My Financial Times column this week is on Barack Obama and what chief executives can learn from him about leadership. You can read it here and comment below.

Prompted by Jason Kottke, Steven Johnson and Richard Florida, who have all posted the list of cities they visited in 2007, I looked back to identify my own list. It is as follows:

London
Zurich
Detroit
Cancun
Fort Lauderdale
Beverly Hills
Paris
Santa Monica
Dubai
Abu Dhabi

A couple of thoughts on my list. I was far less well travelled than Mr Florida or Mr Johnson although I gave Mr Kottke a run for his money (he has the excuse of a new baby). I also neglected to go to Asia, which is quite an oversight given the new shape of the world.

But I still like my list. Small, but full of interest. The photo above, by the way, is a shot I took of sunset in the desert outside Dubai.

On October 8, I listed the three chief executives of Wall Street banks who I thought were most at risk from the credit market turmoil. I have to admit that this was not an extraordinary insight: all three faced obvious problems even then.

Still, with the resignation of Jimmy Cayne as chief executive of Bear Stearns, I am three for three. Rather to my surprise, each (Chuck Prince, Stan O’Neal and Mr Cayne) has now stepped down.

There are no obvious new names to put on the list although the reputation of John Mack, chief executive of Morgan Stanley, has been bruised. Perhaps this is the end of the blood-letting for now.

Sometimes I sympathise with Rupert Murdoch.

Mr Murdoch has made little secret of the fact that he wants more hard news and fewer long features on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. He would like it to be more immediate and less reflective.

This has generally gone down badly with US journalists and media types, who are schooled in the idea that reporting yesterday’s news must give way to forward-looking, original reporting and analysis. This piece by Jack Shafer, Slate’s entertaining media critic, advocates this idea.

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To watch the US primaries, as I have been doing this weekend, is to be bombarded with endless pledges of "change" as other candidates scramble to react to Barack Obama’s victory in the Iowa caucus.

The mantra that most irritates me, however, is the banal insistence of Wolf Blitzer, the main politics presenter on Cable News Network on referring repeatedly to a (as far as I can discern, run-of-the-mill) bunch of talking heads in the CNN studios as "the best political team on television".

I swear that he must have uttered the phrase 20 times as I was listening to CNN on C-Span radio on Sunday afternoon. Apparently, CNN won an Emmy for its analysis and it has seized upon this as a branding opportunity.

Other media outlets, the FT included, are not shy about advertising their awards. But please, Mr Blitzer, could you cease this inane repetition? We are only at the start of the election year and I will not be able to stand it if you keep it up until November. Others also seem to be feeling the pain from CNN’s onslaught of boasting.

It is the voters who will decide the next president and it is the viewers who choose "the best political team on television". Not Wolf Blitzer.

So Sony did it. And, if it has any sense, it will never try to do it again. The battle between Sony’s Blu-Ray high definition video disc standard and the rival HD-DVD backed by Toshiba and others appears to be ending in a victory for Sony.

Sony staked an enormous amount on winning. It incorporated Blu-Ray technology in its Playstation 3 games console, which made it both expensive and late, presenting a bigger opportunity to Nintendo’s Wii. Blu-Ray is the only big technology platform battle it has won since its defeat in the well-known contest between its Betamax video tape standard and JVC’s VHS.

Actually, the entire structure of the company is a product of that standards war. Sony’s weird strategy of combining a Japanese electronics company with a US film studio stems from a determination to have the muscle to impose standards. As I wrote in a column three years ago: “If Sony cannot win the Blu-Ray battle, then what is Sony for?"

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I got a Nespresso coffee machine for Christmas this year and I have written an FT column about it. You can read it here and post comments below. Happy New Year.