Blogging for French votes

Just about everyone knows by now that the French blog more than anyone. So, with eight months to go to the presidential elections, it is not a surprise that the politicians have piled into the blog business -- with mixed results.

First the background. Over four million people run weblogs in France, according to an Ipsos survey last month. That amounts to over seven percent of the population. Half are under the age of 24 and 54 percent are female. Skyblog, the biggest host, claims as many as five million on its platform. Another survey showed that 60 percent of French internautes visited a blog in May, compared with 40 percent in Britain and 33 percent in the USA. Just over half the population is wired to the internet, 85 percent on broadband.

There is no mystery to the Gallic love affair with blogging.

The French are brought up to be articulate, to debate and criticise and France has always loved new technology. According to Loic Le Meur, a star blogueur who has become a national authority, "the French blogosphère is replacing the function that used to be provided by cafés" (Le Monde). The French have big egos and like to express them, says Le Meur, who is European boss of Six Apart, the San Francisco firm that runs the TypePad weblog hosting service.

Where outside France, for example, would you find a chief state prosecutor pounding out a blog on such matters as pop lyrics, the heat wave and politics?. Philippe Bilger, the senior Paris court prosecutor, does just that.

Not everyone is thrilled with France's blogomania. Schools are punishing pupils who ridicule teachers with text and video and the police have prosecuted bloggers for inciting violence on the city-edge housing projects. Psychologists are warning parents that blogs can cut kids off in a narcissistic bubble. The government says that internet should be kept out of children's rooms.

Most of the dozen or so presidential contenders now run weblogs and the big parties -- the Socialists on the left and the Union for a Popular Majority (UMP) on the right -- are offering blog platforms for supporters. The parties are also waging guerrilla actions against each other with spoof sites. Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP has bought keyword advertising from Google France to lead to their site.  Last weekend, to create a buzz, the UMP invited a dozen stars of the blogogracy to attend Sarkozy's effective coronation as presidential candidate at a convention in Marseille. The bloggers were not especially kind to Sarko, but the fact that the party paid their expenses raised questions about their objectivity and whether or not blogging is journalism.

Sarkozy is one of the few heavyweights who is not typing a first person journal. He is too busy being Interior Minister and preparing to become head of state next May. Arnaud Dassier, Sarko's young internet adviser, has just caused a stir by saying that personal blogs are for the losers of the political world. "A minister doesn't have time to devote half an hour a day to tending a blog. A blog has to be authentic so you don't get your staff to turn out jottings in your name." Sarkozy's team is running a plethora of blogs and sites on their candidate

Ségolène Royal, Sarkozy's chief Socialist opponent, is using her site, Desirs d'avenir for a running debate on policy before she produces her own manifesto. It's all part of what she calls participative democracy. But she is also steering clear of an intimate diary.

The other candidates are tying to get close and personal. Lionel Jospin, the former Socialist Prime Minister and disastrous presidential candidate in 2002, is the latest. However, his effort, now in its second week, sounds as wooden as the would-be candidate himself. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, another of the Socialists' duelling "elephants", is the blogging veteran since he has been scribbling on line since 2004.

Few of the French politicians' blogs feel natural or intimate. Like Jospin's, they smack more of careful "on-the-record" remarks for media consumption. One exception is Alain Juppé, Chirac's former Prime Minister, who carried the legal can for corrupt practices in his boss's political machine. He started a blog a year ago in exile in Quebec while banned from politics. You could feel the bitterness of the exile. Now he is back, about to be reinstated as Mayor of Bordeaux, the edge has gone.

The parties and candidates got into the act after the establishment was caught out by the internet "citizens' resistance" that scuppered the European Constitution in the referendum of May 2005. The grass-roots "no" campaign was led by Etienne Chouard, a high-school teacher from Marseille. Chouard thinks that citizens' blogging still has a limited impact on national campaigning. The mainstream media still lead the dance, he said the other day. He laughs at the new blogging zeal of the presidential candidates: "The politicians are greedy pigs. If they can put their hands on yet another platform, they rush for it, but I don't know if it will work," he told Agence France-Presse. "The point of blogs is that they are spontaneous, honest, not professional -- and that's the opposite of politicians."

Some might of course apply the same logic to mainstream media and professional journalists who blog.

Comments

[GAG]

I thought blogs were created to allow biased and self righteous people to express themselves. More importantly, to reduce the suffering of their respective partners and spouses, who before the invention of blogs, had to endure an ongoing barrage of opinionated comment about the world’s problems.
Thanks to blogs, many homes are happier and more serene.
GAG

[Gareth]

Interesting stuff, I'd always had problems finding French writers but maybe it's because they're all blogging away. Those who have submitted to me have often submitted work that would be more suitable for blogs - even Libération journalists use exclamation marks all over the place, littering articles with opinion. Perhaps the French mindset really is suited to blogging!
Gareth
http://www.paris-link.com

[Eric]

You did not memtion another (small) candidate blog: the one for Corinne Lepage, from Cap 21.

http://corinnelepage.hautetfort.com/

[Marcel Patoulatchi]

It is quite obvious that blogs solely created for one event lack of sincerity.
You cannot start a blog to run for an election and do something else than campaigning. Well, you could, you can do what you want - but that's not how the average politician see it, especially because he does not want to blog but to campaign. So what is said is way too much prepared, without suspense.

Despite the fact I dislike Alain Juppé, it is true that his blog seems more genuine than the others because he created it long before any elections and because he was more or less an outcast in France.

Another problem with blogs run by celebrities are the comments: too many readers means too many comments, it gets harder and harder to follow. Moreover, celebrities are usually authority figures, which absolutely not harmless on the debates quality.

[Tara]

I want to add to Marcel's thought: That blogs created for "one event" aren't the real deal. I had a similar experience in a grad school class last spring. The topic of the course was technology and education. Keep in mind that the students were teachers themselves, and teachers, in general, aren't known for being shy and retiring. Reading the blogs, you would think some of us had had a personality transplant. The writing felt stale - the very opposite of spontaneity.

We were required to keep a blog, simply for the experience of it. I admit I resented it; it felt artificial, and I certainly wasn't going to say the things I really thought, because I knew my professor would read it.

Before the class ended, I emailed everyone and asked who would be keeping their blog going, because if not, I'd erase that link from my Favorites. Surprise! No one would be continuing the blog. The reason most people gave? That the "forced" blog felt like another job.

And that's why I think reading some of those blogs isn't interesting - - it feels as if someone's doing it because they MUST, not because they want to. Granted, wonderful people like Mr. Bremner do it because it's his work, but I think we can all tell that he enjoys communicating. The process of writing is part of his reward, I'm sure.

My point is that I think that we readers are sophisticated enough to decide whether a blog is a blog in the true sense, or if it's just done to keep up with the times.

[Frank Schnittger]

I find the figure of four Million weblogs in France quite incredible, not so much because that is a lot of people writing a lot of stuff, but who has the time to read it? How many of these weblogs are actually read by more than a very few people?

Of course if that figure includes "social networking sites" which are mostly made up of photographs and favourite songs etc. together with e-mail cross references, then the figure becomes more understandable. Every self respecting teenager now has their Bebo or other hosted site proclaiming their preferences to the world, but not a lot of content.

It must make you wonder, Charles, if there is a future in this professional journalism lark, if everyone is becoming a DIY journalist and writing their own stuff. You know what happens - if the market is oversupplied with content, the price goes down, and pretty soon everyone, bar a few market leaders, is working for free. Hang on to the day job for a while yet!

[Andrew Kirby]

These French weblogs are of little interest to me, but I thaught the poster or bookcover or whatever it is at the top of the column was superb. Who did it , and where can I get one ?

[Maggie]

It doesn't surprise me at all that the French love to Blag, sorry Blog.
They have the time to do it , due to 35 hour weak ,too many public holidays,striking, & so many of them without a job any way.