Since I mentioned the relative size of the German an French Blogospheres below, here’s another interesting fact about relative sizes: If you look at
Wikipedia’s main page, you will notice that, using an article per capita measure, the German part of the free encyclopedia is holding up very well not just in comparison to the Anglosphere challenge but also with respect to our French friends (about 1.3 times).

Assuming for the moment that both blogging and writing for Wikipedia means participating in some kind of digital civil society, do the different relative sizes of the respective elements thereof tell us something about the people behind the ventures?

Could it be that Germans are more interested in participating in something with a more authoritative, slightly more hierarchical, aura than the blogosphere, where the laws of information markets determine reputation, pseudo-link-list-authority, success and failure and everything is very much evolutionary, sometimes even in the short run? Could it be that the French are displaying an unknown taste for the said market forces?

I’m not sure, but it seems, just as contemporary forms of dating have apaprently enabled social scientists to gain a new level of understanding concerning the rules determining human mating ( you may not like it ;) – from Zeit Wissen, in German), mass participation in the digital public discourse could provide previously impossible insights into national discoursive preferences.

What do you think.