What European Blogosphere?

A year ago, Cecilia Atrios started a blog. Since she was the ex-wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy newly transplanted to New York City, I figured it would be interesting. So I started following her.

Two weeks later I gave up.

Her posts were like political press releases, full of blather and lacking in any serious content. Also, for no apparent reason she put large parts of her posts in bold, sometimes repeatedly in the same sentence. Given the total lack of hyperlinks, I was convinced she had just not yet mastered the sina qua non of blogs, the 'insert link' button.

But no...as it turns out, Cecilia's blog is little different from the rest of the European blogosphere:

As Ronny Patz noted in a recent post (hat tip to the European blogs aggregator bloggingportal), European blogs are still very much “unconnected”. That is, they use hyperlinks far less than their American counterparts or do it and in a way that doesn’t create two-way debate. In brief, Europe has bloggers, but no blogosphere: it lacks a living ecosystem to exchange and debate. Of most leading European blogs, only 1 in 5 were linked to other online content. This is a pretty striking number but one that is somewhat consistent with the use that Europeans make of blogs (ie. just another media but not an interactive one).

It's a sad statement about European democracy. The blogosphere is about one of the only places where Europeans of all nationalities could realistically get together and debate the troubled but worthwhile European project.