you tagged me, now I own it.

This week I attended LeWeb London, a two-day affair described as "Europe's leading Internet conference on innovation and entrepeneurship"

For the most part, the conference was great, an amazing opportunity to meet amazing people, either already established in the industry or just getting started in it. I had no specific agenda there (wasn't pitching or shopping for anything) but I got to talk to a couple dozen new people, all of whom were very polite.

The topic of the conference seemed to be the "sharing economy", a term I've grown to hate during the first day of the conference simply because of the number of times it was said out loud. It reminded me of all the buzzwords that came before it. The talks themselves were fun and interesting, just the term kept sounding worse and worse, emptier and emptier, every time someone said it.


The closing talk of the day on Wednesday was "10 reasons why the sharing economy is bollocks" by Milo Yiannopoulos, who was introduced as a journalist. He came on stage and presented a very well rehearsed 10-point talk on why he thought the whole thing was bullshit and while some points I could stand behind, I felt some points were wrong and others not explained well enough.

But it was a very entertaining talk. Extra-entertaining was the fact that some people got offended and left in the middle of it, which I found hilarious because his words weren't offensive as such.

It was also entertaining because I couldn't figure out if he genuinely despised the sharing economy or if he was trolling. I think he was genuine, but it wouldn't take much to convince me it was just an act.

Anyway, I tweeted

kll: „10 reasons the share economy is bollocks“ #leweb i can only hope to clear a room this fast one day…
twitter.com/kll/status/3423297…

And at that point I considered it the best talk of the day. I even ran into the guy out on the street while my friends and I were on our way to grab some food. I walked up, shook his hand and told him I really liked his talk and that I thought it was the best talk of the day. And I immediately walked away.


Tiny bit of backstory: I do not consider myself a photographer of any calibre, nor do I aspire to ever be considered one. I've tinkered with cameras for a while, entirely at a hobbyist level, and I've not really put any effort into it. On Monday, I bought a new camera because it had WiFi allowing me to snap a decent-looking photo and upload to facebook/twitter/etc immediately.

Because I had a two-day-old camera, I was snapping pics all the time at LeWeb. Partly because I wanted to see what kind of pictures I could actually produce, of this kind of event, to see for myself if I knew anything at all, partly because I was interested in seeing how the camera performed in different situations.

To my surprise, I got more than a couple of photos out of it that I really liked, so I shared them on twitter and facebook.

Two of the dozen or so photos I uploaded on Wednesday evening were of Milo's talk, and they can be found on the following two links (under the embedded pics)

www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbi…;
www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbi…