Kathlyn Clore

They may appear just another group of anonymous geeks banging away behind laptops in your local café. But online — and in Brussels — the bloggers who write about the European Union are starting to be noticed.

“There is some kind of European blogosphere evolving, at least for some issues,” prominent EU blogger Julien Frisch wrote in one of his first posts of 2010.

“And that if (influential) national blogs take up European questions, they can become more important than one might initially expect.”

The remark came at the end of a post describing information flow within the community of bloggers concerned with the daily politics of the European Union.

One of the best places to delve into this community is Bloggingportal.eu, which promotes the most interesting posts of the day from among more than 500 EU blogs. Frisch’s site is among them.

The team of 25 volunteer editors at Bloggingportal.eu reads hundreds of posts every day. They link to the most interesting of the bunch on their front page.

“We want to reach people that do not necessarily read blogs and we want to show that there is a quality debate going on when it comes to the EU and European debates,” said Andreas Müllerleile, one of the site’s founders. He also blogs on EU issues at Kosmopolitio.

“The long-term goal is to offer a selection of the best blog posts in as many EU languages as possible.”

Bloggingportal.eu turned a year old in January, 2010. The number of blogs it aggregates and monitors has doubled since its launch.

“It somehow shows that we are growing although some blogs stopped posting regularly and it is difficult to filter them out,” Müllerleile said. “However, compared with national political blogopsheres the number is still tiny and I think we still have not reached a critical number of people who write regularly on EU/European affairs.”

Bloggingportal.eu launched on 25 January, 2009, the result of follow-up efforts to a pair of 2007 blog posts about the development of an EU blogosphere. In these, EU blogger Jon Worth attempted to categorise and characterise prominent EU blogs.

“The sheer number of links below means I never quite know where to start for good EU analysis on blogs – maybe time for some better aggregation somewhere?,” he wrote.

So began Bloggingportal.eu. It started as a collaboration between Worth, Müllerleile, and Norwegian media professional Bente Kalsnes. Stefan Happer donated programming expertise and the site initially aggregated about 275 blogs.

“We do not have any funding so we have been working on it in our free time which has been a challenge. We are still beta and we are trying to implement new features. And we are always looking for new people who want to get involved,” Müllerleile said.

The community of people who are interested in closely following the political machinery of the EU may be small, with many a student among the bunch.

But most EU bloggers are focused on moving beyond surface-level EU stories that appear in traditional national newspapers. Many of these stories contain inaccurate information, Müllerleile said. The EU blogosophere is a realm in which to suss and discuss errors made in mainstream press.

To those Europeans surfing happily outside the existing EU blogosphere, though, examining and debating the inner workings of the European Union is a fantastically dry proposition.

Curation – employing editors handpick the most noteworthy posts – is an attempt to make the EU blogosphere more accessible, personal and relevant.

“So many Europeans feel disconnected from European issues and bogged down by the complexity of the institution itself. Having an editor create a path through the information can be a definite bonus for those not already familiar with the topic,” said Ruth Spencer, an editor at Th!nk About It, a European blogging platform supported by the EJC.

This idea is captured in the logo of Bloggingportal; here the stars of the European Union flag dance within what could appear to be a drop of water.

The drop represents the “pure essence” squeezed out of the EU blogosphere, Müllerleile said.

Will it catch on?

This may depend on the ability of writers, translators (machine or human) and readers to break through language barriers.

At the moment, national communities in Europe do not interact much with one another online, a report by French research agency Linkfluence concluded in autumn, 2009. Most interactions and conversations happen within the respective national communities, the report said.

Conversations about how to best overcome this challenge are happening around the EU blogosphere. Models like Café Babel, which pays translators, and Global Voices, which uses volunteer translators, are often cited.

“Bloggingportal isn’t a content creator but an aggregator,” said Spencer, the Th!nk About It editor. “The best they can do is take as much as possible from all the EU languages.”

Müllerleile said Bloggingportal.eu initially tried translating posts using automatic machine translation, but were unsatisfied with the results.

“We are thinking of other solutions but nothing has emerged just yet,” he said.

It’s indeed a good challenge for Bloggingportal’s future years.

They’re online!

First: I loathe seeing baby faces as Facebook profile photos and feel a wave of nausea when I see college-educated women posting on Twitter about potty training. The term “mommy blogger” gives me a headache.

That said, I do think the Internet is a wonderful tool for women in their childbearing years.

The Internet can help mothers be more informed. It helps connect women who are balancing family and career. It helps women make informed choices as heads of purchasing in their households. And it does this in a way that wasn’t possible years before, when having one’s first child - while continuing to be a woman concerned with her career and education - was a very isolating experience.

Yesterday I read two articles concerning feminism and female advancement in the workplace. The first was written by a former Wall Street Journal editor turned business mag editor.

Two quotes I found relevant:

“In my time as an editor, many, many men have come through my door asking for a raise or demanding a promotion. Guess how many women have ever asked me for a promotion?

I’ll tell you. Exactly … zero.

Sure, it’s a risk to ask for a raise. But women need to take risks — and to realize that at some point they will fail.”

Agreed. And we need women bloggers and commenters and Tweeters and friends on Facebook to remind us about this; we need to converse with each other to learn how to take risks in a women-friendly way (which is to say, a way in which women feel comfortable).

and

“Women define success differently; for some it may be a career, for others the ability to stay home with children. They also define themselves differently. I’m in the unfortunate position of witnessing many friends and colleagues laid off over the past year. But the women are less apt to fall apart — and this goes even for the primary breadwinners — because they are less likely to define themselves by their job in the first place.”

I agree.

The latter article on this I read yesterday, at Gawker, ripped this former editor a new one for her short-sightendness. While I thought the tone of the Gawker post was pretty haughty, I have to agree: The former editor seems out of touch and not ‘Net savvy whatsoever.

Then today I saw this post, at Venture Beat, a tipsheet for strategic communication efforts involving women who were born between 1977 and 1996.

It says:

“Millennial Moms are supplanting college students as the most connected and technology-dependent population, concludes a white paper by social marketing agency Mr Youth.”

I am not ready to wrap this all up (microfunding, advertising, entrepreneurship and educational opportunities still to be considered), as I think this is an emerging issue… But I do think the Internet enables women in an important, unique way that is so far only being considered by marketing types.

Two stories surfaced in the national American press this weekend that appeared to call into question the concept of free speech.

The first and more lively issue, speech on social networking platforms, reveals itself to involve a question of ethics and protocol rather than free speech. But the second issue, limits on corporations’ ability to campaign for specific politicians around election times, does seem to involve issues of free speech.

First, the issue of free speech on social media platforms. In an article I read in Sunday’s New York Times, the right of members of the U.S. court system to speak about their work on social networking platforms was questioned.

Citing an incident in Florida in which a lawyer blogged about a judge who he and his colleagues believed to be improperly delaying cases, The New York Times article acknowledges that when individuals become a member of the court system, they willingly give up the right to brashly criticize the court in public.

Still, it’s seems to me that the Florida lawyer who posted nasty comments about a judge for whom he didn’t think blogging about the issue was really out of line.

To broaden the issue, the article continues:

Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at New York University Law School, sees many more missteps in the future, as young people who grew up with Facebook and other social media enter a profession governed by centuries of legal tradition.

“Twenty-somethings have a much-reduced sense of personal privacy,” Professor Gillers said. Younger lawyers are, predictably, more comfortable with the media than their older colleagues, according to a recent survey for LexisNexis, the legal database company: 86 percent of lawyers ages 25 to 35 are members of social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace, as opposed to 66 percent of those over 46. For those just out of law school, “this stuff is like air to them,” said Michael Mintz, who manages an online community for lawyers, Martindale-Hubbell Connected. ”

Indeed - as my generation continues to develop professionally, what will the speech standards be on social media site?

To be sure, clamping down on social networking isn’t just an issue in the United States. Swiss bureaucrats have been asked to limit their social networking activities.

I do think that certain professions should require more decorum in social networking sites than others. It’s not like anyone forces you to be a lawyer or civil servant (OK, maybe your mother.)

Conclusion: Not a free speech issue.

Second: Limits on the ability of corporations and unions to campaign during election season.

For background, it’s best to just read this Wall Street Journal story.

The Supreme Court must decide if current limits on corporations - which are, it seems, under constitutional law treated like a person - and unions violate their free speech.

I very much like new justice Sandra Sotomayor’s take on this: Questioning if corporations should indeed be treated like a person. I am surprised that they are, actually, and don’t think they should be.

But I also think the quote in the article from justice Anthony Kennedy gets at the heart of the matter: “…that limiting corporate spending on campaign ads deprived voters of the expertise business brings to many subjects. ‘Corporations have lots of knowledge about environment, transportation issues, and you are silencing them during the election,’ he told Ms. Kagan [who was arguing in front of the court].”

Conclusion: As much as I think this is ridiculous in practice, as a free speech advocate I think that until corporations and unions are no longer granted the status of individuals, they should be able to campaign as vigorously as they want for candidates in their constituencies.

Wired has a great infographic and article explaining how AP’s content “protection” system works - or rather, doesn’t.

Helpful in general, but a few grafs in the middle have confused me, especially this bit:

“Indeed, it is designed to detect unauthorized use under conditions a content thief would be unlikely to use: Simply cutting and pasting AP content will remove all underlying code (as an overly ambitious aggregator might). So will re-typing it (as a commenting blogger might).”

But then, one graf later:

“Nothing in copyright law requires a blogger or commenter to include the meta-tags if they use an excerpt in a blog post. (Got it!) In fact for a blogger to comply, they’ll have to do more than just cut and paste – they will have to view the source code on a newspaper’s site, search through the HTML and javascript to find the text of the story and its micro-formats. Once the thief has gone to this trouble the purloined story will call home to report where it is being re-printed, via a Web Bug url embedded in the story. Only then would The News Registry even be aware of this use.”

Question: Does cut and pasting alert The News Registry, or not?

Yesterday I edited the above video together with Bernd, the video producer at the EJC. It’s a follow-up to this video:

Today my colleagues received some positive news about funding a second round of this Th!nk About It project, which features bloggers from each of the 27 Member States writing about one topic. The next topic will be climate change and lead up to the Copenhagen summit in December.

I think this is one of the most worthwhile projects my organization is doing, because it involves a hands-on new media platform on which people from so many countries are contributing and discussing ideas. Plus, the leaders of the EJC have been wise enough to spend some funds on off-line meetups, which really adds a whole new dimension to the community aspect of this blogging platform.

One thing: Bernd and I really struggled with how to end the latest video, the Portrait of a Blogger video. Any suggestions on how we could have done this better?