Shimon Peres stops by blogging event

The stars of the French blogging firmament attending a social media conference on the edge of Paris were outshone on Tuesday by Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who stopped by for a surprise visit.

A last-minute addition to the program, Peres spoke in English for 45 minutes, touching on themes including economic development, philanthropy, transparency, and democracy, but hardly spoke about IT.

Conference host and blogger Loïc Le Meur said that Peres invited himself to the event. The Israeli politician was apparently already in Paris, and had encountered Le Meur before, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Le Meur said.

French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy is also expected to pay a visit to the conference, Le Web 3, on Tuesday afternoon.

On Monday morning, Le Meur said everyone at the event had invited themselves. Le Web 3 was promoted purely by word of mouth, he said, and he had not sent invitations to any of the 1,000 people who signed up for the conference, 55 percent of them from outside France.

However, Le Meur changed tack on Monday afternoon, as he wrote later in his blog. Profiting from the prestige that Peres' visit brought to the conference, Le Meur invited three presidential candidates to attend: Sarkozy, of the ruling right-wing Union for a Popular Movement (UMP); Ségolène Royal of the Socialist Party, and François Bayrou of the centrist Union for French Democracy (UDF).

That Sarkozy was the first to reply and accept Le Meur's invitation is little surprise. Le Meur interviewed Sarkozy in a video for his blog last year, and then announced his intention to vote for Sarkozy in a Sept. 10 blog entry. Both blog postings were widely reported in the mainstream press at the time.

It was Bayrou that turned up at the event first though, drawn as he put it by the potential audience of 60 million readers.

The real reach of French blogs is harder to determine. Studies have reported that the country may have as many as 20 million bloggers. However, there are only 10 million Internet subscribers in France, according to government statistics. Only 1.2 million, or around 2 percent of the 62.5 million blogs tracked by search engine Technorati Inc. are French, the company's chief executive officer David Sifry said at the conference.

That figure may be under-reported, Sifry said, as some of the major French blog hosters do not automatically transmit notice of updates to Technorati.

Sifry spoke of the positive feedback mechanisms inherent in the blogging community: Technorati statistics show that the more often bloggers write, the more their blogs are linked to, and so the higher their profile becomes, encouraging them to write more. The company indexes blogs by their content and the tags, or keywords, that their authors attribute to them. On Tuesday morning, "leweb3" was the second most-popular search term on the site.