Peter Rojas: Engadget Seattle Reader Meetup on Thursday December 8. Wish I could be there!

Kevin Briody nails it: Great marketing doesn’t always start with marketers

“The challenge is to think like the Channel 9 guys – they are doing marketing, and doing it well. They are changing perceptions in a big way, and doing it honestly and transparently. They dream up new ideas for what might make the experience even better, and they just do it. They get feedback, adapt, and keep moving forward.”

Louvre? Nope. Notre Dame? Nope. Eiffel Tower? Nope. FNAC? Yes!

It’s just like visiting Fry’s Electronics in Silicon Valley. Nope, the salespeople don’t speak English here either. Bad joke, I know.

Anyway, we did visit all those other places in Paris too.

The Paris Museum, Musee D’Orsay is absolutely wonderful. Must visit. After visiting the impressionists and seeing the beautiful buildings, I checked out their IT systems. All running Windows XP.

Yesterday Shel Israel and I visited L’Oreal’s headquarters and spoke to many of their marketing and PR people. Turns out that L’Oreal, the world’s largest cosmetics maker, is one of Microsoft’s best customers. But we were there to talk about corporate blogging. We talked about how to use Technorati/Feedster/Pubsub/IceRocket to watch what anyone in the world says about L’Oreal’s products.

Maryam, my wife, was interviewed by Lloyd Davis while here at Les Blogs.

We’re off to Brussels tomorrow, see ya at the geek dinner.

Gavin writes about the blog party in Cork: “As for last week, all of us had a chance to chat to Robert Scoble, who really is a nice guy, obviously passionate about blogging and technology, and perhaps surprisingly to me, the company he works for.”

Clogger is still skeptical about me: Just one last gripe. “Nobody on the Microsoft payroll – or any payroll for that matter of a company that directly affects the fabric of the Internet – can be even 1% authentic.”

My answer? That’s bulls**t. But, glad to see that the corporate skepticism that I believe is one of the forces that caused blogging to happen is alive and well. Clogger obviously hasn’t read my blog for very long. So, when I say I love Google is that not authentic? When I point you at Memeorandum is that not authentic? Oh, so whenever I say I like Windows Vista that’s not authentic? Got it.

Marc Canter says Shel and I are “all warm and fuzzy.”

Rick Segal has an interesting post titled: Microsoft Max – The Human Touch.

Guerrilla Consulting asks “Should You Read Naked Conversations?”

More hopefully soon, but we’re having too much fun here to spend much time on the computer.