What do geeks do in Paris?

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.

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31 thoughts on “What do geeks do in Paris?

  1. You are getting boring, talking about your junkets, dinners and rubbing elbows. You are worse than a politician. How about creating some interesting content on your blog, I am gonna delete your feed unless you start suppplying YOUR market some quality content. BTW Microsfot Max hosed my machine and caused me alot of distress.

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  2. You are getting boring, talking about your junkets, dinners and rubbing elbows. You are worse than a politician. How about creating some interesting content on your blog, I am gonna delete your feed unless you start suppplying YOUR market some quality content. BTW Microsfot Max hosed my machine and caused me alot of distress.

    Like

  3. to watch what anyone in the world says about L’Oreal’s products.

    Why jump thru all those geeky snotty-nosed hoops? They’d do much better if they’d just get Cymfony Orchestra, and avoid all the hubris, and egohead case-study books and preening jetset bloggers, and plus they’d have tracking, charting, analysis and forecasting BUILT IN, with both MSM and CGM.

    And arencha gonna (again) talk about how Vichy was forced to bend to the “human and transparent” marketing rules of the blogopshere community, and how they “rebirthed” themselves? And how it was all a great victory grand and glorious for bloggers and the universe itself….blah, blah blah…

    File under Misc. — Junkets, dinners and rubbing elbows? Just noticing that? That’s been the theme of this blog since it but started. 😉 And Max sucks royally, yes I mean, royally, buggy betaish format C: royally. I don’t think I will ever “human touch” that software again. I still have a ScalaVision MS Reader eBook of Musee D’Orsay, got back in that whole eBook hype era. Nice tho. And End User client systems running XP, doesn’t make for an “IT system”, you’d think you’d know that.

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  4. to watch what anyone in the world says about L’Oreal’s products.

    Why jump thru all those geeky snotty-nosed hoops? They’d do much better if they’d just get Cymfony Orchestra, and avoid all the hubris, and egohead case-study books and preening jetset bloggers, and plus they’d have tracking, charting, analysis and forecasting BUILT IN, with both MSM and CGM.

    And arencha gonna (again) talk about how Vichy was forced to bend to the “human and transparent” marketing rules of the blogopshere community, and how they “rebirthed” themselves? And how it was all a great victory grand and glorious for bloggers and the universe itself….blah, blah blah…

    File under Misc. — Junkets, dinners and rubbing elbows? Just noticing that? That’s been the theme of this blog since it but started. 😉 And Max sucks royally, yes I mean, royally, buggy betaish format C: royally. I don’t think I will ever “human touch” that software again. I still have a ScalaVision MS Reader eBook of Musee D’Orsay, got back in that whole eBook hype era. Nice tho. And End User client systems running XP, doesn’t make for an “IT system”, you’d think you’d know that.

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  5. Scoble is getting more self absorbed than usual. It must be some sort of mania. I don’t understand alot about what he writes sometimes, too many internal references, however he sometimes has moments of brilliance. It has been an exciting time at Microsoft, they released alot of great stuff lately, do they have more coming, perhaps, but the way Scoble is acting on his blogs, the excitement seems to have abated.

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  6. Scoble is getting more self absorbed than usual. It must be some sort of mania. I don’t understand alot about what he writes sometimes, too many internal references, however he sometimes has moments of brilliance. It has been an exciting time at Microsoft, they released alot of great stuff lately, do they have more coming, perhaps, but the way Scoble is acting on his blogs, the excitement seems to have abated.

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  7. Guzzard: blame it on the French wine. When I was in Paris my heart wasn’t in my blog. If you visit here, you’ll understand.

    The blog will get back to normal next week when I get back to boring Seattle.

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  8. Guzzard: blame it on the French wine. When I was in Paris my heart wasn’t in my blog. If you visit here, you’ll understand.

    The blog will get back to normal next week when I get back to boring Seattle.

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  9. C’mon Scobleizer – get back to normal. We’ve missed you. The clogosphere’s been dead silent since all the geeks went to Paris!

    Did you see the pic of the laptop-enabled audience on Loic’s blog? Hilarious.

    Paris never saw it coming…

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  10. C’mon Scobleizer – get back to normal. We’ve missed you. The clogosphere’s been dead silent since all the geeks went to Paris!

    Did you see the pic of the laptop-enabled audience on Loic’s blog? Hilarious.

    Paris never saw it coming…

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  11. If you’re into chocolate or marzipan, check out Leonidas in the Grand Plaz in Brussels. Awesome stuff – the last time I was there I brought back 10 kilos :).

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  12. If you’re into chocolate or marzipan, check out Leonidas in the Grand Plaz in Brussels. Awesome stuff – the last time I was there I brought back 10 kilos :).

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  13. Wow, you and Shel “Yes, show yourself, raise your hands” got yourself into a fubared pickle, eh? Interesting drama, but of course, Mena “speeches” are always that. Hahahaha. Wow. The one thing that hits the press, and boy is Shel looking like a dork. You ignore backchatter until after, taking the pulse and the feedback. PR Pro? Oh dear me. Taking on a BBC guy? Hahhaha.

    Shel voiced his opinion that maybe there should be a show of hands to see who else agreed with me, to which there was a general grown of “no”, that that was a bad idea.

    And now Dave in on the attack? Whee, fun with blogs. Har har har. Oh I love this. Great drama. In researching this from people that were there, Ben came out rosy, Mena came out clueless (amazing that), and Shel came out as opportunist Evil Incarnate jerk.

    http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/index.php/2005/12/07/les-blogs-me-mena/

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/08/lesblogs_nice_call/

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  14. Wow, you and Shel “Yes, show yourself, raise your hands” got yourself into a fubared pickle, eh? Interesting drama, but of course, Mena “speeches” are always that. Hahahaha. Wow. The one thing that hits the press, and boy is Shel looking like a dork. You ignore backchatter until after, taking the pulse and the feedback. PR Pro? Oh dear me. Taking on a BBC guy? Hahhaha.

    Shel voiced his opinion that maybe there should be a show of hands to see who else agreed with me, to which there was a general grown of “no”, that that was a bad idea.

    And now Dave in on the attack? Whee, fun with blogs. Har har har. Oh I love this. Great drama. In researching this from people that were there, Ben came out rosy, Mena came out clueless (amazing that), and Shel came out as opportunist Evil Incarnate jerk.

    http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/index.php/2005/12/07/les-blogs-me-mena/

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/08/lesblogs_nice_call/

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  15. And as an aside, lecturing L’Oreal about ‘what the world thinks’ is rich in irony, considering 95% of the target market be females, and you two crusty geeks have little to zero clue about those products. I guess I was the only one that found deep irony in that, as hardly saw it on the blog pingbacks. 😉

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  16. And as an aside, lecturing L’Oreal about ‘what the world thinks’ is rich in irony, considering 95% of the target market be females, and you two crusty geeks have little to zero clue about those products. I guess I was the only one that found deep irony in that, as hardly saw it on the blog pingbacks. 😉

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  17. Christopher: both Shel’s wife and my wife accompanied us to L’Oreal and played a part in the presentation too. You forget that my wife has blogged about L’Oreal. You also forget that we interviewed more than 100 businesses about blogging so know a bit about it. You also forget that men buy a LOT of cosmetics.

    As for the Mena thing, I wasn’t there.

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  18. Christopher: both Shel’s wife and my wife accompanied us to L’Oreal and played a part in the presentation too. You forget that my wife has blogged about L’Oreal. You also forget that we interviewed more than 100 businesses about blogging so know a bit about it. You also forget that men buy a LOT of cosmetics.

    As for the Mena thing, I wasn’t there.

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