BoomTown just got to Paris, as in France, to attend and moderate sessions for the third annual Le Web conference.

Le Web is organized by Loïc and Geraldine Le Meur, with 1,500 people signed up to hear a range of Internet players, many of whom are from the U.S., tomorrow and Wednesday.

U.S. speakers include TED’s Chris Anderson, News Corp. (NWS) social-networking site MySpace’s Amit Kapur, Marissa Mayer of Google (GOOG), Linda Avey of 23andMe, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, and Dan’l Lewin of Microsoft (MSFT).

And some interesting European execs include France Telecom Orange Chairman and CEO Didier Lombard, and Jacques-Antoine Granjon, CEO and co-founder of a very interesting fashion sale site, Vente-Privee.com.

Of course, there’s a passel of bloggers here like BoomTown. I’ll be interviewing Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon (AMZN) and well-known Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi.

Besides this conference, Loïc Le Meur has been trying to make a go of it with his San Francisco-based start-up Seesmic, which–like a lot of Web 2.0 companies–has recently made cutbacks. See my video interview below with him in better times, when I visited Seesmic in February.

You can also watch the conference streamed live from its site. More shaky–but Frenchtastic, although no lip-synching extravaganzas for me!–videos from me at Le Web to come, of course.

[Full disclosure: My partner, Google exec Megan Smith (you can read all about it here in detail), is judging a start-up competition at Le Web on Wednesday. But I am trying to find an excuse not to go to that panel, because I always nod off at those things, even if the crazy version of Britney Spears were a judge. Instead, I hopefully will be enjoying the lovely artwork at the Louvre right then.]

BoomTown always enjoys chatting with the always sunny Loïc Le Meur of Seesmic (and will, in fact, be appearing at his Paris-based digital conference in December, called Le Web).

But I am not quite sure what to make of his big, happy smile that was in this picture above (click in the image to make it larger), which went with a story in the New York Times about start-ups cutting costs.

In fact, the whole Seesmic crew is grinning awfully hard, putting a very game face on recent layoffs that cut the staff at the video blog service by more than a third.

Money–or, more accurately, non-money–quote from the Times piece:

“To preserve cash, many tech start-ups are rushing to lay off employees and cut expenses. They are shelving their dreams of Google-size riches and getting small, humble and thrifty, all with the more modest goal of surviving the coming economic winter.”

In a less puritan mode, Seesmic raised $6 million in May from a bunch of high-profile angels, of $12 million total.

They include LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, former AOL head Steve Case, SoftTech VC Jeff Clavier, entrepreneur Mark Pincus, former Goldman Sachs analyst Michael Parekh, entrepreneur Ariel Poler, investor Ron Conway, FON founder Martin Varsavsky and an investment group called Atomico founded by Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. Tech bloggers Jeff Pulver, Michael Arrington and Dan Gillmor have also invested.

Now, Le Meur is trying to stretch his dollars in the economic downturn, spurred by venture capitalists who have been pressing entrepreneurs like him to do so.

“If I can’t make this work in three years it will be a failure,” Mr. Le Meur said to the Times. “If I can and I get through this, it will be much stronger.”

In other words, what doesn’t kill us …

C’est la vie in Silicon Valley!

But in more bon-vivant times, back in February, I did a video post on my happier visit to Seesmic’s San Francisco HQ.

(Note: Many in the video are no longer at Seesmic and neither are the shows discussed, as well as the now-defunct Web 2.0 sentiments about growth without revenue.)

Here’s the video:

Image Credit: Jim Wilson/New York Times

Of course, the stock market had to come roaring back and it had to be extra sunny on the very day I was scheduled to have lunch with well-known Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway to talk about the worrisome state of the digital sector.

After all, it was Conway (pictured here), as well as Sequoia Capital, who sent out a stink bomb of an email last week to his start-ups to deliver a simple message: The Web 2.0 party is over.

Said Conway to his entrepreneurial troops as the market was crashing down and smacking tech companies hard in the process:

“Unfortunately history DOES repeat itself but I hope we can learn from history and prevent the turmoil from occurring again. The message is simple. Raising capital will be much more difficult now … the name of the game in this environment in some respects is survival–survival until conditions change.”

Survival!?! What ho? This from the man who is one of the more upbeat of Web investors! Who is one of the backers of Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Ning, Seesmic and 125 other Web 2.0 companies?

Ironically, our lunch yesterday was little more than a year after I had had another lunch with Conway, where I also made a video, and during which we had a lively discussion about a range of topics, including the venture business (better than ever!), innovation (better than better than ever!), monetizing video content on the Web (best of all!) and more.

Yesterday, the news was not so happy, of course, although Conway did try to explain in more detail exactly what he meant in his most recent email, which echoed one he had also sent out when the last Internet bubble was popping a half-dozen years ago.

And that is: You better have a year’s worth of cash and a revenue model or you’re toast.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, he’s bullish!

Here’s the video (and below it, the one from June 2007, when things looked a little sunnier for Conway and Web 2.0):

Last night, BoomTown was invited to moderate a panel for MIT/Stanford Venture Lab at Stanford University’s Business School on the topic of lifecasting.

In other words, the digital version of TMI (too much information!).

Called “Lifestreaming: The Real-time Web,” it was aimed at debating the trend toward “sharing our lives with others as they happen,” with three entrepreneurs and a venture capitalist in the space.

The panel included Bret Taylor, Co-Founder of FriendFeed; Seesmic Founder Loic Le Meur; Pownce Co-Founder Leah Culver; and SoftTechVC’s Jeff Clavier.

It was a lively discussion, which was also focused on monetization–or lack thereof–issues in the instant Internet space, in which users share every detail of their lives with friends and family in a digital millisecond.

Like I said, MTMI (much too much information!!).

In any case, here’s a video I did of the event, including snippets of the company presentations, as well as interviews with all the panelists:

Burda runs an annual digital conference in Munich called DLD (Digital, Life, Design), which a lot of U.S. tech types have gone to, including me, even though the media giant is best known for its old-line magazines about fashion, cooking and crafts.

But Burda has also been dipping into the digital sector a lot, especially via the tireless tech networking of the company’s Steffi Czerny and Marcel Reichart, who have established a high profile for the company among Silicon Valley denizens.

That was in evidence at Burda’s luncheon yesterday, which was crowded with a panoply of techies and hosted by Czerny, Maria Burda, the wife of CEO and owner Hubert Burda, and well-known Israeli investor Yossi Vardi.

Czerny has been taking Maria Burda (pictured here, she is also a famous German television star, better known as Maria Furtwängler) around the Valley on a learning tour this week to meet with companies like Ning, Mozilla, Facebook, and with venture capitalists. They are also here to attend Google’s Zeitgeist partners’ event, which starts today.

Here’s a video of yesterday’s luncheon, where I was asking everyone about the troubled economic situation and more.

It includes chats with Mullenweg and Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur, BillShrink’s Peter Pham, Facebook’s Brandee Barker and Randi Zuckerberg, Wired’s Steven Levy, Vardi and Burda and Czerny:

When BoomTown last checked in with French serial entrepreneur and blogger Loïc Le Meur, he was setting up his Seesmic start-up in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill and making funny daily videos of the effort.

Now, Le Meur’s online video conversation community is ensconced in its new offices and his bank account is $6 million richer.

That wad of cash came earlier this month from high-profile angels like LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, former AOL head Steve Case, SoftTech VC Jeff Clavier, entrepreneur Mark Pincus, Goldman Sachs’s Michael Parekh, entrepreneur Ariel Poler, investor Ron Conway, FON founder Martin Varsavsky and an investment group called Atomico founded by Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis.

(In addition, tech bloggers Jeff Pulver, Michael Arrington and Dan Gillmor have also invested.)

Seesmic, which is still operating in alpha mode (there are a few glitches here and there on the service, especially related to searching), is described in a lot of ways–video Twitter, video social network, video sharing tool are some examples.

(Here is a screen shot below of what Seesmic looks like, which you can click on to make bigger.)

While the service has some critics, I like the idea of it a lot, as it takes the ideas pioneered by YouTube another step.

Still, many efforts in this kind of online commenting community sometimes degenerate into self-obsession and niches of niches. And given it is video, there is, of course, a huge potential for Seesmic to be used for porn.

BoomTown talked about this and more with Le Meur at Seesmic’s offices in the video below.

We also tested out the service by making a Le Meur video about our visit, where we tried to get the community to figure out our identity from only our hand and voice. It got more than a dozen responses very quickly and it was kind of fun, given that the guesses included Queen Elizabeth and actress Christina Ricci.

(You can see those videos here.)

Here’s the video of my visit to Seesmic:

(Here is a link to our post and video of our visit and interview with Le Meur.)

In it, we tried to get the community to figure out BoomTown’s identity from only our hand and voice. It got more than a dozen responses very quickly, and it was kind of fun, given that the guesses included Queen Elizabeth and actress Christina Ricci.

Here are two of our videos and some of the guesses below, including the correct one at the bottom:

Hand Video No. 1:

Hand Video No. 2:

Comment on Identity of Hand No. 1:

Comment on Identity of Hand No. 2:

Comment on Identity of Hand No. 3 (Patty Hartwell guesses correctly, and gets French lunch prize from Le Meur!):

OK, you might attribute it to being super-bored in the holiday doldrums. But, for some reason I cannot explain, I find myself strangely drawn to the videos being made about the start-up of Seesmic, the new video-sharing service that is being created by European entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur.

Up on his own loic.tv channel on YouTube, everything from checking out the company digs to working on a logo to hiring are on display, and Le Meur encourages community comments about the company’s direction. The videos are currently up to Day 57.

It’s a shameless gimmick, to be sure, but Le Meur’s French accent grows on you, and it is an interesting way to market your company, for certain (AllThingsD.com and D: All Things Digital only did one staff BBQ and Rodeo video, which is seen below).

While Seesmic is described in a lot of ways–video Twitter, video social network, video sharing tool are some examples–Seesmic’s obviously practicing what it preaches here: video blabbing that is often compelling.

(Here is a screen shot of what Seesmic looks like, which you can click on to make bigger.)

To get it all going, Le Meur (who also organizes the Le Web conference in Paris, which just took place) got a bunch of high-profile angels like former AOL head Steve Case, investor Ron Conway, FON founder Martin Varsavsky and Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, as well as many others, to pony up millions for Seesmic’s funding.

He and his family moved to San Francisco this past summer, and he has been ferreting away ever since on the service, which will officially debut in early spring of 2008.

Here’s Seesmic’s latest, a what-are-you-doing-for-the-holidays video of its employees:

Then again, I also kind of like the flip side–the mostly hysterical, sometimes line-crossing attack review of Seesmic by Loren Feldman of 1938 Media. Actually, although Feldman trashes Le Meur’s effort, it is just the kind of thing that would probably make Seesmic the very lively place it needs to be.

Here’s Feldman:

And here’s the video of our ATD/D BBQ and Rodeo, which focuses a lot on the marinated lamb: