It would be nice to have France on our team for the first time in over two hundred years. I am very interested right now in Thomas Barnett's core/gap model and increasing cohesiveness in the core cannot be a bad thing.
Well he finally made it, now we'll waith if he can keep all the promises he made... we'll see. Concerning the web, it is really the first elections in France that had such an importance and repercussions over the internet. All three major candidates had what was called 'campaign sites' (battle sites ?) and at every public appearance you had the url printed on candidate's side ( in order of %votes : http://www.sarkozy.fr http://www.desirsdavenir.org http://www.bayrou.fr ) All these sites did pinopoint realtime videos, forums and an special enlightenment on mastering, giving almost realtime information. Some people here in France suppose that these elections were on the way to be won across the Internet, and that the web is now considered as a major media for important public events such as this one. On an other hand, an other point of importance was the frequentation of those sites and others dealing with elections reached summits, see for example http://www.pourquivoter.com/planpqv.html (who to vote for dot com) a particuliar point of France is that its presidentials are in two rounds and that at each round, publishing estimations or results out of the voting area are strictly forbidden before 8 PM (closure of voting offices). This is french law, but France's neighbours, such as switzerland or belgium are not submitted to french law and they did present out of the ballots results or estimations, which did yield to their servers overhaul overheat and overfrequentation (some 'friendly DDOS's') http://www.netdynamics.eu/forum/viewtopic.php?t=51&start=0 http://fr.news.yahoo.com/26042007/2...l-de-la-frequentation-des-sites-internet.html Belgian great media such as RTBF did publis also Such a frequentation that for the second round each of these sites did put their servers on steroids... Due to the fact that legislative electioons are to be voted again in less than one month, let us see what may happen then..