Came out just after my post on applying network theory and the EU online public sphere: "For those of us who are interested in understanding and participating in the EU digital public sphere(s), social network analysis offers a useful way to identify key influencers and map different communities. I can see plenty of practical applications (for e…

The above image is from Drake Baer's FastCompany article "Why Successful People Have So Many Groups Of Friends", which is all about networking for career success, something I've never done and am very unlikely to start.

This video is aimed at developers interested in combining machine translation, automatic semantic analysis, human curation, faceted and federated search, and social media to create a machine-assisted multilingual longform content curation engine.

Gratifyingly, the preview of the Hashtag Europe wireframes seemed to do the job, and allow people to understand just what this tool could do...

Pour le Journée Européenne du blogging multilingue, a video of one minute (waltz) length sur the bloggingportal.eu reboot, avec une "first look" à les wireframes et pas un mot dans mon accent francais de vache espagnol.

Data from bloggingportal.eu, extracted by BrusselsBlogger, gives some idea of the dominance of English as a blogging language on EU policy.

Some of the comments to my initial post showed me that I have to show, not tell, what I mean when I refer to technologies like semantic analysis and faceted search. So, a quick video about faceted search and the role it could play in helping people find opinions and ideas on EU policy via a rebooted BloggingPortal.

I received a couple of interesting reactions to the post about rebooting BloggingPortal, but as some of them were by email I decided to reply in FAQAO (Frequently Asked Questions And Objections) format, which I just invented, in case others have the same questions.

"and the idea was to get academic expertise and research into the broader public conversation."

A while back I was invited to make a 10minute presentation to "Civil Society Day", held at the EESC. Kwinten Lambrecht asked me to upload the ppt, and others asked for followup links, hence this post.

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?

At last, an opportunity to blog about gardening and EU comms in the same post.

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.

I've finally gotten around to updating my avatars here and there to show my support to Benoit Poelevoorde's call earlier this year to stop shaving. Why? And why won't it help solve Belgium's political crisis? And what's this got to do with Europe? I don't tend to write much about Belgian affairs ...

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...

A while ago I posted 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. Commenters seemed to both agree and disagree...

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 (Euro…

The lack of specialists in EU-oriented blogs is impeding the development of the European online public space.

That's right - curation. Now officially Web2.0-buzzword-of-the-month (not quite sure which one).

So the debate about the Euroblogosphere, or the Eurosphere, or the European Public Sphere, or web2eu, or the European online public space, of whatever-we-call-it-next-week, has sparked again into life, like a Frankensteinian monster with dodgy spark plugs screwed into the base of its neck.

A Twitter conversation betweentwo much-followed EU-oriented bloggers over the weekend caught my eye. I won't identify them as you need to follow them on Twitter to see their tweets.It started when one asked whether anyone out there"still thinks that blogging is in any way likely to have an impact ... why should anyone listen to us? We st…

PR firm interns posting fake reviews about iPhone apps for their clients. Ghost blogging and tweeting by just about everyone, including thought-leaders in social media.  Bloggers not disclosing sponsorship. It's just a matter of time before someone poisons the well for EU social media.

Over on Nosemonkey's blog, in yet another debate on the pros and cons of EU membership, Insideur is of the opinion that there is a real gap in the market, that Open Europe has sought but failed to fill, for serious, informed, and therefore constructive criticism of the EU

Over on the Belgian IABC's web2eu site, Philip Weiss embedded a TED video of Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, discussing the revolutionary impact of social media. It's really so good I thought I'd repost it here and add some observations

Julien Frisch blogged about a very thoughtful post on writing for (y)EU by Steve, a web editor from the EP, who sounds distressingly like me (white, British, 40s and sceptical about the Generation Y definition of 'friend' despite having many) and seems to be coming down from a post-holiday Web2.0 overdose. The key paragraph, highlighted …

Constructive discussions generally require good discussion documents. One of the Commission's major contributions to any European online space should therefore be a EUROPA that supports the conversations

Trans-European online Communities of Practice should become a key element in the European online community, but examples so far are few. This post looks at DG INFSO, which has been using online community principles since 2002, two years before the phrase "Web 2.0" was invented.

Now and then the question arises: how can we get a transnational discourse on European topics underway, or create a European online public space? The two phrases in bold, above, both come from one of the latest posts on the topic, this time from Julien Frisch. They follow initiatives like Steffan's Bloggingportal.eu, which aggregates Euroblog…

Quite a few people look at me in quite a puzzled way when I mention how the techniques and approaches of online community management 'may have something to offer' the EU in terms of communications, but that this may require 'a change in mentality'. When they look like that, I say "You know, something along the lines of the…

Following rapid and significant expansion into new markets and sectors of governance and policy, innovative union of nation states ("European Union", or EU) seeks an experienced Online Community Manager to gain buy-in at all levels throughout our 27 Members, as well as with external stakeholders on a global level.