For a start, I agree with Brusselsblogger that a home page that gave greater visibility to comments would be a start, although if you’re thinking about a homepage revision I’d go much further and use the redesign to stimulate the development of a ‘culture and community of conversation’ via the ways stories are highlighted and presented.

But that might not be enough – if a blogger just ignores comments, it’s because they’re treating their blog as a one-way broadcast – a web1.0 site for posting their thoughts. I just find it ironic that the ones I called out actually invite comments and/or position themselves as Web2.0 wunderkinder.

Which brings me to the subject of your 23 year old hired by a “Brussels based consultancy as a Web 2.0 expert” when he has no knowledge or experience of the EU, of wider communications (off-line and on-line) or of social media.

[If you want to 'do' social media in an EU context, you need all three.]

His arrival in Brussels is exactly what I was posting about here and earlier – above, “This is when the number of “experts” explodes … agencies can’t tell the difference between them and those bluffing and rehashing their way onto the bandwagon.“.

It says a lot about the standard of most Brussels-based consultancies that they’re so gullible and/or have no compunction about fooling their clients. The result is inevitable – 2010 will probably be the year when one of these wet-behind-the-ears experts poisons the well for EU and social media by unknowingly breaking the basic rules of social media on behalf of clients who wouldn’t know astroturfing from transparency.

The same could be done for the BlogActiv newsletter.

By the way, while we are talking about the frontpage: it would be nice if the “most active blogs” box would only show blogs that are really still active. Two of the the top 3 blogs have stopped blogging more a less a year ago.

This has been an interesting thread and I thought I’d throw my hat in.

I wish I could tell you for sure why some of our highest profile bloggers aren’t overly keen on comments. I can think of a number of our bloggers that mostly ignore them. You are right, it is a shame. I mean they can’t all be right all of the time can they???

On a separate subject, a few weeks ago I was at an event where I was introduced to a young guy – possibly in his first job – and he was being employed by a Brussels based consultancy as a “Web 2.0 expert”. All good so far.

However, over the course of the next 5 mins he asked me “What is twitter?” and then told me he was “thinking about starting a blog to try it out”. Thats the ‘expert’ opinion then…

As has been noted in some of your other posts, having a facebook account and being under the age of 25 does not actually make you a Web 2.0 expert. Needless to say, he has been in touch with me several times. Essentially, he is hoping that I will answer his questions and teach him how to be a Web 2.0 expert.

He seems like a nice and intelligent kid. But he isn’t an expert yet. Far from it.

I have also had a guy cold call me trying to sell SEO services. Fine. I asked to see his site, took a look and then phoned him back. I provided a 5 minute assessment of why his SEO sucks and what his problems were. He proceeded to tell me that, “SEO is pretty hard isn’t it” and on a couple of occassions, “so how does that work then?”

He was trying to pitch SEO services to work on EurActiv.com. It is a 60,000 or so page website – and yet the 7 pages of his site were not done well!!!

Such experiences are leading me to believe that online communication is still 5 years away from being done properly by most here in Brussels.

Best wishes,

Stuart