Just a quick note: Attended a refreshing presentation with the title
"La blogosphère politique en France - et en Allemagne" yesterday. It was more than interesting to hear about the different blogging behaviour in France and Germany. We learned that French politicians have been actively using blogs a lot longer than their German counterparts. According to Mr Wittmann, the lecturer, this is amongst others due to the fact that for a French politician the support of his regional basis is a lot more important, so they keep their people updated about what's going on in faraway Paris. Gives me the feeling that there is a lot more to explore and discover in our good old German "Internetlandschaft".
But Mr Wittmann went even further: From the blogging phenomenom itself he moved on to social networks and the whole range of
web 2.0-possibilities reaching from commenting and recommending tools to micro-blogging (ever heard about "
Twitter"?!) and even subsequent "real-life" meetings such as "
barcamps". He showed us some
pages analysing the "blogging landscape",
pages providing analysing tools theirselves,
pages where you can look for blogs and
pages rating blogs ...
Of course we also discussed the wiki hype with its advantages and disadvantages and last but not at all least the dangers and manipulative traits of this development. Because after all, the one who knows a lot about programming or simply some tricks has a lot of manipulative power on the web as we saw with "google-bombs" or "google bowling". (By the way, did you ever think about using an
alternative search engine?)
Questions that remain concerning this whole development are in my opinion: How come so many people spend so much time on the web communicating with and helping people they hardly know (if not don't know at all)? - I'm thinking of things like "leo.org", "netdoktor.de", "chefkoch.de" or facebook/studivz-groups. And even further: how come so many people like the idea of turning their inside out on the web, publishing stuff that they would only tell their best friend under a duvet in "status boxes" (facebook/studivz) or everyday-activities through that "twigger" thingy?
Of course I know that I'm part of that whole thing, my blog is long beyond its initial intention of "informing my friends at home about my experiences abroad". I'm still using it to keep people updated who are interested in how I'm doing, but still I have to admit that the self-disclosure aspect gained in significance. Question back to me: Why am I blogging - and most importantly how come I write four long paragraphs after the introducing sentence "just a quick note" ??!!??
...The bottom line is that the answer might be found in highly complex psychological patterns resulting from the complexity of the time we're living in itself ... but maybe it's also just our childlike curiosity of exploring new stuff and seeing what happens ... I do have fun doing so and that is the main thing as society teaches us - isn't it?!
By the way and kind of suiting: Did someone recently watch "