ReadWriteWeb

They don't call Europe the Old World for nothing. Sometimes old European ways of doing things are not at all consistent with the realities of the Internet. Take France for example: There's a union for people who sell antiques and vintage stuff at flea markets professionally. To prevent unfair competition against these pros, the law says individuals are only allowed to sell at flea markets twice a year. This union sued eBay because they had the nerve to let just anybody sell stuff to just anybody whenever they felt like it

That's just one example from only one sector, in only one old country among many, all of them trying to preserve their way of life and protect their people and cultures, while struggling to stay relevant (or become relevant, some might say) in the digital era.

With the ability to reach billions of people for the price of a few keystrokes and clicks, the Web has become the way many of us make our first impressions. These days, I might know a person from their blog or Twitter account before I ever know them in real-life. If they made poor personal branding choices, perhaps I'll never want to actually meet them. Effectively constructing an online brand isn't easy, but thankfully one of the experts in the subject, Loïc Le Meur, founder of Seesmic and LeWeb, is launching his own video series to help set the foundation.

In an interview with TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington at LeWeb today, Google's Marissa Mayer discussed some of the new product that Google announced over the last year, including the recent integration of real-time news streams into the default search pages, Google Music Search and Google Wave. Talking about the future of search, Mayer expects that people will soon do searches by talking to their phones, or through services like the newly announced Google Goggles.

Chad Hurley and Loic Le Meur just talked about the past and future of YouTube at LeWeb. According to Hurley, YouTube's users now upload over 24 hours of content per minute. Hurley refused to talk about YouTube's revenue, though he did mention that revenue at YouTube is up, and the cost of operating the site are down. Hurley acknowledged that the mobile site is currently growing faster than the regular website. YouTube also plans to provide more live programming on the site with the help of its partners.

Earlier this week Myspace announced a partnership with Google to deliver real-time status updates to the search experience. As of today, the company is furthering its real-time efforts by announcing the public release of the real-time stream, status and mood commenting, open search and photo upload APIs.

At the annual LeWeb conference in Paris today, Loic Le Meur interviewed Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey about Square, the mobile payment system he launched in limited beta in November. While the demo didn't quite work as expected - the Square dongle wasn't able to read Loic's credit card at first - we did learn a few more details about Square. Among other thing, Dorsey plans to launch an API in the future that will allow Square to connect to other financial systems and bookkeeping software. In addition, Dorsey announced that he plans to make the payment dongle available for free.

Mobile Roadie is an application builder for the iPhone that focuses on enabling bands, athletes and event organizers to easily create their own iPhone apps. Users can use Mobile Roadie to create apps that can promote events, stream video and facilitate ticket sales through Ticketmaster and LiveNation. Starting today, Mobile Roadie will also make it easy for its users to stream live video directly to the iPhone. The company has teamed up with streaming video provider Ustream to power these live streams.