Happy Birthday BlogActiv, and Bye Bye (for now)

Imported from the Blogactiv.eu blogging platform, closed without warning in 2021. Links, images and embeds not guaranteed, and comments not displayed.

BlogActiv turns 10 today, so now is as good a time as any to shutter this blog, for now at least. It's impossible to date any blogging platform's birth (the first test post? alpha version launch? beta?), but I went through this exactly nine years ago, when I pointed out:

There were plenty of posts before October 15, 2007, of course, but on that day we saw our first post by a bona fide, external blogger

That post reported on the way Eurosceptic trolls reacted to the launch. Appropriately enough, I've been dealing with something similar this past week, thanks to one of the bloggers I brought to Brussels for the EC's European Week of Regions and Cities conference:

Her stunt on the day after the EWRC got her plenty of headlines, but to be honest I was rather disappointed by the way the eurosceptic trolls reacted:

It nevertheless made for a fun week, particularly as it started with my own workshop on online communities and public policy participation, for which I've written three posts:

• Seeking examples of real participation in EU policymaking
• The limits of public participation in policy (above)
• Should we put machines we don’t understand in charge of public policy?

A followup post's coming later this week, also on Medium.

Bye Bye BlogActiv

Which brings me to the main point of this post: I'm shuttering this blog. It makes no sense to try and manage one here and another on Medium. It's something I should have done years ago, when it became clear that parent company EurActiv really wasn't interested in their own blogging platform. Call me sentimental, but it's not that easy to abandon something one helped create.

This is not a criticism of EurActiv. It's incredibly difficult to survive as an online media in any sector, so I admire them a lot just for having survived since the first dotcom, when so many others have failed. If their strategy doesn't involve developing BlogActiv, that's because they need to focus elsewhere. But writers write to get an audience, and when I broke my own rule and published identical posts here and on Medium, there was no comparison: Medium put my post in front of new audiences; BlogActiv did precisely nothing to promote it. They simply have other priorities than the writers who create free content for them. That may change, so I'm not deleting this blog, but for now follow me on Medium and/or subscribe to my newsletter.

PS And yes, I'm aware how totally precious and self-absorbed this sounds, and I'm as sure as you are that they won't notice my absence. Please grant me some self-awareness! ;)

PPS For the record, recent posts on Medium - apart from the above ones - include two personal productivity posts for The Mission: ... three for Chatbot Magazine ... ... a couple more on innovation in large bureaucracies: ... and something I'm sure EurActiv would agree with: It’s Time to #Pay4Content.

• Why you need a Personal Content Strategy
• Listen & Learn: how to absorb podcast knowledge
• How and Why to Add a CuratorBot to Your Content Strategy
• Boosting CuratorBots with Faceted Search
• Public Service Bots Should Support the Open Web
• What the EU’s Mobile Roaming success taught me about innovation in bureaucracies
• Reframe your communications strategy as part of your Innovation Programme to sidestep internal politics