It's always a joy to witness the seemingly endless ways in which organisations can use the interweb to educate, inform and entertain. This week many of you might have spotted the story about C'est so Paris; the appallingly-titled web site created by the Ile-de-France tourist board to encourage more UK tourists to visit the hands-down winner of world's rudest national capital for the last millennium or so; Paris. The best bit, entitled Cop the Parisian Attitude is a brave attempt to teach us stuffy Brits about that national French pastime, the indecipherable bodily gesture.

This part of the site was apparently designed to show us that our close neighbours can poke a little light-hearted fun at themselves; it features eight or so gestures for you to copy and practice, the idea being that if you master these then somehow you will find Paris a little less of an intimidating place to visit.

Well, two things to note here. Firstly, they should have tried inserting movie clips in there, rather than a single pic with the barest of accompanying descriptions. To be honest, some people have trouble enough employing the time-honoured one or two-fingered salute, so what chance do they have of doing "le bof" or the "on se tire" correctly? And secondly, how many opportunities am I going to have in the company of complete strangers to use a gesture indicating, "I'm fed up", "call me", or "shut up" – alright that last one may be handy. In my humble opinion, "where's the nearest metro station?", "how much is that piece of cheese?" and "Christ what's that smell?" might have been more useful.

This genius idea apparently came off the back of a survey of tourists to the French capital and forms part of a £700,000 ad campaign to attract more of us over there. As anyone who's read my colleague James "Muzza" Murray's recent column will realise, however, this could all be a complete waste of time, depending on exactly what the questions to said survey were. It might be that the British are abandoning Paris not because of the rudeness of the locals but simply because we'd rather spend a city break somewhere cheaper, warmer and which requires less effin' hand gestures to practice.