Dur­ing the World Blog­ging Forum 2009 us par­tic­i­pants where quite busy, even dur­ing the breaks — so I inter­viewed French web-shooting star Loïc Le Meur, who left Baguette et Bour­deaux behind and moved to Sil­i­con Val­ley, in the bus, on the way to the conference.

Loïc Le Meur was Excec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent of Europa, Africa and the Mid­dle East for SixA­part, the inven­tors of Mov­able Type. Before he took this job, Loïc had already gath­ered rep­u­ta­tion as a “noto­ri­ous serial-founder” in France, hav­ing suc­cess­fully sold two of his pre­vi­ous start-ups (Rapid­Site web­host­ing and Ublog blog-hosting). These suc­cess sto­ries def­i­nitely proved help­ful in the process of rais­ing investor money for Seesmic. 13 investors, among them TechCrunch’s Michael Arring­ton and AOL co-founder Steve Case, handed Loïc Le Meur 6 mil­lion dol­lars to estab­lish Seesmic as the prime ser­vice for “video-twittering”. But when user growth stag­nated in a pretty early stage, Loïc decided to change the strat­egy and threw the mov­ing images over-board. Since the begin­ning of 2009, Seesmic is focussing on Twit­ter Clients. Cur­rently the com­pany offers two free pro­ducs: Seesmic Desk­top is a win­dows client soft­ware (com­pa­ra­ble to Tweet­deck), and Seesmic web offers a browser-based Twit­ter inbox. Enjoy the interview!

Nat­u­rally, my inter­view part­ner runs a blog: Loiclemeur.com is among France’s most pop­u­lar weblogs. When Nico­las Sarkozy ran for pres­i­dent in 2006, Le Meur con­sulted him in net-related mat­ters. If you want to try Seesmic Desk­top or Seesmic Web (no reg­is­tra­tion needed, you can use Twit­ter auth to test the inter­face), point your browser to seesmic.com. And for all news about Le Web plus live-coverage by the offi­cial blog­gers, check out leweb.net.