cruel to be kind

I have been a bit more quiet than usual in the last few weeks, and one of the reasons for it is Sam Sethi’s new project called blognation which finally launched today with blognation UK.

In case you are wondering what it is: Basically a service to report about what is happening in Tech / Mobile / Enterprise in the different countries around the world, but always in tech lingua franca, English. The about us page has more information and it seems there are more than just some people interested in what the site is going to produce – as Sam just told me there are already over 2000 subscribers for the UK feed just in some hours. :)

As you probably can guess I was thrilled by the idea itself – as you would know from reading my blog, one of my major complaints has always been the mono lingual, mono country aproach from the anglo american point of view.

Just one recent example for this is that despite you may think Pownce is missing, for me it means basically getting rid of two twitter accounts. One for each language. The recent Essential Web in London showed another problem blognations wants to solve: Only one startup from Germany was in the list of those nearly 40 presenting companies. Probably not due to the fact that Germany only has so few startups but more to do with the fact that even the French manage to be more active in the English sphere than the Germans, therefor being more recognizable for organizers of such events.

So you can imagine my delight as Sam asked me to be his editor for Germany – having an official reason to poke Germans to engage more in the english sphere will be even more fun as well as show people not from Germany why it is so important to pay attention to what is happening in one of the major economies of the world. :) :)

Besides Ivan Pope, Huw Leslie, Ewan Spence and David Terrar for the UK, the other country editors are already waiting for their country to launch, for example Karin Hoegh, Robin Wauters, Uri Levanon and Amanda Lorenzani.

So, if you are thinking about starting something in another country as a Web 2.0ish company, do think about your local blognation editor! ;))

More to come soon :)

Tags: european view