Marc Johnson, an American who lives in Lithuania, has a nice piece on the growing European blogosphere in Tech Central Station:
Wryly echoing Andy Warhol’s famous statement, one website recently observed that “in the future every blogger will be Power Line for 15 minutes.” He was referring to the small number of blogs covering the Ukrainian election getting their quarter-hour of notoriety, but the statement brings into sharp relief the rise of a new subset of self-publishing pundits in Europe that may eventually change political discourse on The Continent. Call them Eurobloggers.
Eurobloggers aren’t a heterogeneous group of pseudo-socialist ivory tower intellectuals. One of the most read weblogs in Europe is Samizdata.net, a site that could be best characterized as a Karl Popper-worshipping collection of mini-essays — certainly not in keeping with the current stereotype of European thought.
[A]mong Eurobloggers, Britons lead the way in challenging institutions such as the European Parliament and their adherents. The EU Referendum Blog provides daily doses of Euro-skepticism, while the Adam Smith Institute’s blog discusses free markets and individual liberties as vehemently as the American Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute. EURSOC (a name meant to recall the ‘newspeak’ of George Orwell’s 1984) regularly discusses the perils of Eurocracy. And Biased BBC devotes daily attention to the inaccuracies and biases of the mammoth British public broadcaster.
Continental Eurobloggers, not to be outdone, have turned media watchdog. One enterprising (and very web-adept) soul calling himself the Dissident Frogman, regularly lambastes the leadership of his home country and its main newspapers, including Le Figaro, Le Monde (which even has its own blogs) and others. Similarly, David Kaspar runs Medienkritik, a site dedicated to identifying bias in large German news outlets, including Spiegel, Berliner Zeitung, ZDF, and Stern. And in the Czech Republic, Tomas Kohl monitors (and sometimes writes for) big Prague newspapers, including Lidove Noviny. Iberian Notes, from Barcelona, takes to task the socialist Zapatero government and various elements of the Spanish mainstream media.
Check the original for live links.
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