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 [...]

“The Filter Bubble”, by MoveOn.org foreign policy director Eli Pariser, shows that the forces creating the Brussels Bubble are about to be reinforced by technology, operated invisibly – and with impunity – by a handful of companies. When I launched Blogactiv in 2007 I had some interesting experiences engaging with eurosceptics of the more rabid variety. [...]

If you’re like me and almost everyone else I know, you’ve got a To Do list overflowing with emails starred in various colours, Twitter favourites, starred RSS items, stuff bookmarked ‘Do’ or ‘In’ on diigo or delicious, unlistened-to-podcasts, unread books, unwatched documentaries, scribbled post-its and more. And you certainly haven’t got enough time to read [...]

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 [...]

Next week will see yet another physical meeting in Brussels dedicated to exploring the European public space, an irony which appears permanently lost to the organisers of the neverending stream of conferences, seminars and workshops which can be only attended by Brussels Bubble Insiders, and have neither webstreaming nor any online community (EuropCom, anyone?). Mediacafé [...]

Now and then the question arises: how can we get a transnational discourse on European topics underway, or create a European online public space? The two phrases in bold, above, both come from one of the latest posts on the topic, this time from Julien Frisch. They follow initiatives like Steffan’s Bloggingportal.eu, which aggregates Euroblog [...]

Apparently celebrities – who’ve been driving the buzz around Twitter – are starting to get turned off by the real (i.e., sad) people they are meeting there. What a surprise. From Techcrunch’s coverage of the latest rant against Twitter by some rockstar Twitter-lover-turned-hater: First of all, Twitter is quickly getting overrun by spammers. That’s probably [...]

I was reading Laurent’s post What does it mean to become human?, but it was so long that I skipped to the end, illustrating exactly the point I wanted to make in this post. Laurent writes, amongst other things, about interiority: the capacity to reflect upon ourselves, others and the world, the whole of reality [...]

Over on iBlog, Claus used a term that caught my attention: Networks such as ERRIN, which is funded by membership contributions and invests in what I would call “TRUST 2.0.”, help to establish that collective understanding and culture of cooperation and facilitate successful involvement in EU projects. While he freely admitted that “Trust 2.0 does [...]

By my reckoning, Blogactiv had its first birthday today. Time for a brief trip down memory lane. There were plenty of posts before October 15, 2007, of course, but on that day we saw our first post by a bona fide, external blogger (thanks, Stanley!). I’ve heard some people say (rather snidely, it must be [...]