Greece

We are looking for people to maintain our pages that are related to Greece. If you are interested, please contact kostakis.b AT gmail.com

See the main wiki page in Greek language at http://p2pfoundation.net/Greek_language and the Greek P2P blog (http://bloggr.p2pfoundation.net/).

Free/Open Projects

• Greek free software community, at http://www.ellak.gr/
• Greek Creative Commons community, at http://ccgreece.blogspot.com/
• Greek Linux, at http://www.linux.gr/
• Greek Open Office, at http://el.openoffice.org/
• Hellenic Linux Users' Group, at http://www.hellug.gr/
• Open Source Greece, at http://opensource.gr/en/index.html

Magazines

• Re-public, at http://www.re-public.gr/en/ Bi-lingual Greek-English journal of the Papandreou Foundation.
• Hyperdrome, at http://hyperdrome.net/about.html Host of the Journal of Hyper(+)drome.Manifestation, at http://journal.hyperdrome.net, with left-theoretical contributions about the network society.

People

• George Dafermos (Dafermos, George), active in the open source movement. He's currently undertaking research on the peer governance of free/open communities at the TU Delft.
• Vasilis Kostakis, a contributor and researcher, also writes at P2P blogs.
• George Papanikolaou a contributor to P2P wiki and P2P Greek blog.
• Diomidis Spinellis, an open source researcher and contributor, maintains a blog at http://www.spinellis.gr/blog/.

Status Reports

The politics of blogging in Greece

From a conference report by Roman Tol:

"Kostas Zafiropoulos and Vasiliki Vrana (both University of Macedonia) presented an exploration of political blogging in Greece. Their research was based on a sample of 1367 Greek bloggers.

Blogs have the advantage of speedy publication and in socially constructing interpretive frames for understanding current events. Blogs appear to play an increasingly important role as forum of public debate, with knock-on consequences for the media and for politics. In Greece where the radio of internet users is relatively small there is however an expanding portion of bloggers who comment regularly and have the power to a certain degree and in certain circumstances to trigger off political movements. Based on the relative literature, Kostas and Vasiliki use Technorati.com in order to track Greek political blogs and provide indicators of their popularity and interconnections. Additionally the aim of the case-study was to test whether the hypothesis of Drezner and Farell (2004) - Skewedness of incoming distribution and formations of core blogs - apply for Greek political blogging.

Drezner and Farell argue that blogs with large number of incoming links offer both a means of filtering interesting blog posts from less interesting ones, and a focal point at which bloggers with interesting posts, and potential readers of these posts can coordinate. When less prominent bloggers have an interesting piece of information or point of view that is relevant to a political controversy, they will usually post this on their own blogs. However, they will also often have an incentive to contact one of the large ‘focal point’ blogs, to publicize their posts. The latter may post on the issue with a hyperlink back to the original blog, if the story or point of view is interesting enough, so that the originator of the piece of information receives more readers. In this manner, bloggers with fewer links function as ‘fire alarms’ for focal point blogs, providing new information and links’.

Currently 40% of the Greek population uses Internet (with percentages being higher among young people and men). According to Karampasis (2007, http://ereuna.wordpress.com) blogging started to expand during 2002-2003 in Greece. There are currently 9610 blogs written in Greek, but only 4639 of them are active. The content includes multiple subjects – with an emphasis on personal interests, art and culture, and entertainment (news and political subjects are rarer). The majority receives less than 100 visits daily, and perhaps as a consequence, do not have any advertisements. The typical Greek blogger is a male (64%) with a college education around the age of 30, and lives in Athens (53.1%) , Thessaloniki (12.4%), or resides abroad (11%). Mostly bloggers tend to use the medium for the purpose of keeping a diary, experimenting, taking action while being anonymous, or creating of a community. 38% of the bloggers consider blogging to be a form of journalism, while 51 does not.

The case-study examines the posts of blogs that were about George Papandreou (the former and current President) and Evaggelos Venizelos (contender) during the period prior to the general elections - from September 16 to November 13. The blogs that were examined contained posts linking to the two candidates sites/blogs. Blogs connectivity, closeness and variations over time were the main characteristics of this investigation. In addition, the research discusses skewedness of the blog incoming links distribution and how this is affecting the formation of central or core blog groups, which serve as focal point blogs. Central in the methodology was recording blogs (from friends and followers, party members, dedicated blogs, non political commenting), link from blog rolls, and affiliation of blogs.

The results, Kostas and Vasiliki argue, demonstrate that political blogging in Greece although limited, conforms to the characteristics described in the literature regarding political blogging. Blogs may frame political debates and create focal points for the new media as a whole. In this way, blogs sometimes have real political consequences, given the relatively low number of blog readers in the overall population. Skewedness of incoming links distribution and the formation of core blogs have on the provision of information and discussion. Empirical evidence from Drezner and Farell is also reproduced in the present analysis. Greek political blogs act within a social network of blogs, which form authority core groups where the discussion is taking place. Political affiliation is partly reflected on the formation of blog core groups. Because of this, it is easier for citizens that need information to coordinate and find where the interesting debate is taking place." (http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/weblog/2008/05/13/politics-web-20-international-conference/)