When I started this blog some months ago I’ve been providing some content in English, too. To be honest, nearly no one read these posts. It seemd that my German readers didn’t appreciate that – plus I haven’t been connected to an international community. So I stopped writing English posts. Some months later I started to use Twitter – in English and in order to communicate with an international community. I works quite well (luckily my readers excuse my stutter). But now, two persons have been motivating me to give English posts another try.
During Euroblog conference several talks during coffee breaks lead to the insight that many discussions concerning Public Relations in different countries are limited because of language. So Neville Hobson suggested to some academic bloggers to contribute something like a monthly update in English. I like this idea (even though it’s more painful for me to write and for my visitors to read). But my Portuguese collegue Bruno Amaral has been exemplary and just started blogging in English some days ago and he provides an English feed, too. So it’s up to me now to follow his good example.
While Bruno is using Yahoo Pipes I discovered an even more simple way for my WordPress.com blog to create an extra feed for a category: You just have to get the URL of the category and then you add /feed/. So it looks like:
https://thomaspleil.wordpress.com/category/english/feed/
If you like to, just grab this feed please – and hopefully everything will work. (I do not provide an „only German“ feed since I think German subscribers would cope with some English posts.)
Since I’m not concerned very much in feed statistics and since I’m not using Feedburner this kind of feed is fine for me. And I’m quite enthused to subscribe to any category of a WordPress.com blog in that simple way since there are several blogs with one or two categories I’m especially interested in.
Concerning „Das Textdepot“ I’m not sure yet if I should provide mainly wrap-ups on discussions on Public Relations in Germany in English or to join conversations taking place in English. So far, I preferred to bring some international discussions into the German PR blogosphere. A typical situation to ask the readers: What would you like to read in English in this blog?
Das Textdepot 
Nothing. Because if I want to read english texts, I read english websites… ;-)
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Thanks for the openess :-)
You’re right, it’s much more fun and much more interesting for a German to read english websites. The idea of blogging bilingual is to adress some non-German readers. But your reaction causes the question: Would German readers bother if there are some English posts within the regular feed?
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Thank you, Thomas. I have subscribed to your blog for quite a while but as my knowledge of German is limited, reading your content is quite a challenge :)
So I for one will welcome your occasional English-language content!
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Well you know where I stand on this issue. :)
And I’m happy that I have a chance to follow your blog.
Right now I’m still figuring out the format for my weekly posts.
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Well, i think that anyone who reads this blog should at least be able to scan the englisch texts for information – and by the way, is englisch really „that“ bilingual?
Everybody understands it, and if he/she/it doesn’t, should they really be reading this?
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One further aspect that counts for me is, that with german blogs using english I can get in contact with non natives commenting on (possibly) german issues. Not necessarily the case here, since most issues are the more international type. Anyway, I took your english feed…
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Thank you all for your motivating feedback. I hope to manage to write at least one or two English blog posts per month and not to affront my German readers with that…
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I appreciate the English posts!
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