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 [...]

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 [...]

This post is aimed at those attending the training session I will be giving next month to policy researchers in the framework of the EXACT Marie-Curie project. If you’re attending, comment to this post to let me know what you’d like me to focus on. If you’re not attending, fire away anyway. So I was [...]

The subject of Klout has come up a few times on Twitter, so I’m posting this so I can point people toward a few articles I’ve found useful. Something I can’t do in 140 characters. Which proves my eventual point. For those who don’t know it, Klout purports to measure your social media influence by [...]

“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. [...]

The answer to this post’s title may be so obvious that you wonder why it needs writing, but Jon Worth’s idea to get a Blogging Day for greater European Parliament transparency together got me thinking beyond the knee-jerk reaction. One of the tenets of transparency is full disclosure, so this is where I point out [...]

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 [...]

Another attempt to dash off a post without making it an epic, based on whatever’s in my Inbox/ToDo. This time: Facebook, Twitter: are these the unavoidable tools for the future of European democracy? (pdf*, 9 pages + annexes), by Pauline Desmarest, Internet Communication Manager for the Robert Schuman Foundation, and presumably @Fondation Schuman (* Yep, [...]

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 [...]