I noticed, as I wrote yesterday’s post, that I haven’t explained Germany’s blogosphere, yet. And since half of my visitors are non-Germans I think I have to catch up on this. (And my “The Writing Camp”-post isn’t finished yet…)

The German Blogosphere is of course not as huge as the English/American Blogosphere, simply because the audience is way smaller (there are not as many German-speakers in the world as English-speakers). But apart from this, blogs are not very established in Germany. While in the USA everybody knows about HuffPo and Gawker and the Media also refers to their stories, in Germany Blogs are rather hushed up by Journalists and bloggers are not taken seriously. That’s why many people (and I’m talking about young, internet-active people!) don’t even know what exactly a blog is at all or they believe it’s an (uninteresting) personal internet-diary in which you write about yourself and what you’re doing… So, there’s much potential readership but only little actual readership.

Yet, there’s another “problem” with German Blogs: they aren’t Mainstream! German Bloggers are mostly intelligent, politically active, keen-to-debate, highly educated and rather leftish persons. So: Everything but “normal”! They turn away from mainstream-things like Gossip or Sensations etc. I don’t want to criticize it, au contraire! But this may be another reason why German blogs aren’t as huge as American ones – Look at America’s Top-Blogs: Gawker combines high and low culture, writes in an intelligent way, but about tabloid topics; perezhilton…. uhm, simply Gossip; Huffingtin Post, writes about politics and stuff, but in an sensational way… and so on. Germany doesn’t have any Blog that is even slightly comparable to one of these blogs!

With not being mainstream and just having a small actual readership, German blogs are also not as (financially) valueable as the American “Blockbusters”. According to 24/7 Wall St. the most valueable blog is Gawker with 170 Mio. $. In January Germany’s Top-Blog basicthinking was sold for 46 thousand Euros – a record-breaking prize for a German blog, but puny in comparison to Gawker’s prize.

So, you see: In Germany the blogosphere is quite neglected and the blogs are in comparison to the American heavyweights utterly provincial.

Tomorrow I’ll gonna post Germany’s Top Ten blogs (that’s why this post has the attachment “an introduction”). Or maybe I’ll finish the “Writing Camp”-post and publish it… but that’s rather unlikely. (Sorry to all those of you who wanna read another music-related post)