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Michael Arrington, the main writer and founder of TechCrunch, sometimes picks up topics from Germany. For example today. “German tech bloggers can’t stop posting” about a new startup which is announcing it’s upcoming launch by using some online spots without any message, he writes.

In fact, I never heard of it. And I think my eyes and ears are quite open to new stuff. “Deutsche Startups”, which Arrington links to, in my opinion is nothing but a PR blog (self description: “to inform in extensio about aspiring german startups”), financed by well known venture capitalists and investors.

The thing I wonder about the most is that Arringtons posting is showing his cluelessness about the German scene. Of course the german market is much smaller than the US market, but it’s much harder to find any successful “viral marketing”-dontknowwhat here. And according to the well-hated Technorati (which is probably wrong but the same degree of being wrong for all, so you can compare the data anyway), the buzz about this company is much higher in the english language world. For german language blogs, it counts 20 references only right now. That’s just: nothing.

I’m sorry Michael, but that’s something you could and should have checked out before writing your post.

Yep. You can buy me. Well, my content. A new (german language) blog will be starting in may.

I’m working on eCampaigning related stuff since 2002. This was the time when - during the Federal Election in Germany - many people believed we would see the internet to be the revolutionary power of campaigning. At that time, this was nonsense, of course. And it still is, since european politicians in general are offliners - mainly because of their age.

There is not much good literature on eCampaigning in a political context in Europe. At least, I do not know it and I strongly believe to be quite good informed on that. We have to read books like »Blog Wars«, like »The Revolution will not be televised« and to compare it to our political system and the background patterns of a very specific political culture in every single european country. To get a general understanding of what’s going on in terms of politica science, I usually recommend Pippa Norris «A Virtuous Circle», a truely great book on the change of campaign mechanism. Even though it’s not covering the last years of evolution of internet based political campaigning, it’s worth reading.

..I’m still protesting this shit« is written on a sign of a protester against Iraq war.

What I can’t believe: it’s obviously meant to be citizen media. But it’s “All rights reserved”, so nobody is allowed to reuse it without special permission of the person who made this shot.

I think it should - at least - be published under this license. This would help it’s spreading around the globe a lot, I think.

Jeff Jarvis seems to be annoyed by all that horse race-talk about the primaries.

Well, Jeff. You really can’t imagine how crazy it is to see more or lesse exact copies of what’s reported in the US in Germany these days. It might be interesting stuff since I’d never say that the election of a new US president would not affect us here. But the details of Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, the life, jive and drive of John Edwards and details of the life of Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton and more or less nothing about their plans for the future, even little about their foreign policy (except positions on Iraq).

I think they only matter for one reason: it’s easy to cover for media around the world. Just copy and translate the US sources, mix it up and shake it once or twice. What you will get is a nice story of famous (well, not here) people fighting (well, not here, too) each other in “Highlander” mode: In the end, there can be only one.

That’s sensationalism, not journalism. It’s easy to cheer someone up when you already know he’ll come down again. And if you have about 10 people to write into the sky, you’ll be wrong just 8 times until primaries end.

I wrote a lengthy article on a very specific german topic for the march issue of the german magazine “Journalist“, which all members of one of the two big german journalist associations (DJV) receive. The situation is quite complex: since more than 50 years a self control institution run by journalist associations and publishers called Presserat is checking  (on demand) whether printed publications are following the ethical codex of the Presserat or not. Though it’s effectiveness is despited by critics since many years, it’s at least some kind of general benchmark for the minimum quality of content. The codex includes rules such as a clear separation of business and editorial stuff.

What I was writing about: even though most of the most popular german websites are run by traditional media, the press codex did not apply on any content that was not deriving from printed magazines or news. The Presserat would like to change that now, but in fact it’s still not clear whether this effort will show any effects: the publishers don’t want to be judged too hard and many others involved in some way don’t seem to have a real clue about what’s going on at online media in Germany.

In fact, we see some quite specific new problems arriving with online journalism. Publishers, formerly print, now do audio and video. User Generated Content is thought to be beatific, but brings a lot of new problems. There are just a few and some badly reasoned decisions by courts on responsibiliy and quality assurance duties for the publishers in the field of UGC, laws are fragmentary and some classic approaches turn out to be non-applicable nowadays.

What are we going to expect now? Either it will become a very weak online media codex and it’s effects will be none, so it’s wasted time. Or it’s going to become a real sign of quality, that gives good measuring possibilities and includes strong sanctions. Well, what’s your guess?

«The first real internet news site» is here, former news anchorman and now publisher of Zoomer Ulrich Wickert says in a video advertorial. The german publishing house Holtzbrinck launched Zoomer a few minutes ago, targeting at young users. It’s an ambitious project, with joint forces of the staff of the last year discontinued Business News and the online department of the Berlin based Tagesspiegel.

The new site is meant to be new in several ways, especially in terms of user participation. But right now, there’s not much to see on that: you got to know that it’s the average of editorial and user voting which gives a news item it’s place on the front page.

Noticeable: a lot of flash toys, and captchas appear as soon as you try to interact with the site. Another eye catching feature is the personalization login.

In a more journalistic view, the site looks quite lurid to me («Attempted Murder?», «Mother drown baby in bath tube») and show oriented - football, pop culture…
You should take a closer look at the footer section, since there are many publications of Holtzbrinck Group named, which texts now could appear on Zoomer, too. But golem.de is missing, a german tech ticker which belongs to Holtzbrinck eLab at the moment. Unlike the Lausitzer Rundschau, which fits to the target group just like Ulli Wickert: the man who retired from TV news some year ago could be the grandfather of the young targeted group.

(Disclaimer: Right now I’m employed by a company which is part of the Holtzbrinck Group, too)

 Some german newspaper publishers believe in some diffuse future online, but if you take a closer look at it, you won’t get the impression it has to be the online journalism.

In a survey, the “Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft” (translates “Institute of the german Economy”) learned that average german online editorial staff is at 4.2 editors plus 6.3 freelancers. At many local newspapers, ratio and absolute no. of staff is 1 on 1.