It would certainly be interesting to sit on one of these discussions with you. I have quite a few things I would like to share with the Europeans in terms of American culture. I am sure the opportunity will arise soon.

Keep up the good work.

Carmen

Great presentation! I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the US and other English-speaking countries, and you’re right: Europe (often) is just this rather odd, slightly backward region somewhere out there. Of course, that’s a generalization. But what I found interesting is that mostly, it’s not really that companies or people are trying to cut out Europe or anything. It’s rather that they don’t really have access – access in the sense of understanding what’s happening, simply because from the outside, Europe is hard to understand due to all the reasons you pointed out. So this kind of talk is great, as it may help US companies to get a glimpse into what’s happening here, and maybe leaves them a little less scared. Thanks!

Peter

I would love for technology to filter out everything on user side! by user choice. Then I would write one blog alone and let technology do the filtering. I also want to have a working babelfish – so i could just write in german and everybody can read.

At the same time we do face the other problem – while it is easier to just write in english it is not that fair to our german readers that we only do speak english from time to time …

Stephanie Booth will host a talk at reboot about it, I had similar conversations with her before and I am sure we will have an interesting exchange about this :)

But I am very thankful for them to provide some German language help, at all. And it really helps, that they have a German corporate blog as well. Although it is a little meager.

Since I have started publishing at least one weekly English article in my tourism marketing blog, I get much more international readers. I had never really worried about non-German users that came to my blog through Google. But when their numbers kept increasing, it came to me, that it wasn’t fair to keep them out or wondering about my content. After all, who speeks German, right? I have included very little English on the side bars. But I will add more. And I will add an English section to my classical home page.

In turn, I would love for Typepad to come up with solutions too. For expample bilingual side bar headers, bilingual copy in the comment sections, and so on.