Since several years, the collaboration tools from 37Signals have been enjoying quite a lot of attention. It probably has a lot to do with the popularity of the Ruby on Rails framework, which is a by-product of the development.

After having attended several entrepreneur events in Belgium, like the Open Coffee and BetaGroup gatherings in Brussels, the 8th edition of the Le Web Conference is comparatively huge. I was amazed by the scale of the event and the clout of its attendees.

Except from several big wigs from Microsoft, Google, FaceBook and MySpace, the larger part of the audience consisted of mainly high profile bloggers, VC scouts and French entrepreneurs. I met people from quite a lot of interesting initiatives, like the SilverLight guys from Eeple with their digital picture board, the Three Melons advertising game development company, Yoowalk's nice looking 3D web village, SPARKEO, Weblin, Realmee, BloggersBase, dismoiou, NetVibes, and last but not lease our Belgian friends from Radionomy.

On a less positive note: I wasn't really convinced of the startup contestants. The people's choice Silentale not being among the three winners is an indicator of the lack of a clear winner. No wonder because a lot were uninspirational, lacked a good business model or couldn't really be classified as a startup anymore (5 years old, funded with $25 million, ...).

Many thanks to Robin Wauters, Clopin, Clo, Jonathan and Roland for grabbing a le Big Mac on Tuesday, you guys are hilarious. Also thanks to Kris Hoet and company from Microsoft for the cool GapingVoid drawing and for showing me the LiveServices, SilverLight and the BizSpark program. As mainly an Apple and open source geek I have to confess: Microsoft was probably showing some of the most impressive stuff at Le Web.

Well, I've had enough of Frenglish for quite some time, but as my namecard book shows: it was definitely worth it!

For the "surprise surprise..." category.
 
IntroNiche got covered last week in Mashable by Kristen Nicole. 

Basically, it made my day since you don't get reviewed every day by one of the most popular web 2.0. blogs.

I'm also really glad Mashable hit the spot on a couple of essential points.

First of all, the IntroNiche cross-promotion will make or break on critical mass.
It's not going to come overnight but I'm confident we'll get there.
Mashable reviewing us will obviously help over time too ;-)

I stumbled across a blog post on DoshDosh today, which I liked for three reasons:

1. It covered cross-marketing, a subject close to my heart
2. It calls for making specific cross-marketing proposals - which is key when you want to make cross-marketing deals

Yesterday I saw a sudden implosion in traffic and listings.

I couldn't track in Google Analytics where the traffic came from.
So I simply asked some of yesterday's arrivals how they'd heard about IntroNiche.

Answer: the Make More Money Monday webcast of Stephen Pierce on dtAlpha featuring three sites: 

• Serph.com: an online buzz tracking search engine
• Clusty.com:  a search engine yielding interesting cluster results