The Lobby reveals that the youngest candidate for the EP elections is a Swedish Pirate while Europe de la Defense notices that the European elections started in Afghanistan.
The blogging Eurocrat scrutinises the two-class system created by "contract agents" in the European institutions while the free speech law blog finds that the European Court of Human Rights is close to accepting the right to access to information being guaranteed by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
EU lobbying continues its coverage of MEPs turned into lobbyists with Pat Cox while Grahnlaw delivers the news about the "Directory of European Community legislation in preparation" (via Kosmopolit).
Nicu Popescu on Neighbourhood compares the different degree of high-level attention of European leaders to the two regional projects "Mediterranean Union" and "Eastern Partnership" while in Behind the Scenes bloggers get an insight into the EU-journalist's press secrets.
La Oreja de Europa finds herself on TV very late at night and shares this destiny with Jean Quatremer as we learn from eurosocialiste (who also looks back at the PES Odyssey).
EUX.TV is not allowed to cover the EP election night from inside the European Parliament and in Bulgaria only nationalists care about European issues tells Христо Христов (also here).
Frank Schnittger asks the pertinent question about what will happen with "TH!NK ABOUT IT" after the European Parliament elections and Stergios Mavrikis seems to have found the answer in Plato (although I don't understand the message of his post).
Hungarian Spectrum devotes a long article to the campaign in Hungary and Jon Worth is sharing slides about the use of technology for politcs (so is Bente Kalsnes).
And last but not least, Hauptstadtblog is happy about remixes of EU-electoral billboards in Berlin while The Czech World Daily reports about the "African Czech" Raymond Asuquo running for the EP elections (via Veronica Khokhlova).
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This could become a new category. I will experiment with the short coverage of other European blogs' articles, trying to find a style for "Europe in blogs".
More passengers are a problem for the railways
12 hours ago
8 comments:
Nosemonkey used to do a similar thing a few years ago - the infamous "Euroblog roundup". It is an interesting format if one has the time to do it regularly. At some point there was the idea to pass it around so that every week another blogger would do a roundup, but somehow the idea disappeared again. However, the development of bloggingportal was certainly one consequence of this "roundup" debate.
This would be an interesting feature.
It would be a lot of work - but, then, I have no idea how you produce as much output as you do, Julien.
I half suspect that you are in fact more than one person. ;-)
If anyone wanted to resurrect the idea of a weekly round-up, I'd be willing to give it a go.
But better if you sign up as an editor on bloggingportal.eu!
Actually it is not much extra work, since I anyway read a lot of blogs, so the only additional task I would have is to copy-past the link of a post I liked and write one or two sentences. When I have enough for a nice post after some days, I would publish it.
The question for me is rather: Will it be interesting? Or better: Can I make it interesting?
Regarding you other points (and also Kosmopolit's): I have an (editor's?) account on bloggingportal.eu, but I wasn't able to use it, so I didn't follow-up.
And to be very honest: The present version is far behind the simplistic beauty and functionality it had some month ago.
The editorial choice for the first page is unclear to me, and the listing of new posts doesn't work in a well-arranged manner. The comments part is pretty much useless.
Personally, I have stopped using the bloggingportal as a tool for several weeks and just follow it to find new blogs I can add to my private feed list.
Julien,
If you add commentary to the links, it will be interesting. Tell us why you found them valuable.
If it is just a list of links, then it will not be very interesting at all.
P.S. Thanks for the bloggingportal feedback! Why did't your account work?
Regarding the account: I don't know.
Regarding the link list: Yes, that is exactly the thing I don't want to do while actually doing it.
I want it to be short but the way this "enhanced list" is presented has to be interesting. I'll figure it out.
But it is not supposed to be a discussion about content, because for this I would use comments or specific posts.
The list will usually encompass articles I read but didn't comment, to show the authors that what they do is still noticed.
A desired result of this simple thing would be that some of my readers (re-)read some of the good texts written by others. That is all I want despite letting others know that their work is appreciated.
You are right, lots of things are not working properly on bloggingportal which is basically a result of not having enough people for the tech side of things.Same is true for the design. Some features were implemented just for testing purposes, others are not yet finished. I know this is a problem.
I am sorry that your account is not working. Should be no problem to fix it, just let me know what error message you got.
Another general thing: Bloggingportal is not designed for us blogger who read hundreds of blogs every day anyway, the portal is not supposed to be a replacement for a personal feedreader!
It is designed for people that do NOT read blogs on a regular basis or do not have the time to go through huge lists of blogs. Therefore the main idea is to get people interested in blogging that otherwise would not know about it.And from the feedback we got this has worked rather well.
The editors choice is therefore the tool to highlight the best posts. Every editor is more than welcome to flag up interesting posts that somehow represent the discussions in the blogosphere. At the moment not many people do it on a regular basis (5-10 minutes a day would be enough!) hence the shortcomings in the editors choice. We also still need people that would be willing to look after posts in other languages that English.
Hi Kosmopolit!
There was no particular error message, I just couldn't do anything extra after having logged in. Maybe I didn't get it. :-)
For the rest:
Until a number of the features have been added, I really liked to use bloggingportal, even in addition to my daily RSS-feed lecture.
It gave a different view on a number of blogs and posts I might have ignored that day in my feeds but that looked more interesting on bloggingportal.eu.
Different to those who are not-so-frequent blog readers for whom the front page is made, I tended to use the "posts" section, which at that time showed all posts of the day on one page while now this doesn't seem to work anymore.
Also the presentation of the front page was better at that time, it looked simpler. 3-4 posts per day divided by a line, if I remember correctly.
The editors' choice is nothing I want to miss, to the contrary: What I would like to see is who selected the article, and maybe based on some criteria (e.g. ignored news, new facts, great style, highly controversial etc.), why.
But we can speak about all this when we meet these days; I don't wan't to be criticising all the time... :-D
Honestly: I am ready to contribute more actively on this editorial level or within the framework of any other project that needs co-ordinative efforts.
We'll have time to discuss this soon!
I agree with most of your points, we also discussed some of the stuff on our mailing list. I think there will some changes soon...But let's discuss it next week. I have a couple of ideas what could be done... ;-)
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