LIFT06 in Geneva: bloggers, blogjects, and beyond

I'm off to Geneva for the LIFT conference. That stands for Life, Ideas, Futures. Together. It's a two-days gathering (tomorrow and Friday) at the intersection of technology and people. Many bloggers will be there: Microsoft's Robert Scoble, BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow, the BBC's Euan Semple and Swiss Television's Bernard Rappaz, designer Regine Debatty and fashion model Anina, Swisscom's ethnologist Stefana Broadbent and Nokia's designer Matt Jones,  and others. Sci-fi writer and design professor Bruce Sterling is the latest addition to the program and will talk about spimes (artifacts of the future). We will hear speeches on mashups and human rights, on themeparks and innovation, on design, on China's attempts to control the Internet (or at least a portion of it), on microbranding, on digital identities, and so on (full program here). The award for best headline goes to Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, founder of that other very similar conference, Danemark's reboot: he has titled his talk "Understanding contexts: A unified theory of why it feels like it's all happening now".
A word about the organizers: they're four young guys from Geneva who felt that the city didn't have a tech/life conference matching its international reputation (this is the place where the Web was invented, after all) and decided to do something about it. They put LIFT together in a few months of hard unpaid work, attracting an amazing roster of speakers, working on a minimal budget (with the exception of a forward-thinking foundation and a few local companies, sponsors didn't exactly line up) and with just some help from a few friends, from three universities, and from a small advisory board (to which I belong). It's a great achievement, and the fact that the conference is sold out (350 attendees) proves that they spotted a real need.
Not only: they have little experience in organizing conferences but they've done it in public and have been paying relentless attention to details - the kind of details other conference organizers overlook: informing attendees from abroad about what kind of electric plugs they will find in Switzerland; making sure that there will be enough of them for the people using a laptop; not allowing the venue to be inundated by promotional materials ("I am sure the most effective form of promotion is to smile and talk to people"); free parking;  and so on.
I will be giving the opening keynote, and the organizers asked me "to go broad", in order to open up a window wide enough for all those topics to fit. I will obviously talk about blogs, about wireless devices and connectivity, about the rising power of the individual, about our multiplying personas, about the interpenetration of bits and atoms, about this "digital decade". I will probably retell in more details the story i told on Monday in the Herald Tribune and the NY Times about the BondyBlog, because the more I think about it the more I find it revealing of a possible future that "old media" organizations ought to start exploring - and also because I like the very creative next step they came up with: read the last few paragraphs of the story. I will talk about videogames and how they're impacting our visual environment. Maybe about Google (which is, for many reasons, the defining company of this era).
And I will try to blog some of the conference's sessions (some sessions will also be streamed).
There is also a pre-conference event, which will take place today (ie, I will miss it) on blogjects. Blog-what? Objects that blog:

Blogjects – a neologism Julian Bleecker came up with for objects that blog – exemplify the soon-to-come "Internet of Things", ie. a network of tangible, mobile, chatty things enabled by the miniaturization, the ubiquity of consumer electronics and a pervasive Internet. In its most basic form, a blogject is not dissimilar to people that blog – it is an artifact that can disseminate a record of its experiences to the web. It would report the history of its interactions with other objects and with people. (...) this topic ties into the idea of proximity-based interaction and usage scenarios for mobile contexts.

I suspect that Nicolas Nova, one of the organizers, will write about it on his great blog. And Cyril Rebetez has some thoughts on blogjects, too.
And if you read French, the local paper Tribune de Genève had a story about LIFT yesterday.

(LIFT06 site - LIFT06 tag - LIFT06 on Google Blogsearch and Technorati)