I’ve started reading a translation by Michael Hofmann of Joseph Roth’s collection of short essays about Berlin – What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933 – and in it I learned a new English and German word “feuilleton”/das Feuilleton. This word seems apt to describe many of the pieces one will find in the blogosphere as it can mean “a cultural critique or review,” “a serial story column” or “a supplement” and typically the style is a personal one, light and humorous/ironic in tone, with the writer’s presence and opinions being part of the story. The content can be anything current that interests the writer, with perhaps particular attention to the goings on about town (e.g., the Talk of the Town feature of the New Yorker magazine).
Interestingly, as the Jewish Roth exiled himself to Paris following the rise of Adolf Hitler (a fellow Austrian), this piece in German from a Dickinson College Wiki mentions how the feuilleton was used as part of the Nazi propaganda machine, in part for fomenting antisemitism.
Earthquake Words/Erdbeben Wörter 