Well, now I am actually ready to write something; After 18 hours(!) of sleep...

This year's ESF was fascinating, interesting, exhausting and sometimes even annoying. But let's start from the beginning:

While Florence last year had nearly all events in one place (Fortezza da Basso), the Paris ESF was divided into 5 places: St Denis, Bobigny, La Villette, Ivry and Central Paris. Accomodation-places were also very "distributed", being even further away from the rest. Quite positive effect: There wasn't a central place and therefore no opportunity for all the trotzkist groups to appear too present. (Their demonstration and presence was - to me - one of the annoying things in Florence.)

I myself went to several different Seminars: on the World Summit on Information Society in Geneva (which was a bit disappointing, as the only question discussed was how to bring africa to the internet), on media concentration and the commercialization of knowledge (very interesting), on global warming (very good, but nothing all-too-new for me) and on intellectual property (which was okay, but i missed a lot due to a 90 minutes-journey through paris).

Really wonderful - again - was the spirit of all this: tens of thousands of people from all over europe getting together for mainly the same reason, discussing, debating and sometimes just hanging out together. In fact, the european spirit was very strong: I felt, really everybody accepted all the others just as people, the only borders were language and everybody tried to communicate somehow.
I for my part will try to find out, if I am talented for real-time translation and - if so - take part in the european translators network "babels" next year. On the other hand, next year is very far away, so lets just wait and see...