Yesterday (around noon on Thursday Dec 22nd), our most famous French blogger, the French blogfather Loïc Le Meur interviewed the French Minister of Interior and very likely Presidential candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy. Ever since, in the past 36 hours, the French blogosphere has gone wild with excitement, both positive and negative.
The fact is that this is probably one of the first time (a few prominent French politicians have done so in the past, including Alain Lambert here) that a major political figure in the country (Sarkozy is the leader of the right-wing party UMP) grants an interview to a blogger + podcaster + vlogger.
I will not comment on the content of the interview itself, because I usually do not share the same views with M. Sarkozy, nor to be more precise, his lists of priorities for the country. Nevertheless, I appreciated the fact that Sarkozy found some time to talk to a new audience, in a somehow more decontracted way. I don’t mind either that Loic gave him a video ipod + his book; he did in front of the camera and this is OK, as it’s public. Clearly, this was more of an experiment for both of them, and a marketing coup as well, very much focused on the promotion of the man, the candidate Sarkozy, and on Loïc as an upcoming media figure and prominent blogger. The only inappropriate aspect, in my view, is that the interview took place during working hours of the Minister of the Interior (a late day interview might have been more appropriate), but also in his office in a public servant premise. I guess I wouldn’t have minded for it to be taped better in a restaurant, at UMP HQ, at his home, etc.
That said, Loic took along a couple of professional sound & video friends with him to the interview, so it’s not exactly what any amateur could have done. In particular the sound quality is very good, and you have to praise Loic’s team for that, as I find it very difficult to master sound myself. On the improvement side, I’ll note that there is too much editing in the beginning of the footage, and that for ipods and webcasts, a closer framing would have been better, and that is what you get by the end of the interview. But a big hand for the effort of putting everything online in less than 20 hours all together.
Now, I expect the French blogosphere to wake up even more to online video blogging, and to French politicians to start using video blogging as a major tool in the upcoming 2007 presidential campaign. Easily done, with a fantastic reach online, and above all, outside of official TV quotas for airtime. Blogs enables conversations says Loic. Indeed, comments on a blog enhance the debate; that’s why our whole team at vpod.tv is proud and happy to be a technical partner again (after les blogs 2.0 conference) to Loic’s ventures. If you browse through the comments on his blog, you will read that downloading 92MB of a video file was a no-no for many people, and file format incompatibility for some was a major issue. We quickly adapted our Flash Player for Loic’s movie, and hosted it with our servers in our data center in Madrid. Please remember that we’re still in alpha mode, so some glitches might occur. So far so good: we’ll try to do our best to bring you the best experience.
2006 is the year of the vlog, right ?
