Archive
Year: 2008
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Europe to lead Web 3.0?
October 7, 2008
Image via Wikipedia This is indeed the aim of the European Commission which has just launched a public consultation on web 3.0 "the internet of things" (IoT). The consultation is part of the Commission's preparations for a communication on IoT which is due to be released in the 3rd quarter of 2009. According to the Commission the communication plans to "propose a policy approach addressing the whole range of political and technological issues related to...
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Sub-Prime Crisis: Storm Force Winds Hit Europe
October 6, 2008
Just a week ago I suggested that continental Europe seemed rather detached from the global credit crisis. Whoops! What terrible timing! In the last seven days Europe has been hit by the storm force winds of this crisis. Liquidity has dried up, governments have been forced to rescue one institution after another, Iceland’s banking system seems close to meltdown, the Irish, the Greeks, the Danes and the Germans have promised open-ended guarantees for bank deposits...
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Mandelson and Google’s grace and favour
October 3, 2008
Image via Wikipedia Some of the weightiest legislative dossiers of the current Commission may still be under discussion in Parliament and Council, but another Commissioner jumped ship today in the shape of UK Commissioner Peter Mandelson. According to reports, Mandelson was unable to hide his joy at returning to the UK Cabinet. You may recall that Mandelson's first stint as the UK's industry minister was cut short in 1998 when he resigned following the disclosure...
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It’s for you: NGOs fill the digital space in the Telecoms Package
October 2, 2008
Image via Wikipedia Leading up to last week’s vote in the European Parliament of the Telecoms Package, it was striking to see the myriad of digital advocacy tools that were used by a group of NGOs called ‘La Quadrature du Net/Squaring the Net’. To safeguard the openness of internet and to prevent the insertion of the so called graduated response (or 3 strikes and you're out) ‘La Quadrature du Net” put together an impressive online...
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Politicians lie: it’s a fact
October 1, 2008
The wind blows, it rains in Brussels and politicians lie. These are facts. While we remain powerless to do much about the first two, a US website has launched an attack on lying politicians. The St Petersburg Times of Florida and Congressional Quarterly of Washington, DC – two of America’s most trusted, independent newsrooms – created www.politifact.com, a fact-checking website that helps voters separate fact from fiction in the claims made during the 2008 presidential...
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Europe’s Contrasting Reactions to Sub-Prime Crisis
September 29, 2008
While the United States and Britain reel from one catastrophe to another in the storm of the sub-prime crisis, the eurozone has seemed remarkably detached, until recently anyway. For the Americans and the Brits the news is totally dominated by stories of collapsing banks, bail-outs, vast lines of credit insurance which turn out to be no insurance at all, and an American administration desperately seeking a safe path for the US economy over the quicksands...
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Let them eat cake!
September 25, 2008
[youtube=http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=dOGV9_ki7lc] Given that the roof fell in on the Strasbourg Parliament building over the summer, MEPs supporting the one seat campaign have staged an event in the European Parliament to protest about the fact that they have to trek down to Strasbourg where they all don hard hats (see video above). Laughing at how they look aside, we have a feeling that despite the continued protest the French will be quite prepared to let them...
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Google ads for politicians
September 24, 2008
Image via CrunchBase Expanding our reading beyond our traditional EN sources, we note that the use of Google Adwords for political campaigns has caught the attention of our Italian friends at left leaning daily la Repubblica. Surely our MEPs, Italian or otherwise, should be looking into this tactic with elections in mind to reach out to voters interested in the issues they deal with here in Brussels? With this in mind, perhaps that's why we...
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More EU “web streaming services”
September 22, 2008
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znJC_XnGvx0] In our excitement about Europarl TV, we missed the re-launch of the EPP-ED internet video station at www.epp-ed.tv. It is a slick new platform. As the EPP-ED points out in its press release, “EPP-ED TV first broadcast via the internet in June 2007”, making it the old man on the block as it just beat the Commission’s EUTube out of the blocks. The Socialists and ALDE group have not progressed from providing the infrequent...
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We put our hands up…
September 21, 2008
You may have noted that we've been a bit quiet lately. Blogging is, as they say, a fulltime occupation. As we already have at least one of them, it's been a challenge recently to keep you up to date as we hit a real wall of work. We promise to do better in the coming weeks as we build up to a European public affairs event in early December hosted by our friends at European...