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 other posts celebrating this auspicious occasion] BloggingPortal’s USP is deceptively simple: if you want to know [...]

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 single market: Dear Sony Belgium, When I bought my new TV, I asked the salesman [...]

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 Programme on Balance“) covered the often tortured relationship between: the media, for whom ‘balance’ means getting two opposing views onto a [...]

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 the Commission communicate their policies and programmes. [...]

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 that, though they purport to be concerned with the people’s interests, all too often ignore them.” – Civic journalism 2.0: The [...]

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’: young Muslim men in the Middle East, Afghanistan, etc. Apparently there’s a Digital Engagement Team, scouring [...]

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 been tempted to drop the ‘oxy’. But, life being what it is, I probably won’t make it due to [family issues/overwork/rampaging gerbil infestation]. [...]

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 short for time I based it on the Prezi I did [...]

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, developed by IHECS (Institut des Hautes Etudes des Communications Sociales) and their partners via Socialeuropeanjournalism.com. The site looks good. At [...]

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 organisers of Europcom 2011 seemed less ambitious, at [...]