-attend Inter­net events.

Spread over three days with over 3,000 atten­dees and a star lineup of speak­ers and pan­elists, par­tic­i­pants, and blog­gers, this edi­tion of LeWeb promises to be the best one yet. I will be live blog­ging most of the event. If you’re attend­ing and read­ing this, let’s meet up! Just send me a note on Twit­ter or email

Let the fun begin!

Update– here are my live posts from the con­fer­ence (see also pho­tos on Flickr):

Fer­nando Madeira of Terra

Daniel Ek of Spotify

Ben Parr

Kiran Bel­lubbi of 955Dreams

Niklas Zennstrom of Skype and Atomico

Om Malik inter­views Yves Behar

Deb Roy of Bluefin Labs

Marissa Mayer of Google

Carmine Gallo, Author, “Inno­va­tion Secrets of Steve Jobs”

Phil Libin of Evernote

Bill Gross of Idealab