EUObserver in German?

Today, EUObserver runs a story about the EU's year of intercultural dialogue 2008 - in German.

While EUobserver normally is 100% English, and as a private sector media can afford this politically, this is an exception.

On the other hand, the official website on the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue of the European Commission (which has more political obligation to communicate in a multilingual way than Euobserver) is strangely enough only available in 4 languages: English, French and German plus Spanish.

This gives a somehow bad taste to the efforts of supporting an intercultural dialogue as language can be considered one of the most basic ingredient for Culture.


Euobserver to jump on Web 2.0 trend?

Back to Euobserver: The German story is in fact part of a new Euobserver campaign focussing on the 2008 thematic year.

Apart from the German translations the following two points seem interesting to me:

• Euobserver uses video (at the same time as EurActiv offers a new service called Vidcast to its advertisers)
  
  
• Euobserver mentions that as of January 2008 there will be an additional service calles Culture Tube, essentially building on the "user-generated content" paradigm.
  

It needs to be seen how many people will participate in this "dialogue". If there is enough engagement by Euobserver and if they provide enough visibility on their website then it might work, otherwise it will end like some of the other Web 2.0 wannabes - see discussion over at Blogactiv.

The German version of EUobserver as such seems to me less a strategic move than a necessity for EU funding which seems the main driver behind EUobserver's focus on intercultural dialogue.