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. [...]

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 [...]

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): I wrote this post before Klout renovated their algorithm in a very opaque [...]

A few weeks before the Hungarian media storm broke late last year, the BloggingPortal editors were contacted by the (then upcoming) Hungarian Presidency team, seeking ideas for how they could cooperate with the Euroblogosphere. Being a loosely-at-best organised gang of volunteers, it took us a while to respond. To their immense credit, the Presidency team [...]

Meanwhile, more provocation from the European Parliament’s lovely web team: “there are two kinds of people working in the public relations management milieu of European institutions: the ones that entertain romantic notions about the emancipatory potential of new media … and those that recognize Web 2.0 as yet another tool for managing and projecting the [...]

If I recall correctly, a lot of us in the euroblogosphere reacted to the announcement of the European Public Communication Conference and Network (EuropCom) with a mixture of scepticism, hope and amusement, particularly with the original launch video, which was so badly done I for one was actually charmed. Fancy announcing a conference and not [...]

This is the first edition of what I hope will be a series of annual Review Posts, published as part of the My Europe blogging carnival, looking back at the ideas I’ve explored in this blog over the past 12 months. The main reason for doing this review was to test whether these ideas, which [...]

A while back I and a number of others were blogging about how a very light, bottom-up usage of Web2-style tools and techniques (bloggingportal, delicious, tagging, google alerts, etc.) could help build links between national and EU online discussions and develop the slowly emerging European public space. The importance of this was brought home to [...]