Le Blog est Magnifique!

As I continue my European tour of the Coalition of the Willing to Blog, I’ve found that, although Americans tend to think of everything outside our shores as “over there,” in truth there are significant differences “over here” when it comes to blogging.

So here I am in Porto Cervo in Sardinia, surfing Italian and French blogs while reading a Business Week article about French blogs. The French, it seems, are crazy for blogging -- which only makes sense. I mean, if you think of a blog as a means of self-expression for people who like to think a lot about things, and then tell other people about those things, and then discuss what those people think about what the blogger thinks about things, what other country would love blogging more than France?

In the same way that water finds its own level, modes of communication find their own communities (mon dieu, I sound almost French!).

For the French, blogging hasn’t so much been a revolution as an extension of what they've been doing for centuries.

The National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, says that French is second only to English as the lingua franca of the blogosphere, and according to Business Week 4.9 percent of the French population (3 million people) are already blogging, compared to only 3 percent in the U.S.

And French blogs are growing in importance politically, already having had an impact on the European Union vote in May (particularly effective was an anti-yes vote blog run by a Marseille teacher). Business blogs are catching on too. One of the most popular is by Michel-Edouard Leclerc, the head of the retailing company E. Leclerc.

And while blogs are very big among French youth (as is the case in America), they have also been embraced by the older generation. Style, whether sartorial or technological, has no age limit in France. Take former Prime Minister Alain Juppé’s blog (Can’t quite picture Bush 41 blogging, can you? Me neither, especially after all the trouble he famously had with that grocery store scanner). Juppé’s latest entry is entitled, yes, "JO...Tristesse." Though it sounds like that could be the title of a French blog every single day, in this particular entry he waxes melancholy about losing the Olympics to London.

And though the French get caricatured for being insular and self-involved, their bloggers are well aware of how their fellow countrymen are being used in American political discourse.

Loïc Le Meur, proprietor of the French blog software company Ublog and of his own very popular blog, written in both French and English, blogged for example about comments made by John Gibson -- the increasingly clownish Fox News host -- expressing his wish that Paris had gotten the Olympics instead of London, so Parisians could be threatened by terrorism.

Loïc's reaction?

"I see your article, “Missed Opportunity,” as racism and defamation to the French. Actually you could have replaced Paris and the French by any other city and people, and I would have thought exactly the same of your words. You are dangerous and I wonder how any media can give you a tribune with such an article."

Je suis d’accord.

At the business blog Bazaarz, I came upon a discussion of whether bloggers should be considered journalists -- a hotly debated issue back in America as well, with the recent hearings on whether the FEC can regulate blogs. In France, bloggers critical of the US government are worried that if they're considered journalists, they'll be denied American visas, which are being refused to foreign journalists with increasing frequency.

Then there are the French blogs based in America -- like the one written by Emmanuelle, a 30-something Frenchwoman living in California. I particularly liked her posting from the Fourth of July:

“Often during parties, Americans ask me what I miss the most about France now that I live in the U.S. These days, it's not so much the cuisine or the mocking Gallic sense of humor, but the anti-establishment spirit: the marches, and the opposition movements including donkey-riding protesters. It's quite strange given that very often, I disagree with the core of the protests and strikes in France. But facing American injustice, you often wonder: ‘How can Americans tolerate this without protesting? The French would be already pounding the pavement’."

Well, maybe with a few million more blogs, we'll get there, Emmanuelle. Au revoir for now.