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 [...]

Last year, in the runup to the first EuropCom conference, I gave it a bit of a hard time. My cynicism was confirmed by many I knew who went, describing it as a conference about Web2 and social media which allowed little or no participation. Oops. The organisers of Europcom 2011 seemed less ambitious, at [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 – [...]

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 [...]

If I recall correctly, a lot of us in the euroblogosphere reacted to the announcement of the European Public Communication Conference and Network (EuropCom) with a mixture of scepticism, hope and amusement, particularly with the original launch video, which was so badly done I for one was actually charmed. Fancy announcing a conference and not [...]