Last week, the good folks at Business 2·0 put together a map of Web 2·0 sites outside the United States. While Sweden’s Bubblare.se (kind of like a YouTube) is missing (then again, it is in Swedish only), it does give a good idea of how social media are global. I was pleased to see coComment there.
   It looks like the promise of the World Wide Web—where countries that are not expected to come up with world-serving sites do (something I was quite aware of when I started Lucire)—is being fulfilled. One issue is the use of English as a global lingua franca: I did not know that Spurl is Icelandic, for example, or that Feeds 2·0 is Greek.
   On the internet, it makes little difference. As I found with old media, however, world-class design can sometimes be absent of national characteristics. As mentioned before, for the first year, Lucire’s print edition’s most regular comment was, ‘I didn’t know it was Kiwi.’ Should it matter?
   In some cases, yes. If the nation brand can contribute to its success, then there should be some overt recognition of its origins. In print publishing, this seems to be the case. It’s why I am finally considering putting the New Zealand flag on to the cover of the home edition of Lucire. (I refused to do this before, because the home editions of Vogue, Elle and Marie Claire have no national indicator—only its foreign editions do. But I suppose we in New Zealand are not used to being the home of an international magazine’s home edition.)
   On the internet, I find it irrelevant, and that in time, national indicators will mean less, even for magazines, as print globalizes as well. I may be a little too ahead of my time on that one: right now, the focus is on maintaining national brands, even when they are owned by multinationals, in order to fool unsuspecting consumers that they are buying domestically owned and made.
   Eventually, however, some companies will succumb to endorsement branding, where the parent company’s name is mentioned, to appease shareholders and to make them feel big. Nestlé does this with its brands; and at times BMW (with Rover, in the mid-1990s), Ford (a global campaign starring Charlotte Church linking all its brands in the late 1990s), and others have, in moments where they have been confused with the direction of theirs. I give it a few more years before this becomes a trend, and globalized multinationals are, for inexplicable reasons buoyed by the media, more welcome than they are now. Posted by Jack Yan, 23:50  permalink

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