Apparently tomorrow – apart from being Australia Day – is BloggingPortal’s 3rd birthday. What does it’s state tell us about the EU Online Public Space? How many more friends can I lose anyway? [Update: read a blogtour of 11 other posts celebrating this auspicious occasion] BloggingPortal’s USP is deceptively simple: if you want to know [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

Via @Niemanlab, a fascinating article on the “Citizens Agenda”, a collaboration between The Guardian and NYU’s Studio 20 program: ” an experimental space dedicated to determining how to get people’s voices heard in campaigns that, though they purport to be concerned with the people’s interests, all too often ignore them.” – Civic journalism 2.0: The [...]

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 [...]

And from flandersnews.be, via Andy Carling (@quarsan) comes the important news that: Flemings good at sorting their rubbish The amount of non-recyclable rubbish Flemings put out for collection continues to fall. Really! Yep, it’s true. You can read all about it here if you like. Now this post started life as a throwaway tweet by [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]