Loic Le Meur

This morning I met a man who will change the world. His name is Loic Le Meur EVP at San Francisco-based  Six Apart, the company hosting this blog and about 9 million others. He said loads of things which were interesting, but this one struck me particularly - in Europe blogging is more popular in the South rather than the North. The Germans in particular have been slow to take up the technology. The reason, according to Loic, is simply national characteristics. The French, by comparison, are way ahead. Have a look at the European Blogosphere, a wiki site he created.

I'm grateful for him giving up his time. For anyone thinking about hearing him speak, he is entertaining, informative and massively experienced. He was an entrepreneur in this space before joing Six Apart.

He was one of the presenters at a breakfast seminar held at LEWIS. The other two were my colleague the brilliant Morgan McLintic and the BBC Online journalist, Dr. Jo Twist. Jo explained how BBC Online worked and the speed at which it operates. Her news judgment under such time pressure is astonishing. Basically, the first cut of news is done by 1000hrs, then updated subsequently throughout the day. Blogs are an important part of the news scans, especially when used in conjunction with RSS feeds. When I was a journalist, you were lucky to be in for 1000hrs (well I was).

The whole event was held in the company's media centre and was also attended by other industry specialists like Niall Cook from Hill & Knowlton and Charlie Cannell from Edelman. It was also nice to see my friend Sinclair Beecham founder of Pret, the sandwich chain. He is one of my heroes and I could see his agile mind turning over the ideas.

The event was attended by around 80 people and was a tremendous success. For anyone interested the webstream is here.

My thanks goes to everyone in the events and marketing team who worked so hard to make it so.

Comments

[James Cherkoff]

Resist Loic's jedi-power and his uber-plan to claim the blogosphere for France!! The real reason that France leads currently is the the massive 3m strong Skyblog community. That and the fact that BT has only just worked out how to make money from broadband...

[Will S]

I suspect the north/south blogging divide in Europe owes more to language than "national characteristics"? (Assuming what languages people speak, with the exception of their own, aren't 'a national characteristic'.)

My point being that northern Europe has a far higher percentage of English speakers and therefore access to a far greater number of mainstream media outlets (which perhaps make us lazy in the way we consume media). Southern Europe – take Spain, Italy, Greece and the Balkans as an example – however has far fewer English speakers and therefore perhaps a greater need to disseminate own-language updates on world affairs through blogging. This would also ring true I suggest for the French anomaly in Northern Europe where English, while spoken in large metropolitan areas is also nowhere near as common as in Scandinavian countries, The Netherlands and Germany (and the UK of course.)

There is also an argument – which I imagine ties in with what Loic may have been saying (and would be interesting to hear more if there is a transcript) - that political instability has been far more common in southern Europe and so the people are perhaps more reactive and less trusting in large corporations or state-owned media.