UPDATE: And for what it's worth, here's the Italian take from the class I taught at the university in Urbino, Italy - a beautiful medieval city, top of a mountain, walled in, just amazing. The student newspaper reported on my talk. (It's in Italian, but I know some of you speak it.)
My trip to Europe over the past month was a working trip. In addition to doing a panel discussion and a workshop about online advocacy and blogs at the annual conference of the lead (liberal) opposition party in Greece, I also did a number of presentations/discussions for reporters and college students in Italy about the same topic. Both Greece and Italy are behind in using the Internet for politics (though Greece, at least, has a pretty good nascent corps of online advocates on the left - I can't speak for Italy as I didn't meet any). I'd say each country is easily 8 to 10 years behind us in terms of their use of blogs, but also years behind in the use of the Net at large for politics (though, oddly, Italy claims one of the top bloggers in the world, Beppe Grillo). I also did a number of interviews with the press in each country, in order to push the idea that blogging, and the Internet overall, could be a force for positive change. In Greece, there's a lot of suspicion about blogging, and in Italy I got the sense that many people think it's simply irrelevant. This interview below, with "Marianne" magazine, one of the largest weekly magazines in France (I'm told), was part of that marketing effort (you can check the magazine out here). The interview is in French, and I was nervous as hell (in addition to sick with the flu and freezing), so I figured this was worth a laugh on a Friday. Enjoy.
