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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Time for my second Annual Review. Try to curb your enthusiasm. The idea of an Annual Review started last year with the BloggingPortal-inspired EU Blogging Carnival, held in May. I thought then it’d be interesting to look back over the preceding 12 months of posts and to reflect on if and how my thinking on [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]