The German blogosphere

To write an article about the German blogosphere in 2009 is not easy. There haven't been any reliable studies on this subject, so it all depends upon the individual viewpoint of the author. Even the question "how many blogs are there in German?" remains unanswered. And who can define what a blog is in the first place? Is MySpace a blog? Is Twitter? Going on just traditional blogs alone, I’d guess there’d be between 200,000 and 500,000 in the German-speaking realm.

In the past, I’ve often felt that, in terms of blogging, Germany is a developing country in comparison to its neighbors. Germany doesn't have nearly as many blogs as, say, France. If you take a look at the Top 100 most-linked German blogs, you’ll notice that the German blogosphere reached a peak in 2007. Since then, blogs have been in the decline. Whether or not we've seen the zenith of the blog world in general, remains disputed.

The marginalization of blogs seems possible. What would once have been a whole blogging community acting as a tight-knit communication center is now distributing itself in ever smaller, topic-orientated areas. New communication forms such as Twitter and Facebook also point towards this possibility. Whereas before, you’d write a blog entry in order to draw attention to a link from another source, now you can do this in a couple of seconds and in less than 140 characters via Twitter of Facebook. Social media is a closely interwoven landscape of communication, within which bloggers can still play an important role.

Prejudices

The German blogosphere has it particularly tough, since it still suffers from a bad reputation in many sectors of the traditional media. Most other blogospheres left these teething problems behind long ago. We, on the other hand, are often told that blogs are not relevant and that the traditional media is far superior.

The traditional media often lacks the courage to see the new communications landscape as an expansion of their own trade and to enter into collaboration with readers and bloggers. A further prejudice is that the German blogosphere is not political: political debates still tend to play out in the newspapers. A quick glance at the German Blog Charts, however, shows that around 20 percent of the most-linked blogs deal with political topics.

Wake-up call

For many bloggers, the political wake-up came in spring this year, when the government introduced a new Internet censorship infrastructure. Within three and a half days, Internet users had used blogs and Twitter to call an online petition into being with as many as 50,000 signatories: enough to be taken seriously in parliament. No petition has ever been gathered so many signatures so quickly in the history of the German parliament.

By the end, over 134,000 people had signed the petition, making it Germany's most successful petition to date. The protesters used blogs and Twitter to call people to action and to distribute and criticize the comments of politicians. Many bloggers wrote political posts for the first time in their lives, or drew their readers' attention to the petition. As a result, journalists became informed and involved and formed a weighty opposition to the censorship bill.

Meanwhile, the German blogging community had started to network offline. In April, over 1,600 people met at the re:publica conference (organized by the author) to talk about social media, blogs and the digital community. Almost every weekend, Bar camps are organized somewhere in the country. These are regional meet-ups for people who simply want to discuss particular blogger topics, or simply chat about blogs and social media in general.

Markus Beckedahl is a businessman, blogger and activist for digital freedom. He is the organizer of re:publica and is regarded as one of the German pioneers of Internet-based political communication. Markus also teaches at the University of Mannheim. His blog netzpolitik.org has received many national and international awards.

Editor: Sean Sinico