Latest posts
Happy Birthday, BloggingPortal(?)
Apparently tomorrow – apart from being Australia Day – is BloggingPortal’s 3rd birthday. What does it’s state tell us about the EU Online Public Space? How many more friends can I lose anyway? [Update: read a blogtour of 11 ot...
Dear Sony, so much for .eu
The following text was just submitted to Sony Belgium. I post it here not because I think it will get me improved customer service, but to show the difference between the vision and the reality of “.eu-driven businesses” in Europe’s...
Of technocrats, journalistic balance and telling EU stories
A recent edition of The Infinite Monkey Cage, BBC Radio4′s brilliant chat show combining science and comedy, got me thinking again about the parallels between science communications and EU communications. The episode (“A Balanced Programm...
An alternative overarching EU communication strategy?
At last, an opportunity to blog about gardening and EU comms in the same post. Those who managed to sit through some or all of my Prezicast on the EU online public space would have picked up the fact that my day job involves helping various parts of...
How about a citizens’ agenda for the European elections?
Via @Niemanlab, a fascinating article on the “Citizens Agenda”, a collaboration between The Guardian and NYU’s Studio 20 program: ” an experimental space dedicated to determining how to get people’s voices heard in campaigns tha...
So the US military is now more open in social media than the European Commission …
Over on edition 627 of For Immediate Release, they open their news section (timestamp 04:30) by bringing together a couple of news stories on how the US military is engaging with what could euphemistically be called their ‘challenging public...
Key question 1 for panel X today/tonight/tomorrow
I’m going to try to break the habit of a lifetime this [morning/lunchtime/evening] and actually attend a physical [conference/workshop/seminar/PRpissup] about the EU and social media, something so self-evidently oxymoronic that I’ve often...
EU Online Public Space – the PreziCast (updated)
A few weeks ago I was asked to give a training on the EU online public space to a group of political science PhDs taking part in the EXACT Marie-Curie training programme (pre-session discussion here). Being a sucker for flattery I agreed, but being s...
Do we need more EU platforms, or sustainable EU media? (Updated)
In response to @SocialEUJ, because Twitter sometimes (usually) doesn’t give you the room one needs … On November 8, MEPs will discuss ’10 concrete political proposals’ for creating the European public sphere via digital media,...
Simon Anholt on EU propaganda
Last year, in the runup to the first EuropCom conference, I gave it a bit of a hard time. My cynicism was confirmed by many I knew who went, describing it as a conference about Web2 and social media which allowed little or no participation. Oops. The...
The value of politically-motivated news
And from flandersnews.be, via Andy Carling (@quarsan) comes the important news that: Flemings good at sorting their rubbish The amount of non-recyclable rubbish Flemings put out for collection continues to fall. Really! Yep, it’s true. You can...
For students in my Marie-Curie training session: what should we cover?
This post is aimed at those attending the training session I will be giving next month to policy researchers in the framework of the EXACT Marie-Curie project. If you’re attending, comment to this post to let me know what you’d like me to...
What is influence? or, Why I don’t care about my Klout score (updated)
The subject of Klout has come up a few times on Twitter, so I’m posting this so I can point people toward a few articles I’ve found useful. Something I can’t do in 140 characters. Which proves my eventual point. [Update (12/11/11):...
What “The Filter Bubble” means for the Brussels Bubble
“The Filter Bubble”, by MoveOn.org foreign policy director Eli Pariser, shows that the forces creating the Brussels Bubble are about to be reinforced by technology, operated invisibly – and with impunity – by a handful of...
Does more transparency make better comms?
The answer to this post’s title may be so obvious that you wonder why it needs writing, but Jon Worth’s idea to get a Blogging Day for greater European Parliament transparency together got me thinking beyond the knee-jerk reaction. One of...
Building a Blogosphere: any questions for a panel discussion? (updated)
Next Tuesday (14/6) I’ll be running a short panel with Gergely Polner, spokesman for the HU Presidency of the Council of EU, three other BloggingPortal editors (Joe Litobarski, Alia Papageorgiou and Ronny Patz), and Dr Mark Pack, one of the e...
Has plagiarism finally arrived to the EU online public space? (updated 7x, which is ridiculous)
Another attempt to dash off a post without making it an epic, based on whatever’s in my Inbox/ToDo. This time: Facebook, Twitter: are these the unavoidable tools for the future of European democracy? (pdf*, 9 pages + annexes), by Pauline Desmar...
Some stuff I should have read when it came out
If you’re like me and almost everyone else I know, you’ve got a To Do list overflowing with emails starred in various colours, Twitter favourites, starred RSS items, stuff bookmarked ‘Do’ or ‘In’ on diigo or delici...
2011 Annual Review
Time for my second Annual Review. Try to curb your enthusiasm. The idea of an Annual Review started last year with the BloggingPortal-inspired EU Blogging Carnival, held in May. I thought then it’d be interesting to look back over the preceding...
Europe with a LiSP (updated)
While lobbyists scramble to use the European Citizens’ Initiative to their advantage, one of the other innovations of the Lisbon Treaty seems to have raised so little interest that it doesn’t even have a TLA (Three Letter Acronym). Surely...
