Blognomics 07 in Amsterdam

Yesterday Blognomics 07 was held in Amsterdam. It was for the third time that this event, powered by Guido van Nispen and Krijn Schuurman took place. Last year's event Blognomics 06 (discovered that I misspelled the name last year) the event felt like a big hot sauna; this year the sauna cooled down. There was again a packed program with many speakers in 5 hours; new in the format were the forum sessions. Many professional and semi-professional bloggers were present; the total audience consisted of 200 registered people.


















There are many bloggers in the Netherlands. Estimates are usually made by putting the figures together of the Dutch language blogger collections like ilse/Sanoma’s Web-log.nl and de Volkskrant’s weblogs. These contain mainly the emo-blogs (emotional blogs about the lover, pet or drudge of daily life). Then there is a core section of professional and semi-professional blogs, who are writing in the Dutch language, but not necessarily. All in all some, the guestimate is 800.000 Dutch language blogs and blogs originating from The Netherlands.

Are blogs influential in the Netherlands? In the USA there is a serious debate about journalists and bloggers and the influence of bloggers. Some US bloggers can even protect their source. In the Netherlands the debate between the journalists and the bloggers is starting, but they still do not have much influence. Perhaps the shockblog Geen Stijl is a public platform. And Dutch bloggers still do not earn money.

In one of the forums as well as a presentation de-mystification (told you: theology is a perfect training for online!) took place. Politicians (see photograph) have taken to blogging, but in a forum with three politicians it became clear that many political blogs are the product of ghost-writers and when the politicians personally write blogs, they can not tell everything. In a presentation, a representative of a media bureau told openly how blogs were manipulated for commercial gains; the bureau had set up a blog to stimulate the sale of Sony’s PSP.

A high point for me was the presentation about bliin, a feature which lets you share your location and geo-tagged photos from your handset in real-time. There was a live demonstration of someone taking a photograph and the photograph appearing on a map; in the meantime you could also see who of your friends were in the neighbourhood. The demonstration sadly looked more like a demonstruction technically, but the result (see photograph) turned up on the screen eventually. It is definitely a feature I would like to link to my blogs and definitely during my travels.

Deep thoughts I did not take along from the conference. The key-note speaker Paul Molenaar of ilse/Sanoma shortly touched on the question, whether blogs are the wisdom of crowds: collective knowledge or idiocy. Whatever way it is seen: blogs keep stimulating communities and conversation.

As you can imagine, a conference for bloggers usually is heavily blogged by bloggers and photographers. So also Blognomics. Most blogs are of course in the Dutch language and hardly readable for the foreign readers. But there are many photographs of the event available on Flickr; Henk-Jan Winkelman took also one of me (centre) with my good friend Herman van Oorschot (left) and Eric Voigt of the NHL college (right).

Blog Posting Number: 750

Tags: blog

Journalism and blogging

Last night I attended a session of the Dutch Journalists Association NVJ in Utrecht. Subject of the meeting was the public debate in blogs. The subject was introduced by Marc Chavannes (to the right on the photograph), professor journalism at Groningen University and former correspondent for the Dutch newspaper NRC in Paris, London and Washington. The discussion was chaired by Peter Olsthoorn (left)

The subject was formally about the public debate and blogs, but in the background the attention directed itself to the question what do blogs do to journalism and do journalists and newspapers take blogs seriously. And all this related to The Netherlands.

Marc Chavannes started out to tell about his experience as a foreign correspondent in Washington and how he used blogs as barometers to see political questions growing. He indicated that blog about the public debate often gave him material to write about questions before they erupted or never did erupt at all as blogs demonstrated the inconsistencies of the political proposals. He showed it with examples from blogs like Talking Point Memo and Kos.

He compared bloggers of the public debate to mice that with their small teeth nibble away the information and shred evidence to pieces. He used the example of the action of Bush after re-election. Having won the elections, scaring the hell for terrorists out of the Americans, Bush thought that he could privatise social pension schemes and let banks and insurance companies handle these services. It would save the government a lot of money and bureaucracy. But the bloggers showed that this solution would not be for the better of the citizens. One year after, the proposal was silently moved off the agenda, while even parliament had not spent time on it.

In The Netherlands we have thousands of blogs; so one would suppose that there is a long tail with top blogs and special blogs; but there are only a few public debate blogs such as Geen Stijl and Geen Commentaar (mind you two blog titles with a negative!). Yet Geen Stijl is more a shock blog, while Geen commentaar is still in a starting up phase. There are no public debate blogs which bring on questions of politics or social issues; nor take bloggers politicians or leading figures to task. Neither is there a collective blog in the public debate in which bloggers can enter their contribution on public question.

The question was obviously why does this not happen in the Netherlands? Is the population too small? Do we follow the US, but much later? Or do we have another debating culture. So far blogs have not been taken seriously in The Netherlands by journalists; besides some bloggers want to impress their mum and dad, so it is an inferior kind of journalism, the mum-and-dad journalism. Besides most blogs in The Netherlands can be categorised as autistic; the bloggers talk to themselves. However, fine blogs are ideosyncratic.

What have blogs done to newspapers? Not much so far. In the US papers like the NYT and the Washington Post have bought blogs for their traffic and in the second place for their opinion. The same has happened in the Netherlands. The Telegraaf has a participation of 40 percent in Geen Stijl; the blog regularly takes care for contribution in the newspapers. De Volkskrant has started its own blogosphere with blog software, with which new bloggers can set up their blog; but so far de Volkskrant has not harvested these blogs for news.

The conclusion of the meeting was that Dutch journalists should study the phenomenon of bloggers more carefully. For Dutch newspapers there is still an opportunity to start up citizens’ journalism in the public debate.

Posting"s of blogs on this subject in Dutch:
- Peter Olsthoorn (Planet Multimedia): 'Te weinig relevant debat in Nederlandse blogs'
- Roy (Geencommentaar.nl): Kwaliteit en invloed van weblogs in Nederland
- Maarten Reijnders (De Nieuwe Reporter): Waarom doen Nederlandse blogs het slechter dan Amerikaanse?

Blog Posting Number: 727

Tags: journalism, blogging, citizens journalism