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 lack of specialists in EU-oriented blogs is impeding the development of the European online public space. One of the observations in the recent Waggener-Edstrom survey of influential blogs that resonated with me was the lack of specialists in Euro blogging circles. Finding 1: a major gap in sector-specific blogging expertise The study contrasts this [...]

Hmm, any survey which lists my blog as a Top 20 ‘influential’ blog (see Stuart’s post and interview with the authors, and Jon’s post) must be either very generous or not have more than 20 blogs to work with, given that I post rarely, haven’t posted in months, always post too long, cover a subject [...]

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 [...]

I’ve decided to be a grouch until Spring fully arrives, which is why I am going to do the unthinkable and criticise the European Citizens Initiative against poverty. Like my previous post on the first ECI, my criticism is not about the content at all – who could criticise any initiative to reduce poverty? My [...]

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 [...]

Last week MEP Martin Kastler (EPP-CSU) launched the first European Citizen’s Initiative (ECI). Is this a slow-motion train wreck, or the dawn of a new era of democracy? Two things immediately caught my eye when I checked out “Mum and dad belong to us on Sunday” (via @Kosmopolit via @andrewjburgess. Update: Kosmopolito blogged on this [...]

That’s right – curation. Now officially Web2.0-buzzword-of-the-month (not quite sure which one). And here was me thinking that curation was something knowledge workers have been doing ever since there was knowledge to work with. So stand by for a totally gratuitous use of the c-word later on in this post. Maybe even two. But first, [...]

Answer: when the blogger doesn’t publish comments or trackbacks. But why are so many of these Charade Blogs supposedly ‘blogs on European communications’? Are there too many freshly minted ‘social media experts’ in Brussels? I’ve found that Eurosceptic-oriented blogs are generally very open environments – I had a comment blocked once on Devil’s Kitchen, but [...]

I recently joined Tibo’s conversation on the Parliament’s Writing for (y)EU – see Not the 8 o’clock news -  but my latest comment grew so long I decided to put it here instead. And then, typically, it grew … In Tibo’s original post and subsequent comments, he explored how far EP officials can go in [...]