To give my blog a bit more Usability and Accessibility for the English speaking participants of the conference I attended last week I will switch over to English for this posting. So: Welcome English speaking visitors! Enjoy sailing the media-ocean! :-) There will be more Euroblog2006 related content coming!

I spend Thursday through Saturday in Stuttgart at the Euroblog 2006 Symposium. On Friday afternoon I gave my presentation [PDF] on “Weblog Strategies of German Print Media Corporations” with a focus on the weblog project of the Trierischer Volksfreund. Since there had been some exeptional presentations in the morning and early afternoon sessions that had talked about stuff I was going to talk about as well I was a little bit afraid to be redundant. But in my opinion it wasn’t really a problem and so I simply picked up some of the thoughts of the others and related them to what I was talking about.

Elizabeth Albrycht‘s keynote [PDF] kicked off the conference with some very interesting thoughts and remarks towards a theoretical framework for weblogs and participatory communications. The blogging colleagues from knallgrau, Michael Schuster and Olaf Nitz, very nicely illustrated in their presentation [PDF] of the antarctica2005 project how the framework can be put into practice (excellent job by the way, go and have a look!). In the discussion after their talk, questions arose on if they had really been able to address the target groups they had in mind. That very same questions was central to my presentation as well since I was arguing that it is surprising that only a few print media corporations utilize blogs to reach target groups they are increasingly failing to adress as surveys show (the 14-40 year olds). The audience had a good laugh – and I didn’t mean to offend – when I said that the core readership of regional newspapers, the 50+ year olds, will eventually die and that media corporations must find a way to reach the young. ;-)

Anyways, it seemed the audience found the project of the Volksfreund very enlightening. They asked interesting questions, gave good comments and made some highly insightful remarks. Basically what happend – not only after my presentation – was real-life blogging: People exchanged ideas, opposing arguments, differing viewpoints, trackbacked and commented each other, linked to new thoughts…. So: Thank you live-blogging-audience @ Euroblog 2006! :-)