uwehorstmann.de

When Hubertus Heil, chairman of Germany’s socialdemocratic party, started using microblogging service twitter to comment and share his expierences at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, the online service of the major German news magazine “Der Spiegel”, jumped right at it. The experiment was described in an article as being awkward and embarassing, a video followed right after. However, Spiegel’s view on the issue was not shared by the blogosphere.

With presidential candidates Obama and McCain using services like Twitter and YouTube extensively, scepticism about all new ways that politicians take seems to be a German trait – and even one that two of Germany’s progressive media elements like Der Spiegel and Sueddeutsche Zeitung have incorporated. While Heil’s reports obviously are highly subjective and not always 100% correct in spelling, they do represent a politician opening himself to the public, sharing personal insights both about politics as well as about his own daily life – and in fact using Twitter’s reply function to engage in dialogues with interested followers, of which there are 900, now, at the end of the week.

For other blog reactions in German see Thomas Knüwer’s Indiskretion Ehrensache, Christian Soeder or Nico Lumma.