EP Diary Forum

"Spain has the wrong 'latitude' for the Internet"--Madrid conference

At a magazine publishers conference in Madrid last month, one of the speaker's said that the Internet fits an "Anglo-Saxon" mindset and was not really applicable to the Iberian experience. As I understood him, Anglo-Saxons and Northern Europeans (I guess including Germans and Scandinavians) like information almost for its own sake while people from the south are more interested in the people behind the data.

From what I've seen, there are cultural differences in the way people approach the net, but a fast and cheap information source obviously transcends local idiosyncracies.

Beyond simple information access, though, I wish I understood what makes the Internet attractive (or repulsive) to users from different cultures. I just saw in our sites stats today that people from 42 countries access Electric-Pages every month; how are the 42 perspectives different, and should we be doing something more to broaden the material or the perspective?