The Irish Times had a nice piece about the new exhibition of Robert Doisneau’s photography currently in show at the Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris. (Memo to self: check out Eurostar prices.) It rather undermines the image of Doisneau as a frivolous, romantic street photographer.

He captures the chalky, lonesome feel of the postwar industrial suburbs that were then rising fast on the capital’s periphery – brutalist towers, shantytown huts, oppressive grey skies, factory plumes rising in the distance. Workers file out in silhouette from the giant Renault plant at Boulogne-Billancourt, where Doisneau worked for five years. A faceless cyclist, his head cast downward, hurries home through the heavy rain. In Carrefour Saint-Germain (1945), the famously elegant cross-roads at the heart of Paris is under heavy snow, transforming it into an anonymous eastern European esplanade. During the second World War, Doisneau printed pamphlets and fake identity papers for the resistance, and here there are constant reminders of the war: Le cheval tombé (1942), an image of a fallen horse lying on a wet Parisian street as a crowd watches helplessly, represented for Doisneau “the great sadness” of his city under the Nazi occupation.

And yet familiar Doisneau signatures abound: the banality of daily toil brightened by a knowing, ironic juxtaposition, a belly-laugh, a stolen smile or – a recurrent theme – the escape routes dreamed up in a child’s imagination. And so, in La voiture fondue (1944), five children turn the clapped-out shell of an abandoned car into a sumptuous carriage, the coachman with his whip on the roof, another navigator on the bonnet, a third boy keeping a vigilant eye on the road behind.

But in a way the most interesting thing about the piece is a box about his most famous photograph — Le Baiser de l’Hotel de Ville.

I’ve seen that picture hundreds of times — and wondered if it had been staged.

A few years before Doisneau’s death in 1994, a retired couple came forward claiming they were the lovers featured in the photo and should be paid their share of the royalties. The case was dismissed, but in the course of it Doisneau revealed that the scene had been staged. While working on the Life series about Paris lovers, he had spotted Françoise Bornet and her then boyfriend Jacques Carteaud near the school where they were studying theatre, and they agreed to pose.

Some 40 years later, Bornet surfaced and showed Doisneau the original print bearing his signature and stamp, which he had sent her just a few days after the shoot. The couple didn’t stay together; Carteaud became a wine producer. In 2005, Bornet sold her original print for €156,000 at auction.

But it turns out that there’e even more to the picture. Look further into it:

The man in the beret striding purposefully behind the couple was Jack Costello, an auctioneer from Dublin, who was on a pilgrimage to Rome when the photograph was taken. It was 1950, a holy year, and he had travelled from his home in Clontarf by motorbike with a neighbour to join in the religious commemorations in Rome – the first and only time he ever travelled abroad. Costello is thought to have been sightseeing alone in Paris when he wandered into Doisneau’s frame. He never lived to enjoy his fame, alas. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that one of his sons spotted his father in a large poster of Le Baiser in a shop window in Dublin.

There’s a novel in this, you know. (Memo to self: phone Colm Toibin.)

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Fed up lugging round power-bricks for charging your various bits of kit? Or of having to plug them into a laptop simply to recharge? This is what every hotel-room and conference centre should have — powered USB in the wall socket. Thanks to Glyn Moody for spotting it.

Only available in US power format at present from here. But surely someone will do a UK version soon. (Hope springs eternal, etc.)

Lovely column by Charlie Brooker on why he’s an ebook convert.

But the single biggest advantage to the ebook is this: no one can see what you’re reading. You can mourn the loss of book covers all you want, but once again I say to you: no one can see what you’re reading. This is a giant leap forward, one that frees you up to read whatever you want without being judged by the person sitting opposite you on the tube. OK, so right now they’ll judge you simply for using an ebook – because you will look like a showoff early-adopter techno-nob if you use one on public transport until at least some time circa 2012 – but at least they’re not sneering at you for enjoying The Rats by James Herbert.

The lack of a cover immediately alters your purchasing habits. As soon as I got the ebook, I went on a virtual shopping spree, starting with the stuff I thought I should read – Wolf Hall, that kind of thing – but quickly found myself downloading titles I’d be too embarrassed to buy in a shop or publicly read on a bus. Not pornography, but something far worse: celebrity autobiographies.

And coverlessness works both ways: pretentious wonks will no longer be able to impress pretty students on the bus by nonchalantly/ demonstratively reading The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard, at least until someone brings out an ebook device with a second screen on the back which displays the cover of whatever it is you’re reading for the benefit of attractive witnesses (or more likely, boldly displays the cover of The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard while you guiltily breeze through It’s Not What You Think by Chris Evans).

And another advantage of the technology — you can read at night without disturbing anyone. I’ve currently got E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View on my iPod, for example, and, finding myself awake in the small hours last night, was able to continue reading without switching on a light.

Watching RyanAir cabin crew struggling to serve overpriced canned drinks to customers on a packed airborne cattle-truck yesterday I was struck by the memory that there was a time, in the 1950s and 1960s, when socially ambitious Irish parents used to pray that one of their daughters would become an ‘airline hostess’ on the national carrier, Aer Lingus. That way, you see, they’d be sure to meet a rich man and marry well. It wasn’t an entirely daft idea, either: airline travel was an expensive and socially exclusive business at the time — and flying was often a pleasant experience. I remember catching an Aer Lingus flight from London to Dublin in the late 1960s and finding myself upgraded to the ‘First Class’ part of the plane (curtained off from the hoi-polloi behind) — where I was served with a glass of champagne, if you please. Ah, those were the days. Sigh. Er, did I ever tell you about the Boer War…?

This morning’s Observer column.

IF, LIKE MILLIONS of others, you use Gmail, Google’s webmail service, you will have been startled last week by the sudden appearance of a cuckoo in your email nest. When you log in to collect your mail, an invitation to “try Buzz in Gmail?” – “no setup needed” – pops up. There’s no indication of what this “Buzz” is, but if you click “try” a window opens saying you’re now “following” a number of people and that a number of people are “following” you. Below this comes a stream of Twitter-like postings from your followees.

This will come as a surprise, because you have no recollection of making any decision to follow anyone, or of soliciting followers yourself. And this is in fact the case: Google has simply gone through your email inbox and designated some of those with whom you correspond frequently as followees. And you were at no stage consulted about any of this…

The more I think about Buzz the more it reminds me of Gilbert Ryle’s concept of a ‘category mistake’, i.e. a situation where we think of something in terms appropriate only to something of a radically different kind. For me, email is an entirely private tool — for confidential communications with carefully selected individuals. The designers of Buzz, however, seem to have assumed that email is inherently social — i.e. involving communication in public. For me — and I suspect for millions of others — this is emphatically not the case. I’m happy to use social networking tools like this blog and Twitter for public stuff. But email is for private stuff — even when I’m sending a message to multiple recipients.

Another thought: this time about the abrupt way in which Buzz was introduced. As I said in the column, it smacks of Microsoft-type arrogance. I don’t really think the Google guys are evil — though of course to regard a public corporation as a ‘moral’ entity is to make another category mistake. Corporations don’t have morals; the best one can hope for is that they obey the law. But, as Ken Auletta’s book about the company makes clear, Google blunders sometimes because Brin and Page tend to approach things with the simplistic directness of engineers. (I’m an engineer, so I can say this.)

Take the Google Books project, the reasoning behind which goes something like this:

1. Millions of books are out of print and therefore inaccessible to most of mankind. This is a Bad Thing.
2. Up to now nobody has had the nerve to digitise out-of-print books that are still in copyright but whose copyright owners are untraceable because infringement carries strict (i.e. unlimited) liability.
3. Google has the resources, capability and chutzpah to digitise these books and make them accessible to everyone — which would be a Good Thing.
4. So Google will digitise the books. QED.

The fact that this might upset many publishers, some authors and sundry public authorities (like the Federal government) doesn’t really appear on the Google radar at first. And when it does, the Google boys are hurt and surprised. So they then try a piece of legal engineering — by proposing a deal with publishers et al in which Google will pay a one-off fee and set up an agency for collecting access fees/royalties and dispensing them to the appropriate recipients. In return Google will receive indemnity from copyright suits in respect of ‘orphan’ works — thereby giving it a unique advantage over other would-be digitisers.

But then it turns out that the US and other governments are not overjoyed by this — much to the dismayed bafflement of the Google boys.

Buzz looks like the product of a similar simplistic, can-do mindset. The best articulation of it I’ve seen comes from Tim O’Reilly (who seems to think that Buzz is wonderful). “Google Buzz”, he writes, “re-invents Gmail”.

There are many of us for whom email is still our core information console, and our most powerful and reliable vehicle for sharing ideas, links, pictures, and conversations with the people who constitute our real social network. But up till now, we could only share with explicitly specified individuals or groups. Now, we can post messages to be read by anyone. Sergey Brin said that Buzz gives the ability “to post a message without a ‘to’ line.” That’s exactly right – something that in retrospect is so brilliantly obvious that it will soon no doubt be emulated by every other cloud-based email system.

Buzz items can be shared directly in Gmail, but are also pulled in from other social sharing sites, including Twitter, Picasa, YouTube, and Flickr.

What’s particularly cool is that the people you “follow” are auto-generated for you out of your email-based social network. If you communicate with them, they are the seed for your buzz cloud. Over time, as you like or dislike buzz entries from that network, the buzz cloud adapts.

The fact that this might constitute a category mistake obviously never occurred to the Google team, or indeed to the sainted Mr O’Reilly, who is normally a very astute observer ot the technological scene.

LATER: Thanks to Neil Davidson for spotting the missing link to my column.

Since I was rude about Davos (see The Davos Smugfest) a few days ago (much to the frustration of Adrian Monck, the former journalism professor who has forsaken academia to become its lead PR guy), I should perhaps balance that post by drawing attention to this more emollient piece by Google CEO, Eric Schmidt.

It’s easy to sneer at Davos as a place where the rich, powerful and famous come to talk to each other and arrogantly put the world to rights. But there has been little sign of arrogance at recent gatherings. Nor any settled view of how to overcome the challenges our world faces. If there is a global conspiracy underway at Davos, no one has yet let me in on the secret.

Instead Davos mirrors the uncertainty in the world in general. The real story this year was not arrogance but anxiety over how we could channel turbulent global forces in a more positive direction so that everyone gains. It's a rare chance for people — whether political or business leaders — to check their more narrow interests at the door and discuss these challenges from a broader perspective.

So we heard real and widespread concerns about the direction of the American economy and, for the first time, the danger of stalemate in our political system. There was intense discussion, too, about the eurozone and levels of debt. Here, too, there were concerns about politics, the lack of clear direction and lowest common denominator decisions…

Simon Singh has had a good idea — an online petition to persuade the political parties to reform Britain’s absurd defamation laws. Might I respectfully suggest that you consider signing it?