A month ago, Nicholas Sarkozy caused quite a stir when he posted a comment on the blog of a movie director critical of his policies.

Now, he’s broken new ground again by being possibly the first major politician to do an interview by Podcast.

The video interview (in French) is here

I’ve previously written that Sarkozy’s use of the Internet could make him the Howard Dean of European politics; during the interview Sarkozy discusses the use of email campaigns and blogs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he decided to use the Internet to his competitive advantage in the 2007 presidential elections. He clearly is more comfortable in the medium than any of his major rivals.

Some other comments/thoughts:

• Within two days of being posted, the podcast was seen by 10,000 people
• Rodrigo Sepulveda makes a ***very*** interesting observation that podcasts fall outside the regulations of media airtime of candidates. The politician that can figure out how to be "virally heard and seen" on the internet will have a very big advantage of exposure over those that don’t
• The interview was conducted by Loic Le Meur, a French serial entrepreneur and SixApart’s European head. When was the last time a European politician accepted to be interviewed by a blogger, or rather, someone not a professional journalist?
• Sarkozy was ok with being addressed in the informal "tu" form during the interview. This is pretty cool. I can hardly imagine Jacques Chirac accepting to do the same.

David Blanco has gotten in touch with news that his startup, Tractis, has won the DMR Foundation‘s Entrepreneur’s Prize for 2005. This means 200k Euros of seed funding to get the project off the ground.

Tractis is an interesting idea of using Web Services to manage and broker all kinds of contracts. They presented at WebDosBeta, and as far as I know are the first startup since the conference to get funding.

Congrats, David!

In a former life, Robert Cringely must have been a writer of Edwardian ghost stories.

Everybody writes about Google, but only Cringely has managed to raise the game of speculating about Google’s "master plan" into terror-inducing literary art.

His writing is part detective novel ("The probable answer lies in one of Google’s underground parking garages…"), part serialized pulp fiction ("Game over. And next week I’ll take it one more step…"), part global conspiracy theory ("…as Google takes over the role of trusted third-party info-escrow agent for all world business…"), and mostly sheer terror and scary stuff ("…as a result, Google becomes overnight a major phone company, a major video entertainment provider, a major player in home automation, and even medical telemetry…")

Mark Evans says his "brain hurts" when he read Cringely. Personally, my spine tingles with fear of the mysterious, much terrifying Google Ghost haunting all the industries of the world!

Given the mind-blowing Google projects he describes in his last three columns, here, then here, and lately here, I wouldn’t be surprised if he decides to top the storyline along the lines of "Google employees are really lizards from outer space; I just narrowly escaped the Googleplex with proof…" or "My team of archeologists have just cracked the ancient Incan myth fortelling the coming of The Great Search Beast, and I can now share with you what humanity must do to survive…"

This is hilarious.

I will suggest a 21st century version of the old saying:

"you can’t fool every blogger, even some of the time"

…and once one blogger (and Google) have figured out your fraud, you ain’t fooling anybody again.

Hat tip to Hugh

A rumor started here, and talked about here, has Telefonica employees currently undergoing training for the imminent rollout of a 50 mb/s broadband product in Spain.

If true, then this would certainly put the heat on all the just-launched (and still yet-to-be-launched!) ADSL2+ players in Spain.

UPDATE: Looks to be sort-of true. The excellent ADSLZone uncovers the plans:
- regulatory approval given for Telefonica to offer 24 mb/s ADSL2+ in 2006
- this apparently includes a plan to move to 50 mb/s VDSL2 also in the same year, but with limited availability (sounds like just Madrid, for now)

Curious to know the pricing…

Laurent Bernat raises the stakes and scathingly challenges Free on its claims of creating a revolutionary new ADSL technology to rival the speeds of fiber optics. Thankfully, he spares my own review (phew!), but is very critical towards those news sources that just parroted the words of the press release without any analysis or challenge.

This is a question of credibility; Free has it, given their awesome track record of execution and measured innovation. But for the goodwill and reputation to continue, it will have to follow up to show us just what exactly "F-ADSL" is really all about.

Getting to see my friend Ami Vitale is a rare feat! An accomplished photojournalist with experience in amazing places all over the world, she was in town yesterday for a brief 24 hours.

It’s always fun to talk to Ami about her work because it’s always fun to talk to anyone who is as enthusiastic and in love and motivated by the mission of their job as she is..

Here’s some of her great work online; enjoy! Link: www.amivitale.com