Tech Blogging in Europe

Interesting article by Mike Butcher at TechCrunch EU on Tech blogging in Europe - the times, he says, are a-changing:

Now, in 2011, the scene and perhaps the economics, are starting to change. The tech scene itself is bigger, there is more potential money around. There’s just more heat. I daresay a few people are eyeing up the market.

But even in standalone media terms it’s not a ‘straight’ play. Most of the European tech blogs are either run by people who also consult on the side, or, as in the case of TheNextWeb, are attached, like a Pilot Fish to a their host shark, to a large annual conference. However, recently, a couple of things have changed.

Other big guns have parked their tanks on the European lawn. GigaOm now has a European writer, Bobbie Johnson (based in Brighton), so does WSJ Europe (Ben Rooney, in London), VentureBeat has Ciara Byrne in Amsterdam and The Next Web (especially with Martin Bryant in Manchester) has done a pretty good job internationalising in English (although good luck trying to monetize that Dutch language blog guys). Wired UK‘s magazine’s site has become an important adjunct to the print title. Some might say it’s already the ‘Vanity Fair’ of tech. So, leaving aside the economics of online publishing, in editorial terms alone, pan-European coverage of tech and startups has never been better.

I do hope the economics change - we are that classic "Consultancy-with-a-blog" model Mike mentions above, in 2006 we felt that you had to put your mouth where your money was (or in blogging's case, wasn't...) and actually use the technology we were consulting on. We have certainly learned a lot from blogging and the blog has led to some interesting assignments and opportunities indirectly, and forged some good friendships, but it has certainly not been a profitable endeavour - we see it very much as a marketing cost. In fact, we took a bit of a hiatus this summer because we were so darn busy with client work!

It's interesting that the US blogs now have a "European Foreign Correspondent" too, so lets see, maybe Mike is right. Our own observation is that there are only 3 scenes in Europe that are really worth keeping an eye on - London, Berlin and the European emigres to Silicon Valley (with maybe Paris deserving the occasional glance as a 4th) as pretty much anything happening in Europe will wash up in one of these nets. Most of the running is still very US centric.

Mike also wants to see more attitude...well, Broadstuff has always been a tad, well, satirical - Bubblewatch has been this year's running joke - In fact more than one person has told us we could never get Ads owing to that Broadsnark. We are quite proud of that actually

So clearly we may even be on the right track.