My accidental career part deux, or: the WebComm Way

"We are what we pretend to be – so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Thus the late great American author Kurt Vonnegut defines the moral of his seminal novel Mother Night. It's about an American presumed Nazi propagandist during World War II. Only the reader knows he is in fact [...]

Working with the system – A master class with Paul Boag

  I was lucky enough to be invited by our colleagues from the European Commission at a Master Class given by Paul Boag. Mr Boag is an expert in many things, including web design. The topic of the class was how to work with the system when you have a web-something job in a big organization. [...]

Featured Posts

The Christmas video

This video is worth weeks of expensive team-building courses sitting in front of flipcharts or building rafts to cross muddy ponds - not that our employer has ever offered us anything like that - and is huge fun into the bargain. It has become part of the collective self-image.

New website: so that was the easy bit…

It's blue, it's new and it's online - the redesigned official institutional website of the EU's directly elected democratic lawmaking institution! And, speaking personally, I now know why you don't do this kind of thing too often.

Asides

• What can happen to your personal data online? The EU is taking action so you can control your information, have access to your data, and be able to modify or delete it. Here comes a video on the subject. #
• Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates during his visit to EP explains his message to MEPs on aid in the developing world. Watch the video. #
• The European Parliament's new Parlamentarium visitors' centre - the largest of its kind in Europe - marks its first 100 days today. It has already welcomed over 64,000 visitors, and around 1,000 students haved played its "role play" game, which enables them to step into an MEP's  shoes for two hours. If you still havent done that, come and explore it now! #
• No foreigners, thank you? EuroparlTV investigates employment discrimination in Brussels, where up to 40% of young people under 25 of ethnic origin are unemployed. #
• What’s it all about? The Archivist is a service that uses the Twitter Search API to find and archive or save tweets. By entering certain keywords or hashtags, you can monitor and store all the relevant Tweets. The Archivist then uses this data to make nice graphs for you – top 10 tweets, top users, top words or URLs, tweet versus retweet ratio. By archiving tweets in this way, you can essentially analyse the success of a Twitter campaign or presence. Read more in the blog by EC Media team. #
• Martin Schulz (S&D, Germany) was elected the 14th President of the European Parliament. EuroparlTV  reportage comes here. #
• In Denmark there is an expression called “et stykke rugbrødsarbejde” – translated directly into English “a piece of rye breads work”. This might not make sense for many foreigners, but for Danes this means a solid and simple piece of work. Read more. #
• 2013 will mark the 20th anniversary of the establishment of Union citizenship under the Maastricht Treaty that entered into force on 1 November 1993. The European Commission therefore proposed to designate 2013 as the "European Year of Citizens". Read more. #
• The video you are about to see is a summary of the 2 and a half year Presidency of the European Parliament by Jerzy Buzek. That's a 6 minute summary for some 1,313,000 minutes of activity! This video comes back on some of the key moments, key ideas and memorable moments of the Presidency. President Buzek's mandate will end on 17 January 2012. Here is the transcript of his last speech, a veritable "oratio pro Europa". #
• Blink meets hackers from all over the world who have been invited by the European Parliament to take part in a 24-hour coding marathon. Watch the reportage. #