The idea of bloggers writing about bloggers is less than bracing, but at Davos the phenomenon is so widespread and talked about that Monty Python’s Spam sketch comes to mind - blog, blog, blog, blog etc.

It is actually next to impossible to calculate how many people are blogging the event. As well as high profile media companies, Reuters, the BBC, Swiss TV, Forbes, CNN and so on, there are untold babbles of individuals out there. What is the collective noun for bloggers, while we’re thinking about it? A nuisance of bloggers, perhaps. Suggestions welcome.

Anyway, the Davos organisers have been in at the beginning on this. Their main blog page has more than 15 official contributors and links to many others. The page has had 21,000 hits so far. It also leads you to Davos Conversation, a site set up by the World Economic Forum and others to bring in about everyone else talking about Davos that they can. It’s interesting that instead of taking part in the myriad discussions going on here, many people are diving out to see what everyone’s saying in the blogosphere instead, as this WEF staffer was right next to me (below).

With more than 800 chief executive officers around it is hardly surprising that some of them have taken up the blog. BT Group boss Ben Verwaayen has been blogging for the Daily Telegraph about the diverse types of people here while KPMG International’s Michael Rake has been talking in his blog about the Transatlantic Business Dialogue.

I hope you will excuse the thoroughly shameless plug, but Reuters CEO Tom Glocer is also at it, suggesting that with all the blogging and webbing going on, one day “we’ll all be able to stay home, prevent climate change and just send our avatars to Switzerland“. 

The titles of panel meetings at the World Economic Forum can sometimes be pretty dire. Frankly, “Strategies for a New Power Equation” or “The Future of Urban Mobility” do not really set the pulse racing. So it was with some delight that I came across this gem being moderated by Laura Tyson, Bill Clinton’s former economic adviser — “Is Freedom Overrated?”

The mere idea is enough to raise the hackles of any self-respecting civil libertarian and could get Davos sceptics mumbling deep thoughts about what all these powerful people really want. But the issue that really lies behind the catchy title is not that clear-cut and has been exercising great philosphical minds such as those of Hobbes and Locke for centuries. It’s all about individual rights versus the common good.

The Davos debate was not expected to solve the problem, of course. But some of the ideas expressed at the panel were worth noting. Cheng Siwei, vice chairman of the Chinese congress’s powerful standing committee, opined that individual freedom could not be put above the national benefit. But he then said that this applied mainly to security issues and should not be used by governments as an excuse.

Israel’s vice prime minister, Shimon Peres, said he reckoned there was a difference between the right of a person to be equal and the — more important in his view — right of a person to be different. He got a big laugh quoting his old nemesis Yasser Arafat as once joking: “Democracy… who invented it. It is so tiring.”

Shimon Peres at Davos. REUTERS/Sebastian Derungs

A few things are becoming clear as the WEF’s annual meeting slides out of its second day. For one, businesses are getting decidedly nervous about the possibility that the Doha Trade round will not restart.
    Microsoft’s Bill Gates had a private chat with World Trade Organisation director general Pasal Lamy on the sidelines here.
Gates was coy about the meeting but it came as other very interested parties started to get the gloves out. Fifteen heavy hitters, including bosses from Unilever, British Airways, Alcoa and Goldman Sach made it clear they had had enough of stalled trade negotiations.
    Words like “damage”, “destruction” and “failure” peppered a joint statement that had some here noting that business was suddenly realising that Doha, which is stalled, could end completely. Trade ministers meet at the weekend.
    Climate change is the other big item. Although some have
complained that it is simply a trendy subject, it is a top item. That can be seen from Chinese officials pledging to have the huge developing market become more efficient in energy use — even if they reckon the big job is for the West.
    Bono and Blair get their turn on Friday so Africa may get its moment in the snow.

Why do we journalists always fall for it? Nasdaq, the U.S.
stock market group, just persuaded a bunch of us to trek way up a steep, slippery hillside in the cold to watch them open trading against a backdrop of yodel-ay-ee-oo Switzerland. There we were, TV cameras rolling and stills snapping (or whatever digitals do), while corporate America waved, yelled and grinned in front of us.

Actually, as a PR stunt it was pretty good. Nasdaq likes to
call itself a virtual market model and reckons a Swiss hillside
is as good a place as any to show that it can get global traders off to a start wherever it wants.

Coincidently (because they did the same thing last year) it
also showed their European aspirations. It is embroiled in a
hostile takeover bid for the London Stock Exchange for a start. I had hoped that the “High Tea” on offer to guests beforehand was a dig at Britain but it turned out more Davosian with chocolates and champagne.

Anyway, Nasdaq boss Bob Greifeld was nice enough to talk to me beforehand for a non-blog story on his thoughts on the LSE bid and I did get this blog out of it, so I supposed the trek was worth. Reckoned they missed one trick though by not ringing the open with a cow bell.

I didn’t come out here to go celeb-spotting but the fact that celebrities are short on the ground in Davos hasn’t escaped the notice of some of the myriad journalists and bloggers following events at the World Economic Forum.

While it’s possibly true that this year’s event may be lacking in true A list attendees my colleague Mark Jones notes there are still plenty of potential stars to be found among those who have bothered to show up in Davos. His trawl of the blogosphere produces a few surprises.

Mark was most struck by Jane Martinson in the Guardian’s Comment Is Free, who decides that  a new star is born:

Move over Sharon Stone and Bono. A small, grey-haired man wearing a grey suit and a slightly startled expression was the unlikely star of today’s Davos… A session on “making green pay” starring Sir Nicholas Stern, the former government economist and author of last year’s groundbreaking report into climate change, was standing room only.

Meanwhile Foreign Policy describes its unlikely star as ….

…a homely middle-aged woman from a declining region of the world. Not very stylishly dressed in a burgundy blazer, looking vaguely professorial, thoughtfully and without pretext staring off into the half-distance as she framed her thoughts, she nevertheless held 1,000 people in the Congress Center’s main hall rapt as she spoke about globalization, her own experiences, the relationship between the developed and the developing world, and her sense of Europe’s role.

That’s German Chancellor Angela Merkel they’re describing (below), in case you hadn’t already worked it out for yourself.

So what is the World Economic Forum really? Talking shop, manna for conspiracy theorists or a useful get-together for the great and the good?

It’s certainly a mysterious institution for many. It’s privately run and unabashedly self-promoting, a meet-and-greet that brings together enough of the world’s super-powerful to delight any conspiracy theorist worthy of the name. But a new book tries to get behind the mystique and the hype to try to explain what it is all about - and what impact the WEF really does have on the world.

Geoffrey Allen Pigman, a political economist at Bennington College in the U.S. state of Vermont, has penned an academic study that is part of a series from publisher Routledge that includes the likes of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

The author tells me that one of the WEF’s main achievements recently has been to diffuse some of the criticism hurled at it by what he calls the “alter-globalisation” movement. It is “alter” not “anti”, he says, because many people are not against globalisation but have a different view of what it should comprise to the mainstream capitalism one.

Pigman reckons the WEF did well to incorporate some of these critics and other NGOs into its discussion, inviting them to Davos and setting up a World Social Forum.

But regardless of these achievements, what of the WEF’s overall impact? Some may simply say ‘talking shop’. But Pigman says he has a positive view of what the organisation is trying to do with grand meetings like this one in Davos. ”Words do make realities,” he says.

Davos is not all about intense discussions on the world’s future mixed with deal-making and a bit of skiing. Even if there isn’t much glitz this year, anyone who tires of the non-stop geopolitics and economics will find respite in a land of blues, purples, greens and oranges at the nearby Kirchner Museum in the centre of town.

Belying its rather stark bunker-like architecture, the museum is awash with the colourful works of quasi-home town boy Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

Kirchner was German but lived in and around this Swiss resort between 1917 and his death in 1938. The embodiment of German expressionism, he painted a wonderful if rather different picture of Davos and its surrounds than a less artistic visitor might see on an overcast January day.

The Nazis, however, didn’t take to his work and featured him heavily in their Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) exhibition, which lumped together work deemed at odds with National Socialist virtues. This, says museum creator Dr Karin Schick, worried Kirchner so much that, prompted also by pain from ill health, he killed himself.

Not much goes on in Davos at this time of year that does not involve the World Economic Forum, however, so Kirchner’s masterpieces will be the backdrop for a number of high-flying parties, sponsored by the likes of Google, Swiss Re and Canada. As well as the regular collection party-goers will be treated to a special exhibition of Kirchner’s still lifes. Of his 1,100 oil paintings, only about 60 were in this category, so it’ll be something of a rare treat for any aficionados of his work among the Davos elite.

This posting is not for the uncool. My colleague Adam Reuters, aka Adam Pasick, has just scored a first for Davos, interviewing one of the participants in the virtual world Second Life. Avatars (online alter egos) of Adam and his special guest, Arianna Huffington, sat in a specially constructed Davos newsroom in Second Life and chatted about things including, well, Second Life.

You could see the snow-capped peaks outside.

Adam is virtual bureau chief of the virtual Reuters bureau in the virtual world. Ms Huffington is the celebrated blogger and columnist whose The Huffington Post is a popular read for those following U.S. politics. She sat with Adam in the middle of the Davos conference centre while audio was fed into Second Life and their avatars chatted along with it in front of what anywhere else would be described as a live audience.
Avatars who missed it can get the interview in Second Life on video. Others might hear of it on the BBC or in a newspapers as real world, old style media also covered the interview. (Reuters will post the video here)

Not all went well in the real world. Ms Huffington arrived later than expected which set off some virtual fidgeting among the assorted avatars waiting in the Second Life auditorium. One was having a good smoke — it’s about the only place left that you can — others discussed U.S. politics. One avatar said he/she was disappointed that Hillary Clinton did not announce her presidental plans in Second Life. It can only be a matter of time.

Pictures: Jeremy Vaught (above), Jeremy Gaunt (right)

One of the things Davosians love best when they meet up here in the mountains each year is the ability to hash out serious ideas about where the world is going. The World Economic Forum, after all, bills itself as “committed to improving the state of the world.”

This year is no exception and about 750 of the movers and shakers here have just decided that climate change is not only likely to have more impact than anything else on the world in the years ahead but that it is by a long shot the thing that everyone is least ready for.

It worked like this. After a morning divided between seminars on business, geopolitics, technology and the economy, participants identified a dozen shifting sands likely to have the most impact on the world. These included growing emerging economies, inequality, demographics and so on. After a vote, climate change won out. Emerging economies came a close second in the “most impact” vote. Inequality was a distant second in the “least ready” category.

The problem was that climate change was a last-minute add on. One participant said it had hijacked the vote. Another accused the assembled high-flyers of having a herd mentality. There was also a mini-row over equality, with some speakers at a kind of town hall meeting saying it did not matter that some people were getting poorer because many more were getting wealthier. Others took umbrage, with one jumping up to say that inequality was driving all kinds of threats to world stability. There will eventually be a podcast of the event.

Something is missing from this year’s Davos meeting — glitz. After years of grabbing the limelight, the likes of Sharon Stone and Angelina Jolie are nowhere to be seen. Rock ‘n’ roll hasn’t died, of course: Bono is due in town on Friday to talk about Africa and Peter Gabriel is supposed to be around somewhere. But apart from that the glitterati is thin on the ground. Could it be that Davos is no longer hip?

Not so, says Klaus Schwab, the founder, executive chairman and all-round booster of the World Economic Forum whose goal is no less than shaping the global agenda. “We invited what you call ’star’ people only the last years because they were relevant to a very specific topic,” he told celebrity-starved reporters. “This year we don’t feel in need of such a special accelerator, multiplier of the message.” Ouch!