Battle in the German Blogosphere
The usually interesting Marc Babej over at Being Reasonable has been following this escalating duel between supermodel Heidi Klum's father and the German blogosphere. It's particularly interesting to me because, when we wrote Naked Conversations, we were surprised that the more populated, automated and industrialized Germany lagged far behind France in blogging.
We concluded it was a cultural thing, that Germans tended to be private, often keeping their hostilities so close to the vest that they could be mistaken for tattoos. I guess we'll have to revise that in the second edition.
this is very interesting !!
I have tried to astrotuff certain blogs in other langauges into english and most of the intense conversations are not understand. This is the 3rd or 4th case that I am noticing in blogsphere.
you say "..Germans tended to be private,", I dont think thats the case. They post best in thier own language, thats how they think and write. Take a look at the berlin-223c blog, you will notice a lot of posts in Germain. There is Joi Ito blog in Japense.
Posted by: /pd | January 03, 2006 at 04:13 PM
Shel, I see a link to Heidi Klum but wouldn't a link to her father be more on point ;)
- Pito
Posted by: Pito Salas | January 03, 2006 at 04:27 PM
shel, great to read about our 'groundbreaking' German issue in your blog - hope that others will follow so that a small at first kind of national topic goes multinational and may help to build up the idea of the WORLD wide web via blogs.
Posted by: bjoern | January 04, 2006 at 12:31 AM
Outstanding coverage! Let's hope this case will help the world change their minds on Germany's blogosphere. Spread the word!
Posted by: Alexander | January 04, 2006 at 12:56 AM
Even thought we might prefer to blog just in German, there is still the case of not really having a lot of visible blogs. There are a lot of the Spaces / Lifejournals blogs and alike, but the visible ones as in blogospere are a smaller number.
Also, due to the language barrier, we don't have so many visible blogs to us - they are just in english.
And many people - like myself - find it more and more gratifying to just blog in english, which is a dangerous development.
We have seen some small changes in the last months as well in as Europe; we will see what we can do for you in the second edition ;)
Posted by: Nicole Simon | January 04, 2006 at 01:14 AM
when jerry springer first came to the UK a lot of commentators said nobody English would participate or watch such a show because we are more "reserved". evidently these commentators had never seen an Englishman or woman after a few pints... it turns out we love the salacious stuff - no shit, the nation that spawned The Sun and News of the World likes tittle lattle?
i got quoted in a german blog today, which made me very happy. it was in english though.
i cant believe i am posting this and still have no idea what the actual klum story is about...
Posted by: james governor | January 04, 2006 at 06:16 AM
@ james: there's a good summary on 'Being Reasonable', however I know that the German Werbeblogger Patrick (the one who has that issue with Klums) is working on a translation of the first post. Hope it will be online soon...
Posted by: bjoernhasse | January 04, 2006 at 06:42 AM
Bjoernhasse: Please ping me at shel@itseemstome.net when that translation comes out. I'll link to it.
Posted by: shel israel | January 04, 2006 at 07:36 AM
Did so, hope it worked. The translation is online at www.werbeblogger.de, however the summary of Lino is quite well indeed!
Posted by: bjoernhasse | January 04, 2006 at 08:31 AM