The Gates in NY

The Gates by 72nd St

The Gates before the unveiling 

Casimir couleur "safran" 

Impressions of The Gates

Un touriste incognito aux Gates de Christo

Winter in the city

vive le slush !!!

encore un qui va rigoler lundi matin.... 

cherchez la voiture.... 

Our snowed in street the day after the storm 

The first snowstorm of the season

Snow atop my barbecue

Pedaling in the snow 

The red posts signal where Christo's Gates will be positioned 

NY's first snowstorm of the season

Le futur siege des editions Hearst (Cosmo), dessine par Norman Forster (Viaduc de Millau)

Central Park - Snow and Christo

Central Park sous la neige et les preparatifs de "The Gates" la prochaine oeuvre ephemere de Christo

Photoblog 01

Les poubelles new yorkaises offrent toujours des scenes amusantes...
NY city trash is always its unique world....

Over the next few days, I'll start photoblogging and see where it leads.

Frontline-the best documentaries on US TV

One of the best documentary shows on US TV is Frontline, on PBS. You can watch the shows online and the companion websites offer more details into each theme.
They've recently had a number of insightful episodes on a variety of topics which I'll link to and comment :

The Persuaders focuses on marketing and highlights specialists such as Clotaire Rapaille, a French-born researcher who helps Fortune 500 companies find their "code" and communicate to consumers' reptilian brains. Rapaille maintained a blog during the US presidential campaign where he expanded on code and archetypes in presidential politics.

Is Wal-Mart Good for America ? is a good facts-based report on the far-reaching consequences of Wal-Mart's sourcing strategies starting in the mid-1990s.

The Secret History of the Credit Card is a fascinating recap on the birth of the modern credit card industry in the beginning of the 80s, in South Dakota.

Une demonstration de l'humour francais....peut etre un entrepreneur desireux de faire partager son amour de nos lois sociales "que le monde nous envie"... photo authentique prise dans ma rue pres de Central Park.

The power of blogs - a personal tale

An interesting personal experience sheds light on the power of blogs, you know those geek-powered websites that no one reads. I've been looking to replace my age-old HP laptop and had been unable to decide on a particular brand. Browsing thru Instapundit this weekend, I noticed that Glenn had been searching for a new laptop himself. I took a look at the Amazon link and after going to laptopmag.com to see their review, I bought Glenn's suggestion.

What does that tell us ? That in this age of data overload, blogs are one of the tools enhancing the power of "mavens", those trusted souls Malcom Gladwell writes about.
The Amazon Associates referral system is probably one of the best tools out there to wax poetic about a product and earn money from it.

The digital economy is just starting to invent new business models for people out there to create content, offer their own perspectives and provide what people are so lacking nowadays: rooted points of view from which to start (or end) their own train of thought. Blogs at their core are one person or group's angle on current events and their picks on what to read.

The soon-to-come merger of wikis and blogs, outfitted with podcasting a la Winer-Curry, will allow a true democratization of news gathering. The 500-channel world will explode a hundredfold. Already, Koreans have shown us with Ohmynews that regular folk can become citizen-reporters, and that their fellow readers are willing to pay to access their writing.

More musings tomorrow....

Je reprends le blog apres un tres (trop..) long silence. Depuis ces presque 2 ans, que de changements dans la blogosphere :
- il y aurait maintenant pres de 3 millions de blogs,
- les blogs ont prouve leur "pouvoir mediatique" a plusieurs reprises, a l'occasion du fiasco Trent Lott-Strom Thurmond en Dec 2002, en maintenant la pression apres que les grands medias aient laisse l'histoire "mourir"; au cours de l'avant-guerre d'Irak avec des bloggeurs de l'interieur tels que Salam Pax ,
- les bloggers ont pour la 1ere fois rang d'honneur aux conventions politiques US de cet ete
- certains grands medias ont carrement coopte le phenomene blogs et embauche des bloggers ou ouvert des pages "a la blog"
- le phenomene du RSS (XML, ATOM) continue de se propager et de gagner non seulement les blogs, mais aussi les medias (meme francais).

Le web, redevenu polymorphe, est donc bien devenu un media de 1er ordre, depassant chez certaines tranches d'age la TV. Tous ces outils (blogs, RSS) contribuent donc a faire de la toile le carrefour de toutes les infos, a tel point que le "data smog" devient une realite.

Après plusieurs mois de parenthèses, je reprends les rênes du blog et vous livre quelques liens: Jimmy Carter signe aujourd'hui un article très critique dans le WPost, The Troubling New Face of America , où il met par exemple le doigt sur le caractère légal pour le moins flou de l'emprisonnement des Taliban à Guanatanamo (Cuba) et le fait que cela correspond à des pratiques jadis critiquées par les Etats-Unis.

La tragi-comédie autour de Vivendi Universal et de Canal + donne lieu à un foisonnement d'articles dans la presse économique française et US-UK, quelques liens vers des points de vue intéressants sur la question : Le FT prévoit un J6M qui s'accroche : Messier gambles on a showdown , un peu plus tôt dans la semaine, le même FT dressait le portrait des rois nus de l'été 2000, Chris Gent et J6M : How the 'kings' of Europe lost their crowns . Le vénérable New York Times livre sa vision, très factuelle de la crise : Vivendi's Chief Forces Out Its Pay Television Director.