A few days ago, we got a chance to talk about the state of blogging and social media in Germany with Marcel Weiß, the editor of Netzwertig.com - one of Germany’s most popular blogs. In the interview, Weiß told us that Germany is at least five years behind the U.S. when it comes to social media and its adoption by a larger part of society. Blogs are still considered to be suspect by a large part of the German public and have very little influence, and social news sites and aggregators attract very little attention. With regards to Germany’s Internet startup scene, Weiß argues that, with very few exceptions, most companies are also years behind the U.S. and just aren’t innovative enough to compete.

Blogging in Germany: Five Years Behind

Weiß argues that blogging and social media adoption in Germany is far behind similar trends in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. Blogs are still considered suspect and have almost no influence over local or national politics. The mainstream media still likes to describe the Internet as a dangerous place, full of malware, porn, and scammers. While regular newspapers in Germany have also started to feel the pressure from the Internet (and every major German paper has a web site), the absence of a successful Craigslist-type site in the country has given the newspapers a longer lease on life than in America.

Unlike the U.S., no political blog has the influence of American sites like DailyKos or Talking Points Memo, though a recent (and misguided) move by German politicians to censor the Internet in Germany in order to combat child pornography led over 130,000 German Internet users to sign a petition against this plan and galvanized the German Internet community in an unprecedented way. It remains to be seen, though, if this sudden rise in Internet activism in Germany will have legs, or if it will just fizzle out quickly. Read more…

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