A red dot marks the spot. It’s a sunny Saturday afternoon in Paris and I am poring over a map of the Buttes Chaumont, a park fashionable among Parisians but little- frequented by tourists. I am here to attend a picnic with 60 or so strangers with one thing in common: a blog.
It sounds like the social equivalent of standing on a train platform with a notebook and binoculars but I have come along hoping to learn more about the nuts and bolts of blogging. My blog, www.tout sweet.net – the diary of a former newspaper fashion editor who has hung up her high heels to renovate a house in rural France – already has a loyal following among friends in London. But I am still a relative blog novice and want to learn more about improving my (site) traffic statistics.
The event is hosted by the queen of the expat British bloggers, Catherine Sanderson, aka Petite Anglaise of www.petiteanglaise.com, and three of her best blogging friends. Sanderson, 34, is the attractive bilingual secretary whose blog, an account of her experiences as a single mother in Paris, led to her dismissal from her job with an accountancy firm and subsequently a six-figure book deal (Petite Anglaise is to be published by Penguin in January 2008).
I find my fellow bloggers drinking Pimms on top of a grassy knoll, surrounded by a patchwork of blankets and coolboxes. We were asked to wear badges showing the name of our blogs but only a few have bothered. I am joined by my friend Travis, a business journalist who has hastily set up a blog on blog-spot.com in order to come along, and we are given a warm welcome by the co-organisers, “Frog with a Blog”, Steve “Bookpacker” and “Meg Le Blagueur”.
We quickly get to grips with the etiquette of a “blogmeet”. You introduce yourself by your nom-du-blog (some bloggers like to remain anonymous) and you do not ask someone their site statistics or “overall views”, which is akin to asking a stranger at a cocktail party their salary. While Petite Anglaise gets on average 4,000 hits a day and recently passed the 2m visitors mark, most bloggers struggle to draw 40, so there is potential for embarrassment.
“What’s your blog?” is the question of the day and it’s an excellent icebreaker. A list of attendees, with links to their sites, was published beforehand – the picnic even had its own blog on blogspot.com – and some people have done their research. I introduce myself as Mimi Pompom, my blogging name, and am surprisingly flattered when someone says, “Ah yes, aren’t you the person who cycles through poppy fields in the Charente?”
Our fellow bloggers are from all age-groups and professions. Most are fluent in blog language – podcasts, blogrolling and RSS feeds – and know their way around social networking website Facebook.
“Are you Mac or PC?” one rather serious looking man asks another. But mostly the conversation segues swiftly to non-blog topics. Many of the attendees are expats, living or passing through Paris, and writing personal, fish-out-of-water accounts of their life there. They include a graphic designer from Australia, a public health worker from Kansas and a British estate agent based in the Gers in south-west France.
Frog with a Blog (www.frogwithablog.wordpress.com) writes amusingly about his encounters with French bureaucracy, a topic much covered by British writers but more interesting when told from the perspective of a French citizen.
In general, French blogs tend to be “a bit more serious, philosophical and political”, according to Catherine Sanderson. “Some of the ones I’ve looked at are a bit dry.” Having visited the top 10 French blogs listed on alianzo.com, I agree.
“Really, the picnic was just a pretext to meet up,” says Sanderson. “When I first started blogging three years ago, I thought it would just be me sitting in my bedroom but I have met some really great people as a result.” In addition to attending blogmeets in Paris cafés, Sanderson is happy to jump on the Eurostar to socialise with other members of the blog community. “I am going to London in August for a meeting with a big group of English bloggers,” she says. “What I like is that you meet a really nice bunch of people, from all ages and backgrounds, that you wouldn’t normally meet.
“When you first start a blog you have to put yourself out there a bit,” she says. “If you leave a witty comment on another site, the hope is that they will reciprocate. These things spread virally.”
I leave the Buttes Chaumont not much wiser about how to boost my rating on technorati.com, the equivalent of Amazon’s sales rankings, but I’ve had a lovely afternoon in a beautiful French park and met some interesting people – surprisingly, not a web geek among them.
