Whirlwind day but fun. Back-to-back coffees today in Paris, first with William Arruda and then with Guillaume du Gardier. OK, it was wine for me by the time Guillaume and I got together at 5 PM. Last time we met, Guillaume was running his own consultancy, Blogging Planet. He’s since moved to Edelman Paris as Director Online Communications Europe.
He says he’s spending 30 percent of his time on the road, in Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, etc. spreading the word for Edelman on social media.* He just finished a roadshow to present his findings from the Edelman/Technorati study of the European blogosphere (UK, France, Italy, Germany).
Guillaume and I speak in rapid-fire French (him) and French-English (me) and it seems to work very nicely. BTW, I notice he’s doing a back-and-forth English/French thing on his blog these days. I like it. Maybe because I speak French. But also because it more accurately reflects what’s going on in the multi-national, multi-lingual blogosphere.
Most interesting new blogosphere stat: Japanese is the dominant language
My favorite new stat (from Technorati’s Dave Sifry): the biggest language in the blogosphere as of March 2006 is Japanese (37%), followed by English (31%) and then Chinese (15%).
* Yes we talked a bit about the Edelman/Wal-Mart episode. And no I’m not going to tell you what I learned. If I could ever be said to have a “beef” with the fire-then-aim approach to blogging, it’s this: journalistic rules of “off the record” should apply in the blogosphere when appropriate. God, do I sound old-fashioned, or what??