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 editors of Lib Dem Voice in the UK, on “why there isn’t a bigger and [...]

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 Desmarest, Internet Communication Manager for the Robert Schuman Foundation, and presumably @Fondation Schuman (* Yep, [...]

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 the kiss of death? I’m referring to the subsidiarity check procedure, which a while ago I [...]

I’ve finally gotten around to updating my avatars here and there to show my support to Benoit Poelevoorde’s call earlier this year to stop shaving. Why? And why won’t it help solve Belgium’s political crisis? And what’s this got to do with Europe? I don’t tend to write much about Belgian affairs (Hell, I don’t [...]

A while ago I posted (Not losing sight of the basics) the idea that EUROPA could suffer if the EU Institution’s limited online communications resources were refocused on social media. While social media offers the EU a great deal, this could be a serious problem, particularly given EUROPA’s importance to any EU social media strategy. [...]

As reported on Bloggingportal.eu: “On January 1st, Hungary will take over the Presidency of the EU Council. On the same day, a controversial new law will come into force that even the OSCE’s media freedom representative has openly criticised – arguing in a recent report that “regulating online media … exerts a chilling, self-censoring effect [...]

It might seem strange for me to say this, but lately I’ve been wondering whether the EU institutions are now paying too much attention to social media. Don’t get me wrong, they have a thousand reasons for getting social media right – and also ensuring that they don’t get it wrong by poisoning the well [...]

In September last year I wondered whether 2010 would be the year when someone poisoned the well for the use of social media by the EU (here and here). In the last few weeks I’ve been mentally preparing an update post, as it didn’t really look like it was going to happen. So is the [...]

If anyone thinks that the combined forces of the OPP (Online Pyjama People) are going to take over the world anytime soon, please watch this hilarious video (hat tip: nosemonkey) of one of them being utterly destroyed in a television interview. Did I mention that it was hilarious? Context: the Daily Politics is a TV [...]

The following is a longer version of an article I published recently in NewEurope. If 2010 is the year when Brussels started taking social media seriously, then 2011 may be the year when Brussels realises that the biggest social media challenges are old, not new. Combining social media and EU affairs is not new – [...]