Old Skool media not amused

With thanx to the IHT edition of December 29th,p14, copyright Dennis Valle: fashion bloggers close in on the catwalk. And they get front row seats from the fashion houses. Not really to the likings of the traditional, old skool, privileged fashion watchers.

The result? from left to right the famous Suzy Menkes (IHT), Michael Roberts (VF), bryanboy.com, Sally Singer (American Vogue), thé Anna Wintour, Hamish Bowles (Vogue) and ... jakandjil.com

Two upstarts!

More prominent seating than this is impossible :-)

shocking cynicism

Read in this month's Vanity Fair: a feature on Goldman Sachs. To announce it, editorial writer Carter gives some shocking insite into the cynicism of this top-tier financial insitution (that caused the financial crisis in the first place). Every 13 seconds someone's home is still being foreclosed while banking interests are being benificiaries of 17,5 TRILLION dollar in guarantees, loans and bailouts. This aid means record profits which again means ... record bonusses while the disconnect between America's most rich and America's most downtrodden hasn't been this dramatic since the late 1800s.

On this disconnect one Goldman Sachs advisor says 'we have to tolerate inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all' ... Or how about this one. At Goldman Sachs they do ... 'God's work'. And let's not forget they're into charity. The 2008 tax returns for the charitable foundation of Goldman tells us that the assets have dropped 1/3rd even though they are being managed by Goldman who, by the way, bill the charity almost 4 million dollar for these services.

Warren Buffet has a lot of praise for them , though. They have really turned the financial meltdown of 2008 into one big victory. Huge profits from betting against mortgage-related financial instruments ànd getting bailed out for it. Two main competitors bankrupt. Even getting H1N1 vaccines before hospitals did. And they are topping it of by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying in Washington to prevent banking reform legislation from happening.

Doesn't it give a warm X-massy feeling when you read all that?

Cool maps!

This is a very cool visualisation of the content technology vendor subway map to be found on the site of CMSwatch.com. Even cooler is the Web Map 4 by IA, a very far reminder of those great 'Internet growth' maps from the beginning of the decade. Click on the XXL JPG and zoom in: truly amazing!

Surfing on the Wave

Last week was spent in Boston, for the 6th Annual Gilbane Conference on Content, Collaboration and Customers. Good Conference but very 'American' ... imagine a senior consultant explaining that she'd stumbled upon a company called Atos Origin and that she supposed this never-heard of 'boite' had to be important as they had been involved in facilitating the Olympics ...

However, that's beside the point.

I'd already fallen in love with Boston the first time around, some 20-odd years ago. Now we were completely hooked. I actually would want to live there.

But that's beside the point too.

One of the most interesting (and certainly most fun) sessions of the Gilbane Conference was one with John Blossom on Wave (revolution or hype, complete with a Wave going on while the session ran (and continuing afterwards). I'm using it myself now but haven't had too much time to figure out what it can do (except for the obvious stuff) and I do not want to watch that long demo-video :-)More feedback to follow!

Speaking of video: John Blossom added a great one to his ContentWave

check it out here!

Fold tHe boX (3)

The Jack Klaff session had some weird vibes: laughing one minute, getting completely thrown off the scent the next and ending with a chilling finale. Klaft is a South African born Princeton professor/actor who was also involved in the Starlab initiative (as is Serguei by the way) in Brussels. I'm not sure I know what he talked about in the end ... but he got us sitting on the tip of our chairs.

He was followed by John Engel, production manager in the movie business and author of Uncommon Sound, a history of the guitar since the 1920's with a focus on all those ground-breaking left-handed guitar players like himself. He introduced us to another lefthanded guitar player, Djamel Laroussi, Algerian-French, who produced some trancelike sounds from his guitar (with the strings upside down) and who got the audience joining him in clapping and singing ... sort of, anyway.

I missed the last part, so I didn't get to see Catherine Verfaillie (which is a pitty), nor R.U.Sirius (behind the 10Zenmonkeys blog) nor Noam Perski (who, I read on Twitter made this equation: all datacenters in the world have an energy consumption of 2% which is more than the aviation industry worldwide) , Calligrafitti (who probably designed the awfull TEDx t-shirts) or Paul Collier. And I don't know either whether the missing speakers (Pedro Brugada, the heart surgeon? Caroline Gabriel? ) eventually showed up.

I wouldn't call it Burn the Box, and I do realize that when we think TED, we think TED.com and all those really really great guests they seem to have an endless stock of. It was certainly worth the trip, however. And absolutely to be repeated next year, with more possibilities for interaction (tweets on a screen for example and have speakers react to them if they want to)

I haven't figured out what the incentive was for those like me who paid double the amount of the 50€ fee ... and I haven't found any information yet on the TEDxBrussels website (movies, slideshows, ..) so I'm guessing it will come, eventually.

I hope.