Jan 22nd, 2010
Closer look: Bloggingportal.eu
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.
