In addition to contributing to the Globalization blog, I will also be blogging a bit about what is happneing in social media in Europe. I will start form my own region here in the north, but will move also southwards!

Although it is still cold here close to the Arctic regions, the social media scene is humming. One site to visit is www.arcticstartup.com, where Ville Vesterinen and his friends blog about social media business in Scandinavia and the Baltic region. In addition to the blog, which tells about the latest news about internet and mobile startups in the Nordic and Baltic region, they are also helping to create a buzzing ecosystem of sharing ideas and growing companies together. Great job!

Another place to get acquainted with Finnish social media companies is www.sombiz.net.

There are plenty of interesting social media companies in Scandinavia and Baltics – some of them even surprising. Muxlim, www.muxlim.com, a global Muslim community, has its roots in Finland. Games are another strong area here; www.playfinland.fi is a great site to follow news about the Finnish game development scene. Max Payne came from Finland, and there are several interesting new companies, such as Frosmo (www.frosmo.com).

In addition to consumer social media, things are happening in the Enterprise 2.0 area, but more on that in next entries!

One of the areas which I will be interested to follow is: how will European social media companies address the question of handling languages in social media? Although many communities will be monolingual, I think there are enormous needs in corporations to handle multiple languages in the various Enterprise 2.0 applications. And with multiple languages, I mean much more than the user interface: all the user-generated content, communicating with customers, open innovations etc. Thoughs or comments on this?