From left to right: Claire Ulrich, Laurent Delpit, Cathy Nivez, Karolin Mulhaupt, Louis Baudry, Frédéric Dauphin

Why did we create E-Blogs?

The starting point of E-Blogs: showing the “best” of the European blogosphere. Selecting quality posts in 5 countries and in 5 languages: Italian, German, Spanish, English, French, translating them into these same 5 languages. The idea was to offer a new and everyday perspective of the Europeans. A Courrier International of blogs, a review or rather a “view” of European blogs. E-Blogs was not a site about Europe – in the sense of the institutions themselves -, but on Europeans. Their rants, their dreams, their desires. We were rewarded by what we found. Thank you to the bloggers who participated in this great adventure …

Why do we stop E-blogs?

In Wikio's headquarters, Paris, France

Selecting texts, adapting them to each country, having them translated by paid translators, and finally publishing them in 5 languages and 5 countries … All this costs money. Lots of money. In launching the project at the beginning of the year (February 2010), we expected to find a strong and natural audience among bloggers and on the Internet in general.Unfortunately, we did not strike a chord, met the audience that we expected. E-Blogs was a test, a bet. We lost. Lack of visitors and therefore of potential advertising to pay this work, we stop the adventure. We’re in a market economy, we belong to a private company: Wikio. It is the law of the market. Many are called but few are chosen.

Our pride:

Among the challenges that we have succeeded: there is that of translation. We raised the language barrier, and drew lines from one country to another, backed by a valuable team of 40 professional translators in 5 languages: Italian, German, Spanish, English, French. Thank you to them for having played the game, for agreeing to walk with us at unbeatable rates,  web’s rates ;-) Our pride is also the editorial work we did on the content of European blogs. A searching and selecting job, adapting and proofreading translations, then publishing. And that was done by the 6 editors of E-Blogs.

Thank you to:

Laurent Delpit, English/French translator, great community manager of the team. Laurent was editor for E-Blogs in the UK.

Louis Baudry, ‘magic Louis’, of Spanish mother tongue, former translator and editor of E-Blogs Spain. Among his many skills, Louis created a back office tailored to our needs for translations into 5 languages. Congratulations Louis!

Claire Ulrich, editor of E-Blogs Italy. Journalist and web-addict ;- ) Claire is in charge of Global Voices in French. She gave us her experience of translating and of international contents.

Karolin Mulhaupt, the most discreet of us all, was editing E-Blogs Germany. She showed us the scientific and libertarian spirit of German bloggers.

Cathy Nivez, E-Blogs Project Manager at WIKIO

And finally, Frédéric Dauphin, the latest addition to the team, copy-editor at heart, a blogger at times, and an awesome proofreader ;-) who was in charge of E-Blogs France.

Finally, thank you to the 38 translators, and the 500 bloggers who agreed to have their posts translated… They made us dream.

I believe in “paths crossing” and “bonds creating” as in the European blogosphere. No doubt we shall meet again, one day.

Catherine Nivez

E-Blogs Project Manager at WIKIO

1. The blogosphere is not running out of steam, but is in the midst of a transformation;

2. Blogs are the raw material of conversations which nourish other social media and notably those that favour quick conversations or chats (Twitter and Facebook).

To illustrate my argument, I will take some examples from several recent large studies.

The blogosphere is not running out of steam, but in the midst of a transformation

The company eMarketer got the ball rolling last month with a report on blog usage in the USA: Blogging is alive and well, says report. Not only is the number of blog readers increasing, but, additionally, the number of bloggers is too:

US blogosphere statistics

These figures are not 100% statistics but projections. It has to be said that the analysts are resolutely optimistic with regards to blogs, at least for the US market at any rate. This trend is confirmed by BlogPulse which counted close to 150 million active blogs : state of the blogosphere in 2010.

From a global sample group it shows most of all that the blogosphere is dominated by English, and due to this fact, English speakers represent the largest group of blog users. The report additionally confirms that there is a trend towards a stabilisation of the number of bloggers. Several different phenomena can provide an explanation for this stagnation:

• competition is becoming more and more fierce due to the professionalisation of the blogosphere (which may cause the least motivated new bloggers to renege);

• there are other easier alternatives for occassional bloggers or writers, such as Tumblr or Posterous (and to a certain degree) Twitter);

• the large platforms like MySpace or Skyblogs are struggling against competition from Facebook;

• the concentration of platforms accelerates the shutting down of inactive blogs (recent illustration of this with the with the moving of blogs from Live Spaces to WordPress : WordPress.com will likely receive far less than 30 million users from Windows Live Spaces).

(…) On the other hand, another study carried out by Forrester provides a more interesting perspective: a global update of social technographics. This study compiled the data of 275,000 web users and highlights the emergence of a new category of users; the “conversationalists”

Break down of social media users in Europe (source Forrester)

This new category represents almost one third of social media users and has stopped the growth curve of the adjacent categories in its tracks (creators and critics). The slight drop in blog growth can therefore be explained by a boom in quick conversations and chats which appeases users’ need to express themselves:

Evolution of social media usage worldwide (source : Forrester)

On a European and even French level, some content creators are falling back on a less work-intensive form of expression (around 11% of French adults are ‘social’ content creators).

Does this trend spell the end of blogs? No, not at all, quite the opposite!

Blogs are the raw material of conversations

We have just seen that Darwin’s mechanism can be applied to the blogosphere: only the highly motivated subsist, the others evolve. However, this evolution is not synonymous with a change in the balance of power: bloggers are in the minority, but they are still in the limelight. On the one hand, because quick conversations don’t arise spontaneously, they necessarily are nourished by raw material of some kind (posts). On the other hand, because the audience volumes of conversational platforms (e.g. Facebook or Twitter) reinforce the visibility of written material. In other words: the fewer bloggers there are, the more they benefit from increased visibility as they are not having to ‘compete’ on their platform: a blog is a better social media hub than Twitter.

This reinforces what I had observed a few months ago with regards to content quality on Facebook: the most interesting conversations arise and prosper in close proximity to content (blogs) and lose interest the further they stray from this content (relayed by a multi-linked chain on Facebook and Twitter).

Conclusion: even if the figures show a concentrated audience (quantitative criterion) on Facebook, blogs are the influencing source (qualitative criterion). The most pertinent thing to do would be to set up a system which is both qualitative (on the most popular blogs and forums) and quantitive (on platforms like Facebook and Twitter which will widen the scope of an article or a discussion).

This post has been shortened by E-Blogs with the author’s agreement.

Photo by Adrian Miles | Flickr, CC license

I’m going to assume that most of the people who read this blog already have a heart for the homeless plight and the suffering of others and if not hopefully after reading a few posts you will.

But the truth is a lot of people don’t think like you and this weekend whilst I was in London this was shown to me.

I was getting of the train at Moorgate tube station and saw a man leaning against the wall and he was crying.

I walked past him with a companion and I knew that if I were to walk past and ignore him I would be a hypocrite.

So I turned back and asked him if he was okay and he said no. He was begging and tired of being told to piss off and treated like scum. I could smell the alcohol on his breath.

So I asked him if he was hungry he said yes I was going to buy him a meal but was short on time so I gave him a £5 note.

He was touched and asked my name then I gave him a hug and he shook the hand of my friend.

The whole time my friend was quiet. They said nothing and I told them I know you’re upset but it’s something I have to do and I know what it feels like to have no one on your side.

They said to me ” it’s nothing about the money but let me take you down this road and you could give £2 to a 100 of them and all will happen is they will get drunk and you will have no money.”

This article has been translated in German, French, Spanish, Italian by E-Blogs.

Photo: Rama, Wikimedia Commons

We were checking cars along an avenue broad enough for us to make two or three cars park without obstructing traffic. Each of us was taking care of their own car and driver, it was quite a routinely task being performed in an almost mechanical way. Driver’s license, car registration, insurance certificate, when everything was in order, the audit was fast. Sometimes a little reminder to fasten seat belts, and of course some tickets when necessary.

So I was checking the papers of a motorist when my attention focused on my colleague who was checking the car he had stopped a few meters ahead of me. He was surprisingly still, arms hanging down in front of the window. Not moving at all as if he was petrified, not speaking either, and looking completely dazed.

I stepped aside, still holding the papers and my tickets book, trying to see and understand the situation. I saw his caret shaped eyebrows and his eyes staring inside the car, and a fuzzy worry grabbed me. Immediately followed by a silent anguish.

In a split second, my imagination developed a whole series of horrific scenarios. The driver was dead. There was a dead man beside the driver. There was something scary in the car, perhaps an animal. To put my colleague in this state of cataplexy, it had to be a reptile, a huge reptile. Or maybe he was feeling faint, standing, struck down by some kind of a crippling crisis, and he was going to collapse like a puppet.

Or he was being threatened, quietly, underhand, by a weapon I could not see. And it is this hunch that imposed itself on my mind when I started walking slowly toward the car, heart pounding, and my hand on the grip.

It was crucial for the driver not to see me and I managed to move in the blind spot of the rear-view mirror. My colleague was still staring and looking dazed, and he did not see me. And I still could not see the driver because of reflections on the glass, and I dared not speak to my colleague for fear of triggering who-knows-what.

And then I ended up seeing. A surprising scene that I never would have expected to witness one day… A woman, with her skirt pulled high on her legs, was fondling her thigh with an expert hand in a back and forth movement.

“Aaaaah !” I shouted. Both of them jumped as if a shell had fallen between them, and my colleague gave me the look of someone who had just been woken up with a bucket of cold water.

“Uh … She has no car insurance…” he said in a voice that sounded like a meow.
- Really? No car insurance? And attempting to defraud the public purse? ”

She had indeed attempted a seduction manoeuvre, the “mister officer, arrangements can be made” kind. It happens sometimes. And she had almost succeeded. Almost…

“Hey, could you please go get my tickets book in the car parked over there? I threw it on the dashboard by mistake, and I kept his papers. You can go without fear, it’s not a trap.”

And I started it all up from the beginning with her.

“Hello ma’am, police. Can you show me the vehicle’s papers, please?”
Moments and some gnashing of teeth later, she again raised her skirt, but this time in order to crouch behind her car to clean her car plate.

Now you can test your skills with “Spot the Fake Smile“, an experiment that allows you to identify real and fake smiles.
It was designed by Paul Ekman, a psychology professor at the University of California, who spent a good portion of his career studying facial expressions.
I was able to guess 18 out of the 20 smiles correctly! A useful skill to have if I were a poker player! :-)

I erased the answers so you can try too.

Even though fake smiles are often similar to the real ones, in reality they are slightly different because they are generated by different types of facial muscles, controlled by a different part of the brain.
Fake smiles are executed by a conscious part of our brain by stimulating the zygomatic muscles that contract the cheeks: these are the muscles that pull the corners of the mouth in an external direction.

On the other hand, real smiles are generated unconsciously, making them automatic. When people feel pleasure, signals are transmitted through the part of the brain that processes emotion. In addition to causing movement in the muscles of the mouth, the muscles that raise the cheeks activate the orbital muscles, causing the eyes and the eyebrows to fold.
Researchers are capable of recognizing when a person is lying with the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which was developed by Professor Paul Ekman and Dr. Wallace V. Friesen of the University of Kentucky.

The civil service that administered this vast dominion spoke English –those who held aspiration to be employed in an official capacity clamoured to learn English. By the time most of us were born, the world map was still largely coloured red, and we grew up with an acceptance that other people would make the effort to learn our language. Speaking a foreign language was associated with the deference due to a dominating power –not an attitude that the British adopt easily.

The Internet has exchanged information on a scale hitherto unimaginable; however, if you look around the blogs, particularly the political blogs, you will see many learned and articulate articles on Australian politics, and a welter of comment on American politics –drawn from articles and information printed in English.

Yet English is the first language of a mere 7% of the world’s population. 75% of the world speaks no English whatsoever. When we write in English or read in English, we confine ourselves to a mere quarter of the information, and communicate our ideas with a mere quarter of the world.

It is extraordinary that we accept our young men dying in Afghanistan to enforce the idea of democracy, yet it seems outlandish that we should try to pass on the idea of democracy in words that an Afghan blogger could comprehend. It doesn’t even occur to us that we should make the effort.

Today is Multi-lingual Blogging day, part of a series of initiatives organised by the European Commission to mark the European day of languages. Even the Foreign Office has become involved –they will be pushing out posts today in French, Tagalog, Spanish, Ukranian and Arabic.

Little wonder that the Foreign Office has become involved; for all our whinging about being ruled by a ‘foreign power’ in Brussels, we, who are a 12% segment of Europe, play little part in that rule. A mere 1.8% of the European Commission’s staff is British.

Why? Because the entry requirement for the European Union’s civil service exams demand that the paper be sat in a second language. They don’t stipulate which second language; it can be any second language from amongst the babel of tongues spoken in Europe, and that has effectively kept the British out of the many thousands of jobs available in the EU. Britain has recently forced a change in those rules, lowered the bar that insisted candidates were at least bi-lingual, because it was just too difficult for us.

I have been an enthusiastic supporter of the E-Blogs initiative. E-Blogs will take your words and ideas, and translate them into French, German, Italian and Spanish to enable you to communicate with your near neighbours. They equally take blog posts written in those languages and publish them in English –so that you may take an interest in the political occurrences in those countries without speaking a word of their language. It is a wonderful opportunity to broaden your horizons even if you were educated under a Labour Government that removed languages from the core curriculum leaving you handicapped for a life in Europe. You don’t need to be a pro-EU enthusiast to comprehend the advantages of being able to communicate with your nearest neighbours rather than restrict yourself to an Anglo-American view of the world.

Do contact Laurent at E-Blogs, let him see the posts that you think might be appreciated by those who don’t speak your language. Or click on E-blogs and see what others have been saying in languages you don’t understand. Better still –on Multi-lingual Blogging Day, make the effort to push out a post in another language, and hashtag it #babel on Twitter, you may be surprised at the response.

If you really can’t be bothered, you could always post “Qu’est-ce que ça peut foutre” –at least that way, more of the world will understand your determination to remain confined by your language skills.

This is a linotype* keyboard which is how books were originally made with the keys in the ETAOIN SHRLDU configuration which corresponds to the frequency of the letters in English from top to bottom: E is the most common letter, then T, then A, etc.

This is a teletype/telex* keyboard from 1960, with its ‘at’, the curious “Who are you?” key and another for producing a bell like sound.

A special keyboard from a public terminal – its metallic antivandalism robustness is considerable – whose design seems somewhat disastrous although it includes some humourous keys with HAPPY and SAD emoticons as well as others such as HTTP://, .COM, .NET etc.

Another keyboard from some sort of old programmable computer or something similar with a key layout which appears to make no sense whatsoever.

The difference between the Apple Lisa* keyboard (1983) and the current ultrafine Apple keyboard. Interestingly apart from the central panel and the row of function keys the rest has not changed much in position or size over time.

A classic: the Atari 400* keyboard, which dates back to 1979 and was one of those “membrane” types just like many arcade machines, uncomfortable and with a tendency to break down.

Another classic and one of my favourites of course, because I spent many hours with it: the Commodore 64* keyboard(1982). Instead of four arrow keys for the cursor it only had two and had to use capitals in order to move it; it had a separate @ key which was barely used in those days; another for π (combined with the up arrow which wasn’t used much either). The sides of the keys also included block graphics to create drawings.

Another for the strange keyboard collection: from Marcin Wicary’s collection this Sharp MZ-80K*, a gismo from 1978 which worked with the Z80 and had a non-standard keyboard. Among all the extra graphics and strange symbols there appears to be one for eye and another for nose (!) (bottom row).

An interesting way of putting the alternative Dvorak* key layout into practice although on today’s low profile keyboards it would be difficult to use this trick. Dvorak is optimized to type with both hands and theoretically it is better than the QWERTY layout. It never became very popular.

The keyboard of a Spectrum* clone called Olympian-S, interestingly from 1995, more than a decade after the Spectrum’s popularity in the 80s made it one of the first “family computers”.

Editor’s note:
Photos (under a Creative Commons license) of the impressive Marcin Wichary collection and also from Mark Eichin, Paul Downey, Niels Heidenreich, Blake Patterson, Axel Tregoning and Julián Rodríguez
The links marked with a * are in English.

Upon entering the grounds that are reserved especially for their use, I came across some children who were merrily riding their bikes. They welcomed me with large, friendly smiles followed by a chorus of hellos. I spoke to the eldest of the group:

- I would like to speak to the leader of the camp.

- Mum, there is a gadjo ¹ who wants to see the leader.

A young woman came out of a caravan and I explained the reasons for why I was there. Initially, she preferred to let the men talk but then Linda approached me and I asked her if we could talk about the situation of travellers and what she thinks about the government’s current law and order crackdown. She agreed to share her thoughts.

- What do you think about the government’s attitude towards the traveller population?

- People in politics make decisions about us as if we were a bunch of savages. We are French, just like many other inhabitants here in this country. The only difference is that we live in caravans. When a fellow traveller does something really stupid it is the whole traveller community that gets blamed for it. When an inhabitant does something stupid, it concerns just that person- not every single other inhabitant- why is there this difference? We are French, and have been for over six hundred years; the vast majority of us work, pay taxes and send our children to school.

- What do you think about the current situation for the Roma population living in France?

- For Roma, it’s even worse than it is for us, and I sympathise wholeheartedly. The reason that they decided to come to France was to escape the victimisation in their own countries which is ten times worse than what we have to put up with here. In France, they could live a better life, and straight away, yet the State is going to send them back to even more misery.

A slightly older woman joined in on the conversation and told me that during World War Two her parents were deported to Montreuil Bellay which was a concentration camp reserved for Gypsies.

While looking at the website dedicated to this camp I read many moving accounts, most notably one from Marcel Catrou, policeman, winter 1942 : Their hunger comes to mind. Some of them kept repeating “Sir, We’re going to croak, we’re going to croak!” They picked grass and gathered fruit and vegetable peelings. One day, one of them caught a hedgehog. He was so pleased.

Linda and I carried on talking and she told me that she wouldn’t swap her caravan for a house for anything in the world. All we would like is adapted grounds with showers, running water and electricity.

Have you noticed a difference in how the population or authorities treat you since the statements made by Brice Hortefeux?

What political people say influences everybody. Now, whenever we arrive somewhere the police ask us what our nationality is. The other day my husband and my children had a policeman pointing a gun at them because he was with a bunch of inhabitants looking for scrap metal at a waste collection centre. A tourist dared to say to the policeman that he found his behavior scandalous. It was only at that point that he put the weapon back in its holster.

I was not aware that travellers had a carnet de circulation (travel booklet ²). If this booklet isn’t signed every three or six months (depending on the restrictions) by the local police force, the person is handed a fine of €1,500.

Jean-Pierre ended our discussion with this conclusion: these are the last few years for travellers. We’re heading towards a deprivation of civil liberties. They want to control everything. Where we are, in this spot in Brittany, we are still made to feel welcome. But elsewhere?

So that was that. Everything had been said, or almost… or could it be not enough? At any rate, it would have to be for another time or perhaps never. I could see in their expressions a certain amount of concern about the future and a glimmer of fear for what lies ahead for their children; the very same kids who had been listening to all that the adults had been saying without a care in the world.

The gadjo said goodbye to everybody while thinking about the proclamation of a certain Nicolas Sarkozy - I will be the President of all French people, he also thought of the president that had said that he would bring about a rupture. Indeed, we can see very well that there has been a rupture.

A big thank you to all the people I met today. Good luck and godspeed!

Translator’s notes:
¹ A gadjo is a person who isn’t a gypsy or traveller; it can be a disparaging term.
² This booklet is compulsory for all people living in France who don’t have a fixed abode.

Photo: Daniel Kempken / Pixelio.de

I consider the report on the surveyed decline of the government ¹ not so much as proof of poor work and certainly not as confirmation of the work of the opposition. Not at all! Rather, it is proof that we -the entire German public- have lost sight of every measure and goal. Our so-called politics- or disenchantment with politicians, if you will, can quickly become, and this is my serious concern, an already-confirmed disenchantment with democracy.

Who knows if the brown hoards won’t be back sooner than imagined. They’re already waiting in some corners of Germany and on the web. And the press is playing into their hands with excessive and boundless criticism.

We still wonder why high-rank politicians are throwing in their towel by the dozens. The media, on the other hand, is looking to blame politics, in this case Angela Merkel.

Has someone on the editor-in-chief level considered how it feels to be verbally abused in the way that has become the order of the day here? I know that many will say such things are far more pronounced and typical in Anglo-Saxon countries, for example, but we are much more thorough in that respect. As we often are. Typical German.

Please, let’s think about it for a moment. And please, before you get heated about the fact that I, as a democrat, apparently don’t know that discourse, even of the harsh variety, is a part of political life, I’d like to remind you of [Federal President] Köhler’s resignation and of the fact that the media couldn’t contain themselves about his having done this “just” because he’d been criticized. We are part of a terrible culture of criticism. That doesn’t just apply to politicians.

We tend towards downright rituals of outrage. Consequentially, we tend towards crude exaggerations. Moreover, the boundaries of personal defamation have long since been crossed.

Translator’s Note:

¹ The black-gold coalition (conservative CDU and liberal FPD) has ruled since 2009. Even though the FDP reached their highest ratings in history at the Bundestag elections, the coalition has since become very unpopular.