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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

More than one social media observer has taken their time to react to the latest Edelman Trust Barometer’s statistic that “people like me” has taken a tumble. What does it mean for EU communications? For those confused by the first sentence, let me explain that for many people involved in the early days of social [...]

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 [...]

The story of the Mr Bean “hack” of the Spanish Presidency website got me thinking. Not the story itself, which is just an amusing diversion. But Joe Litobarski’s excellent analysis led me to compare the way the story was covered by the mainstream media and by bloggers such as himself and Julien Frisch, who first [...]

One of the topics I’ve been developing on this blog for quite some time came up at last week’s get-together organised by the Belgian IABC chapter: the need (or not) for social media guidelines for EU staff. I actually think such guidelines are needed not just for EU staff, but for everyone serious about using [...]

As we approach a new Commission, expect to see a lot of recommendations for them from all and sundry. Rather than add my voice to the cacophony by making up my own, I’ll content myself with picking over everyone else’s, using anything I find relevant to communications as a springboard for reflection. First off the [...]