France: Skyrock's social ambitions

Not surprisingly, Skyblog.com taught its parent Skyrock (a hip-hop radio station popular among French youth) the power and "universal potential" of the social Web, the International Herald Tribune reports. Now Skyblog – which gets 11.1 million visitors a month and gained "a measure of notoriety when some of its young bloggers urged French youths to revolt against the police in the midst of disturbances in the Parisian suburbs last year" – is expanding linguistically to include communities in German, English, and Spanish. "Skyblog is unusual in its global ambitions to target a multinational youth network," according to the Herald Tribune. I'm not so sure this isn't what MySpace has in mind too, with its goal of being in 11 countries by next April 1, but it is possible that Skyblog plans to mash up the cultures and languages it embraces more than other social sites, something that one of the Herald Trib's sources said will not be easy. The French company does have a leg up, though, because it has appealed to the French diaspora, from primarily French-language countries like Belgium to French speakers in Spain, Germany, the US, Morocco, and most probably other French-speaking countries in Africa. On the online-safety front, interestingly, Skyblog has "a team of 30 people [who] do screening with a 'cybercop' icon on every page allowing users to complain about violent or hateful speech." The icon on every page is something the New Jersey attorney general is calling for in US-based social sites (see GovTech.net).