Kosmopolito » twitter

Number10.gov.uk and the President of the…

Kosmopolit — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:33:57 +0000

…EU, Europe or European Council? Here we go again. We know that many journalists do not understand why it is European Council President and why it is important to get EU terminology right. But to be honest, journalists do not seem to learn (and they love the easy words that make the story sound good…) and I pretty much gave up complaining about it (although I still think it is quite a disaster…)

But is it too much to ask that the government gets it right? After all it is often the member states that are keen to make sure that certain EU terms should not sound too similar to national terms…

So, today Number10.gov.uk – the official site of the Prime Minister’s Office in the UK had this top story:

The only positive thing about this story is that the Prime Minister got it right…

But coming back to the editors at Number10.gov.uk – Not only do they seem to borrow journalists from the mainstream media they also don’ t seem to care about feedback unlike the Foreign Office.

The UK Foreign Office (FCO) was quick to change its twitter status update after an intervention by the Commission Representation in London on twitter! (check the FCO twitter updates before and after this tweet)

But the website of Downing Street is still the same despite their presence on twitter. So, I wrote a DM to Downing Street – let’s see whether they change the website…and whether they react to DM on twitter!

Twenty questions – but also twenty answers?

Kosmopolit — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 09:39:23 +0000

Just a short blog ego trip: I got interviewed by Paul over at Mars Hill as part of his series “Twenty questions to a fellow blogger”. You can read it here.

Hmm, normal blogging should also resume shortly… I am kind of busy at the moment with some degree of blogging laziness. The other day I heard from a ‘fellow blogger’ that blog abstention apparently increases if one is involved in too many professional blogging projects. Moreover this correlates with some kind of compensatory behaviour on twitter. Guess the diagnosis is correct..

Some Kosmopolito housekeeping

Kosmopolit — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:10:03 +0000

OK, the polls for Best European Blog (Non UK) closed with a suboptimal result for this blog. However, without much campaigning and without any proper blogging during the voting process this is not a big surprise. Due to their innovative format of online democracy which allowed multiple voting, this competition clearly favours blogs with a fanbase and a large readership… and we are not particularly strong in any of these areas Obviously, there is a discussion on exactly those issues (+ the “quality question”) on various blogs out there, one good article can be found here.

Anyway it was fun, and I would like to welcome the new readers that found this blog through the competition. I hope you will enjoy reading our little blog. I also would like to thank everyone who voted for us and I also want to thank the blogs that endorsed Kosmopolito during the competition: here, here, here, here, here. Thanks a lot!

I suggest that next year the organisers should rethink the categories. “Best European Blog” should not be a category for different national blogs but for blogs with a European perspective since a few other EU blogs were competing in other categories. Moreover, the category also featured a very diverse bunch of blogs, from culture and food to politics and photos … Moreover, I still think the UK is part of Europe so the name of the category with the focus on “European but Non-UK” is quite baffling. Why does the UK have an own category but Germany, France and Italy not? Is it because of the US focus of the weblogawards?

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Another new toy I have discovered is twitter. So feel free to follow my musings here. I think the tool has potential for politics, journalism and public debate, although regarding EU issues twitter seems not to be mainstream yet…

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I am also looking for a good tool to track comments on different blog posts. What tools do you use to keep updated with discussions and comment threads? Feel free to share your strategies and suggestions in the comments!

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Some readers might be wondering what happened to the Kosmolinks. Problem is that diigo is not supporting self hosted blogs (?) and I am still looking for a tool that publishes weekly (and not daily!) linkrolls. Again, please share your suggestions in the comments.

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And here is a “happy new year” link treat for you: The quite hard to find EU calendar and searcheuropa, a search engine for the europa.eu page.