small talk 2.0

"France succumbed to Twitter" - this is today's headline in one of the most popular French newspaper "Le Parisien". Two million French are using Twitter as of today. This number is nothing compared to the true success of Facebook on the French soil. Half (!) of the population in France are using the biggest social network in the world. The success of social media in France is undoubted. In addition to the global networks, like Twitter and Facebook, there are other networks that  have rather French or European flavor and are also quite popular, to mention Daily Motion (a version of Youtube) for exchanging videos, or Viadeo (a version of LinkedIn) that is used for professional purposes. The boom of the social media is being felt especially strong in the last few month, due to an extraordinary event that happened in Mai: the arrest of the president of IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The French media was reporting about this event in an obsessive way, only reflecti...

“It’s hard to understand, but Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is heading full force into his own collapse, and that of his Authority, in September”, wrote a n Israeli commentator Guy Bechor a few days ago. It’s one thing to make declarations; it’s another thing to bring to their implementation. It’s one thing to use strong expressions like “Israel will face diplomatic tsunami in September”. However in reality, the vote in the UN, if it will happen (with strong emphasis on “if”), could hardly be described even as an “aftershock”. Rather it will prove to be void of any significance, like most of the communication spins promoted by Palestinian Authority and their supporters in the media. We don’t have to be prophets in order to understand why this outcome of the UN bid is almost inevitable. We just have to be good listeners. Let’s first listen to somebody who probably has better understanding than the average person, why the unilateral declaration in the UN is useless and...