It’s not helped that discussions of EU affairs are already massively splintered into 27+1 debates (there are 27 member states in the EU, speaking over 20 official languages plus plenty other ones).

But there are some interesting things going on. Am currently having a conversation on IABC (one of the other platforms mentioned above) about crowdsourcing policy development, where an old friend pointed me to “Padgets, an EU-funded research project (in which Google is a partner) that is building “a micro web application that combines a policy message with underlying group knowledge in social media (in the form of content and user activities) and interacts with end users in popular locations (such as social networks, blogs, forums, news sites, etc) in order to get and convey their input to policy makers.”

What do you think? Can a microweb application from a research project get the install base it needs to reach a tipping point, or is the history of this field littered with neat technologies which never did?

I’m still hopeful for REGF tech to make a comeback in blogspace. Of course, it’s a kind of culture that has to be instilled, but it can happen. We already see it in twitter with #hashtags, and in tools like SocialText and status.net .

Don’t despair though, even without REGF there are bridge-people in every community who eventually do the hard work of linking things up for the rest of us.

You’re right – people want to interact, have a conversation. It’s our nature as social animals.

But you downplay the importance of technology – the internet, and the software running on it, have been making it easier for people to have those conversations for 50 years, extending the reach of their conversations and allowing geography-less groups to form around topics.

This process may have accelerated since Mosaic 1.0, but it’s far from over – it is still not “ridiculously easy” for groups to form in the wider Web (within platforms like Facebook it”s a different matter, but FB is not the web).

SocialText took the concept of easy group-forming and ran with it in one direction (internal comms). My point was simply that if this concept was taken in another direction, enabling ridiculously easy group-forming on the wider web, the European online public space could take a decent-sized step forward.