Comments on: Does relative size matter?

By: David Weman

David Weman — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 18:13:26 +0000

Heh.

Yes, I discovered you from technorati.

By: Joerg Wolf

Joerg Wolf — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 16:06:14 +0000

“While the German blogger himself is a relatively unknown species to date…”

A link from afoe would certainly help…

We are three German Fulbright Alumni, who blog at the Atlantic Review.

By: stos

stos — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 12:24:44 +0000

The sharing aspect is interesting. But from personal experience I know that a lot of people are reluctant to write “open diaries” (that´s how they perceive blogs” and think they have friends enough to talk to, they don´t need to do that to/with strangers. The German culture is pretty homogenous, imo, and trying to stand out even with a blog is considered a bit odd. Especially academics have a problem with mixing the unpersonal data-world with personal observations. A fear of not being taken serious if it shows they are only human?

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 16:10:12 +0000

@c: mmm, snark…nice.

By: c

Fri, 28 Oct 2005 05:28:11 +0000

The Western part of Poland always had that problem. Especially when it was the Eastern part of Germany

By: js

js — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 04:00:12 +0000

germany has jurgen habermas, the most outspoken thinker on public discourse, does he have a blog? interestingly, here to the east in poland, the public trusts the army (the least democratic institution) more than parliament…

By: Heidi Himmelfahrt

Heidi Himmelfahrt — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 03:06:36 +0000

filchyboy,

Alles hat eine Ende. Aber nur die Wurst hat zwei.

By: Marian Wirth

Marian Wirth — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 17:00:32 +0000

filchyboy,

thank you very much for revealing the true reasons for the failure of European unification .

I must admit, that I missed this tempest in the teapot back in 2003. But Google tells me, that you are wrong concerning one point: Actually, one German doctor claimed that the EU-size condoms were too roomy for Germans. Hmmm… perhaps that is the reason why German politicians were so strong EU enlargement cheerleaders.

But I thought, the topic of this thread was “blogs and wikipedia”?!

By: filchyboy

filchyboy — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 09:21:58 +0000

One big issue of contention over European unification was German insistance that German men have larger penises than the rest of Europe and therefore the German condom industry wouldn’t allow their condom sizing to be put in synch with the rest of Europe. Apparently size does matter!

By: Marian Wirth

Marian Wirth — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 06:51:51 +0000

Good points.

To generalize a little bit: IMHO, Germans are reluctant to share their opinions and views with an audience which is potentially unknown and which is practically uncontrollable. Plus, the Germans lack a certain culture of debate, because we usually don’t have events like speech contests or similar in school, due to our competition-aversity.

The smallness of the German blogsphere doesn’t surprise me, whereas the liveliness of the German wikipedia section (including Switzerland, Austria etc.) struck me as really amazing.

See also the observations of a wikipedia admin expressed in this blog entry (German).

On a related note: The disregard of the German academia towards the phenomenon of blogs seems to emerge into a real threat for German competitiveness, since sharing information and knowledge will most likely be one of the key issues of the future. Check out this blog entry (with further links) on this topic.