Kiss Under Mistletoe

After weeks of intense research to find the perfect evening to spend on New Years, I think I've found the best place to be. You have to understand where I come from. I have an history of the worse New Years ever. From being lost in the Los Angeles tube at midnight to go to bed at 10 pm without being able to sleep after having a quiet dinner with a few girlfriends, I needed change. 

So I created a group on Facebook and invited everyone I knew to spend the best New Years ever. Especially since I believe that if you are truly happy for New Years, then you are happy the rest of the year. Christmas is spending time with the people you love, New Years is about happiness. So here we go.

Of course by being a twenty year old single young lady in the big city of London, I still believe in Prince Charming. And hope he is going to magically pop out of his white horse and kiss me under the mistletoe at midnight while everyone else is applauding. Like in that scene with Bryan and Marisa in the OC. Oh boy.

Well, most of my friends here do not LIVE here, so they are all coming back to their original country. Social pressure says I should do the same. But see, going back to Lyon for New Years means going that to that terrible routine of mine that has been in the last five years. Meaning eating foie gras with my very best girlfriends while watching MTV and other couples making out. Which is great, but well... not really.

So here I am, trying to convince everyone to show up in London for New Years... with very little success. Exams, money, boyfriends, everyone seem to have an excellent excuse not to come. Am I friendless? Not to mention boyfriendless? Well that was without counting on my friends Ben, Cyrielle and hum Korane.

Four friends deciding to dress up their best and crash the ultimate party in one of the most exciting European capital. We decided to hit NOBU, one of Mayfair's hypiest restaurant. But where to go after? With the multitude of club and individual parties, we didn't know what to choose from. 

So I asked around, and my friend Antoin, upcoming actor and London socialight advised me to go a Masquerade Ball which is taking place in a venue near The Thames. Now that sounds cool. Let's just hope it'll be like in Marie Antoinette. With a mask. 

Video courtesy to Youtube.

Image courtesy to Ball.

Top Ten For Dummies

Meet the winning team. Six individuals who created Top Ten For Dummies, the addictive, controversial, innovative and terribly entertaining group blog of our online module. 

Reassembled around Stephan's idea of creating a 'top ten' of everything, the team won the most marketable commercial blog in our presentation this morning. A range of people with different ideas and backgrounds putting the best of themselves to bring their blog to the top.

The idea of 'Top Ten For Dummies' is a commercial website easy to navigate, creative and dynamic without any expectations to change the world, but simply to entertain. Six Top lists are updated on a daily basis, and each day has a different topic around which posts develop and are then categories into areas.

The ultimate aim for this blog was to sparkle debate, get people to be involved and increase traffic. the target audience is primarily a young male and female ABC1 audience, mainly 'bored office workers', but the blog is easy to relate to, so everyone can get appealed to it. It is a light entertainment in the middle of a stressful day.

We have expanded the website to a Facebook group, our poll gadget with which everyone can pick the topics we debate on, and the comments feature.

We take on board objections and we dismiss them. Some people might regard 'Top Ten for Dummies' as a frivolous topic, but guess what? That's where the strength of this blog lies. In fact, this is your daily entertainment where you get involved in between coffee breaks. This would be the ideal place to invest for advertisers. I mean, who would want to buy something while reading about tragedies?

We found out that writing six posts per day can reveal itself overwhelming, therefore we are evaluating the option of writing 2 or 3 posts per day and perhaps have more of multimedia content around them. 

After all, this blog has a tremendous potential. People just love to argue and get involved. It has a good layout, and extreme usability written in a fresh, fun and attractive style which anyone can enjoy.

Picture courtesy to Facebook and the lovely Flamy. 

Blog Mania

In my search to improve my blogging abilities, I started to look around at other blogs, not only in this class, but around the web, and the blogs advised by our wise course lecturer. Well, turns out, there's the good , the bad and the ugly.

Not everyone is Perez Hilton, nor have the controversy, the sponsors and audience the blog is attracting. Here are some of the blogs I preferred:

Gawker: A huge amount of information, catchy sentences, mostly celebrity oriented, the blog is the 'in your face' type. Very organized in its display, it also attracts many comments and is participatory, which I think is extremely important. The information is light entertainment stories which would attract a professional audience looking for distractions in their break time as well as keeping in touch with celebrity gossip.

ValleyWag: Now this one is a first. A blog for geeks, certainly, since we're talking about the Silicon Valley here, but a gossip one. Who knew geeks liked gossip? So a very niche market, but a very successful one since most of these people made their money with internet, therefore will be looking for information and entertainment online. Good videos, good images, good content. Good stuff.

Slashfood: Actually made me hungry. It's lunch time people! Quite different in its display, it's got looottsss of sponsors and a very structured website, with links to 'tips of the day', 'celebrity chefs', 'past recipes', 'gift of the day'... etc. Very creative, it obviously displays a lot of yummy images and fewer videos. Targeted at a wide audience from young professionals to grandparents, the blog invites to easy cooking. Yum. 

Cinematical: Well, I'm a movie geek, probably caught that from living in Hollywood, so I guess it doesn't count. But still, galleries, trailers (I'm a trailer addict), interviews, features, reviews, headlines, cinema news. Everything you could possibly ask for in the film industry. I thought they could have gave an insight of industry news, but their 'the tops, the bests, and the mosts' kept me wanting more. Overall, very attractive, and I will certainly go back to check out the updates.

Overall, I found out that blogging is veryyyyy time consuming. It can be quite addictive too, just like Facebook and other social sites. And dangerous in the way that one can live in a virtual world rather than go out there and live their own real life. It is successful in the way that the web has an infinite possibility of audience and information. It is also a free way to express opinions to a global public. I believe it is certainly the future for journalism, hopefully including more participatory features and an interaction in between the journalist and audience rather than formal news. 

Perez Hilton is confronted by Vistoria Beckham. 

Video courtesy to Youtube. Image courtesy to Jezebel.  

Sarko Romance

For the Carla Bruni dectractors, life must be hard. Because she is doing GREAT! Not only, she has been accepted by the French people as the first lady and an ambassador of charm of France abroad, but she has conquered the media and the rest of the planet.

Appearing on multiple covers of high profile magazines such as Vanity Fair and TV Shows such as the David's Letterman's Late Show, she is now niknamed the new Jackie Kennedy. Her style, beauty, grace and humility has conquered the heart of the people and the media.

Forgotten her naked pictures, her rich and famous past lovers, her Italian origines. She is now one of the most regarded woman in the world, and an extremely powerful political tool, too. How much of Bruni's image isn't orquestred by the Sarkozy clan? She is a celebrity, and her album, which was heavily critized before she became the first lady of France, is now best selling.

I EVEN have a song of Sarkozy in my itunes, called L'amour. Hum, a song of Bruni, sorry.

Video Courtesy to Youtube.

Gossip What?

I am SO disapointed. My favourite TV show GOSSIP GIRL, which I watch online every tuesday (the show appears on American television Monday night) is getting worse and worse.

After an extremely successful debut, which has pretty much launched the careers of the likes of Blake Lively, landing A-list events and magazines such as Vanity Fair, it seems that the show is getting flushed away. What the hell happened? I mean, who cares about parent romance? Why can't anyone be happy, even for an episode?

The show used to be THE reference in terms of fashion, hot spots, inside jokes, painting a young and scandalous New York. It even made ME, the L.A girl, want to go NY. Apart from the irresistible Chuck (English actor, of course), who remains a slight source of entertainment in between essays with a big plate of cereals or nutella, everyone else is SO PLAIN.

The show used to pride itself to be THE teenage show that is every parents nightware, with drugs, alchohol, sex, social prejusdices... well I don't see any of these anymore. It has become so politically correct I fall asleep everytime I watch it! Where is the scandal? We want more. I thought Gossip Girl was going to be the natural succession of the OC, which lasted at LEAST four seasons, and succeeded to 90210.

Well, is it just me? CW and the creative machines behind this addiction, pleeeease. Get Gossip Girl back. The one and only, the show that actually creates gossip. xoxo.

Image courtesy to Google. Video Courtesy to YouTube.

Bite me, Robert

The Twilight mania. If you are between the age of a 13 and 25 and live in the Western civilised world, I bet you haven't been able to avoid it. If you're a girl, it's only about to get worse. I'm talking about Twilight, the teenage vampire romance and its charimatic and gorgeous main character Robert Pattinson.

Now it is ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE. It has taken the American Box Office by storm with more than $70 million the opening week and arrive in England on the 18th of December. Not to mention it is already online and has created an incredible buzz.

The actors are just going from show to show, Ellen, Oprah, The Soup, Tyra, there are on every cover of magazines, every cinema reviews, every corner of the tube. The main description of the vampire male character was 'the perfect man'.

Now Robert is getting close. A talented musician, he also played Cedric in Harry Potter (He's English, of course) and is simply IRRESISTIBLE for every teenage girl and over. He has created an absolute phenomenon in the States.

The film was produced by Summit Entertainment, quite a small independant company getting recognition with Twilight, inspired on a best seller series of books.

For those of haven't watched the film online with some dodgy camera nor downloaded the music, get ready for the 18th, because it is absolutely fantastic.

Video courtesy to youtube. Image courtesy to MoviePics.

Hope For Journalists

They say journalism is dead, but when Neil McIntosh entered our newsroom, things looked quite different. A professional and successful online journalist, Neil painted a different picture. Yes, things are going to be hard for next two years, yes there are going to be jobs lost, but journalism is still and will remain a major part of our society.

Responding to critics saying that print journalism will be over within the next decade, McIntosh claims that the future lays in online. Which made me glad I took this online course. But when you think about it, we all started blogging longer than we even enrolled in journalism. Myspace, Facebook, emails, even letters, these are all the diaries that prepared us for this course. 

The good thing about internet is the infinite audience and freedom involving everyone to participate. Presenting yourself in the best light possible, sharing ideas, creating debate, criticize and getting criticized, taking actions, supporting causes, being part of a virtual community. All these actions that create a virtual and global public sphere and reach a maximum of people.

In this context, no wonder the future of journalists relies on the internet. Internet is to television what television was to print. Expanding an audience, reaching people that don't have access to a traditional form of critical media, these are the goals of online journalism. After meeting and interviewing Neil McIntosh for about an hour, the guy who participated in the creation of one of the most successful newspaper online, The Guardian, I feel relief. 

Everyone was wrong , and we were right. Not only journalism isn't a dead nor a difficult profession, if one gives him or herself the tools to succeed, but it is an indispensable, reliable and powerful part of our lives, which I'll be happy to contribute too.

Image courtesy to Photobucket and the Online Project blog.