For its five-years-old birthday gift, in May 2010, the Huffington Post saw its consultation overtake old-well-established digital emanations of print media. Its monthly traffic reached 12.7 million uniques (that’s 12.7 million single individuals who visited the website) and  more than 50 million visits.

New editorial heroes?

Is it big? The same month, the Wall Street Journal got *only* 8.2 million uniques and the Washington Post 7.9 million. The online news leader remains the New York Times, with 18.9 million uniques. The burning question spreading across all editorial lips is, of course: for how long? If you look at the trends below, coming from two different statistical websites, they show how the gap is closing between HuffPo and NYT:

Huffington Post traffic in red (monthly uniques) Image: Comscore, Huffington Post

(c) Comscore

For all editorial actors playing in the digital world, in a perfect timing with the recent controversy about the quality of pure digital players (well, notably in France vis-à-vis Mediapart, the rise of HuffPo is a good news. Believe it or not, you still have people (even colleagues) who miss the good old days when they was no Internet and who believe nothing really serious ever takes place there. You can’t change the world with Facebook, can you?

Huffington Post is a pure player whose editorial model combines more or less everything we’ve discussed in this series. It started as a collective blog, gathering posts by Ms Huffington and her crew of young wannabes:

“A comprehensive list of contributors to the The Huffington Post blog can be found in its “Bloggers Index”, but includes: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Heather Robinson, Michael Moore, Jimmy Demers, Madonna, Alec Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Saskia Sassen, Sheryl Sandberg, John Cusack, Larry David, Nora Ephron, Madeleine Albright, Robert Redford, Anneli Rufus, Neil Young, Rahm Emanuel, Albert Brooks, Mia Farrow, Russ Feingold, Al Franken, Ari Emanuel, Gary Hart, Edward Kennedy, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ryan Reynolds, Richard Patrick, Craig Newmark, Donna Karan, Kenneth Cole, Ryan J. Davis, Donatella Versace, Bill Maher, Cleo Paskal, B.D. Gallof, Lutfullah Kamran, M. K. Asante, Jr., Robert Wright, Larry Gelbart, Stephen Covey Wendy Diamond and Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev.”

(Source: Wikipedia)

I wouldn’t decline a synopsis or two by one of those.

The HuffPo is also a news aggregator, a political media, a participative space with comments and a state-of-the-art integration of social media. Amongst all the things you can share on the website, you also can rate articles via your Facebook account (and hence let your friends know what you think of what you’ve just read). This is smart, because you add your own personal value to the pleasure of sharing a resource.

Oh, and they have photo of boobs (you can rate them too on Facebook and let your friend… hum. Maybe don’t.) This is one of the major criticisms raised against the Huffington Post: they’re not serious. They’re not the New York Times. They write about anything. And their readers like it:

Only 250 like those hands (c) Huffington Post

It is true that Politics only amounts to a quarter of the website traffic and that HuffPost is about almost everything. And true too that they don’t earn money – yet.

« The Huffington Post booked about $15 million of revenue last year », says Henry Blodget on Business Insider.  « Sales boss Greg Coleman thinks the company can double revenue this year to $30 million and double it again next year, to $60 million.  And from there, as long as the site’s traffic keeps growing, it’s just a hop, skip, and jump to $100+ million. (…) Now, $100+ million is not the $1 billion or so of revenue of the New York Times. But most of the $1 billion or so of the New York Times revenue is going away (its paper-based ads and subscriptions).  What will be left, eventually, when the NYT’s paper-based distribution finally collapses, are the online revenues.  And those, for now, are in the neighborhood of $150 million. »

Even if Mr Blodget pushes his luck a bit (a smart newspaper won’t quit paper, they will reduce its volume, methinks), the trend is there. Huffington Post is on its way to become one of the major online media.

What can we learn from this for a European institution?

Maybe we could shake things up a bit and bring troubles in our self-well-established order. After all, the only ones we could disrupt are… ourselves.

As exposed in Henry Blodget’s story, the Huffington Post is a typical case of a disruptive technology. Those technologies, which provoke disruption in a well-established order, don’t need to be better than existing ones (at least at the beginning). « Their advantage – the reason people begin to adopt them – is that they’re also simpler, cheaper, and more convenient. » See, they’re not perfect but they work and they please. HuffPost might not be the online media every editorial brain dreams of (even if it’s already enough to fantasize about it IMHO) but people do visit and read because it fits their information needs and because it’s free.

As an European institution, we’ve checked the free part. We might well do our homework on the subversive aspect. Maybe we could shake things up a bit and bring troubles in our self-well-established order. After all, the only ones we could disrupt are… ourselves. Rather than aiming at the perfect, bulletproof communication strategy or rock solid website in 22 languages, we could try a different approach. This what we did on Facebook and it works.

In general, and Huffington Post is not the sole actor doing this, we should proceed more by trial and error. Implementing a functionality in a few languages or on a selection of pages, extending it or removing it according to its success amongst our visitors. Searching for the better, cheaper, more convenient rather than for the perfect way of proposing a feature every serious website has since 2003.

Guess what? People read what they want to

There is a truth which is not easy to hear: European institutions, when it comes to online editorial news and content, are on a niche market. We indulge ourselves in labeling our visitors as « EU experts », with all the possible declinations (journalists, lobbyists, universitarians), while crossing our fingers about catching some *real* citizens in our (inter-) net. Don’t get me wrong: there is nothing bad being a niche market. This is very good marketing segmentation, usually a very profitable one. Some advertisers would happily pay some good money to reach our audience. Our visitors are smart people, international, intellectual…

But we are not in this for the money. We sweat over our stories, editorial concept and content strategies because we want to reach the citizen, my Latvian grandmother, you and, especially, your friends and family who don’t read this blog and have never visited a European Institution website.

There is nothing wrong being a niche – except, maybe, if your aim is to reach everyone. To become mainstream because you believe your editorial production reflects debates, actions and decisions that have an impact on almost everyone at a certain time. If that is your objective, then the remaining inside the niche (who says the Bubble?) will not help you.

« More important from the point of view of the miscellaneous, the Huffington Post has an abundance of bloggers and commentators, representing a wide range of progressive interests, who provide an infrastructure of ideas, facts and opinions that adds context to any story »

What HuffPost teaches us: you can’t tell people what they want to read. They know it and they find it. True, HuffPo covers a lot of subjects, some being more mundane than others. But Ms Arianna Huffington’s pieces are far from being yellow journalism. The Huffington Post covers a wide-range of opinions, always in the American Liberal side. The important word being: « opinions. »

The rising media aggregates posts from other blogs, invites its readers to write and comment, and publishes content from its editorial team. What started as a political blog became the first pure player in five years, just by extending its editorial territory, keeping it free and multiplying its contributors. « More important from the point of view of the miscellaneous, the Huffington Post has an abundance of bloggers and commentators, representing a wide range of progressive interests, who provide an infrastructure of ideas, facts and opinions that adds context to any story » wrote Wired in 2007.

Maybe the real way to reach more than 10 million people a month is to extend our editorial territory. To keep producing and publishing the unique content European Institutions have while multiplying external contributions, opinions, topics. Cooking receipts from all Member States? North psychology versus South therapies? Afghanistan war dispatches? Anything of a certain quality that would appeal to the readers. To apply the recipe explained by Ms Huffington herself:

“Everything is Miscellaneous, is about what happens to institutions, such as news media, when their content gets turned into a big, miscellaneous pile, that anybody can pick out of, and rearrange the pieces. So they lose control over their editorial function, the newspapers do. They lose control over their front page, which obviously is a huge part of their value.

So you look at the Huffington Post, which has a couple of dozen news sources. It presents its own front page. It has its own staff of I don’t know how many bloggers who are writing there. And it is a rearrangement of this miscellaneous pile of news in a way that makes sense to the progressive readers of this site.”

And I haven’t mentioned European boobs slideshow – yet.

This post is part of a series about online editorial models.
Online editorial models #01 – Ours
Online editorial models #02 – Link journalism
Online editorial models #03 – Networked journalism
Online editorial models #04 – Media-enabling journalism aka lol-journalism
Online editorial models #05 – The Huffington Post case

*** Sources ***

Five Years Later, The Huffington Post (And Online Media) Are Coming Of Age
Here’s What People Actually Want To Read
This is the Future of the News: The Arianna Huffington Interview

I had my first peek at the sleek tower of Brussels’ Hôtel de Ville from the doorstep of the city’s central train station, teeming, it seemed to me, with unsavoury characters which could have easily escaped from one of the adult-only comics sold in the station’s news shop.

Barely 18, I was going through that inevitable rite of passage for any would-be traveller, a rail tour of Europe, with just enough money to afford a dorm bed every night, but with just enough courage and youthful carelessness to crash under the stars (and an occasional raindrop) when I felt like it. You could say I am no stranger to French beaches from Côte d’Azur to Normandy.

It was mid-1990s and I was passing through Brussels on my way from swanky Paris to free-wheeling Amsterdam. The city didn’t make much of an impression on me. Crowds were squeezing into the Grande Place, it smelt of French fries and stale piss and you had to be very careful about animal excrements littering the streets. Paris, I thought to myself, but without the Eiffel tower.

Fast forward seven years or so. It’s a freezing, rainy afternoon as our plane touches the tarmac at Charleroi airport. Coming from Ireland’s west coast (Limerick, to be precise), the weather isn’t really something that bothers a bunch of MA in European integration students on their way to Brussels. Conversations mainly revolve around differences between Irish stouts and Belgian lady beers, as the Irish contingent in our expedition pejoratively calls them.

For me, however, this Brussels trip was less about beers and more about a decision to go all out for a career in European institutions. Maybe it was the audacious architecture of Berlaymont, stories galore about the sweet life of eurocrats or just the appealing smell of power in the halls of European Parliament  – from then on Brussels had a special place in my career plans, if not exactly in my heart.

Sure enough, three years later I was back again, this time as a stagiaire at the European Commission’s DG Trade. Strangely, I didn’t find it hard to survive on a paltry salary EU institutions give to their trainees. A studio, small but warm, in the heart of Ixelles, just across the street from pumping music of Matonge bars, was really all I needed to plunge headlong into the raw vigour that brews in Brussels’ bowels, a long way from glitzy EU palaces.

A studio, small but warm, in the heart of Ixelles, just across the street from pumping music of Matonge bars, was really all I needed to plunge headlong into the raw vigour that brews in Brussels’ bowels, a long way from glitzy EU palaces.

You might expect that this experience only further cemented my resolve to go to Brussels and have a real European career. But this is not what happened. I came back to Slovenia not only with two successfully passed competitions under my belt, but also with a thirst to see the world up close, to experience it the way I experienced Brussels, living where other people live, eating what other people eat and having a blast where other people have a blast.

Almost immediately after my return, I and my girlfriend started planning a long sabbatical in South America. Not only did my exploratory six weeks in Colombia not quench my thirst for travelling, they only enflamed it. Then, just at the end of a long Indian summer last year, as I was browsing airline websites for cheap tickets to Bogota, Buenos Aires and La Paz, an email from the Parliament arrived …

As I look through the window of my office on Rue Montoyer, my view blocked by the EP’s imposing Willy Brandt building, I am thinking about what might have happened had I not seized the opportunity to go back to Brussels. There’s the city’s raw vigour again, its broad avenues, houses packed tightly together on rolling little hills, people from all over the world speaking in tongues you don’t understand – now that I think of it, it really reminds one of Tangiers, as my girlfriend noticed when she first arrived here.

As for the vistas of other continents, they will have to wait – although on a sunny day like this, I can still hear the alluring whisper of lands unvisited.

Feeling packed? Borrowed from http://flickr.com/photos/ahhyeah/454494396/

God, it is stressful. You have to put your “life” into boxes. Deal with 2 landlords at the same time, fight with internet and energy providers. Start living in trenches among boxes in the new place with a basic set of survival tools. Buy the missing furniture and take care of seemingly never-ending issues demanding hard physical labour. Ah, there’s still a full time job to do and ill babies to take care of…

But then, there’s a bright side. You can get rid of the junk you accumulated and probably never used (the “special” stuff only good for using in the attic/cellar/garage type of premises). Put that effort in making the new apartment liveable and likeable. Meet new people that you would have never met. Realise that it is yet another stop and everything is temporary. You can’t permanently own things and stay in one place, because YOU have that expiry date, remember? It’s all about moving light.

“Rent, be free” said a notice on a rental truck I once saw somewhere in Alsace. Owning things does not necessarily make your life better, sometimes it only complicates it. In some cases renting, sharing and helping is a much better investment than ownership. Enjoy being on the move ;)

I was at Riga Airport again this morning because, guess what?, my rebooked flight has been cancelled again. I want to underline how Air Baltic people are professional and nice. The situation, in terms of mess, has positively evolved: line was only 45 minutes long. There is an Air Baltic lady scanning the line, asking people why they came and discarding those for whom she can provide information or for whom the waiting is useless: if their flight is not cancelled yet, for example. There is a water fountain and glasses. Two little touches that change a lot the feeling: you are taking care of. Kiddos to Air Baltic then.

There were few people in the airport. It didn’t look like many, if any, passengers had slept here. Most anguished people I met and talked with were a Chinese couple and a Canadian group. They feel far far far away from home, for sure. I advised the Canadians to head for Spain and catch a plane to Mexico. At least, you’ll be on the right continent. We all laughed at the weirdness of the proposal. They said they’ll wait for Amsterdam airport to re-open.

On my personal front, I dropped the idea of flying this week. A very good friend of mine left Brussels this morning to pick me up by car. We’ll ride back together from Tuesday morning and I should be back with my family on Wednesday night. I feel lucky to have such a friend. Maybe my current analysis of the situation will turn wrong. At the time of writing, I don’t see why flights would start again tomorrow. Of course, I’ve read about the tests they did with empty airplanes and I wouldn’t like to be the civil servant nor the Head of State who would say: OK, let’s allow everyone to fly through this harmless cloud of ashes. Tell them about responsibilities.

Anyway, the best Air Baltic could offer was a seat on Tuesday night. One more day in a car won’t make any difference. The real difference is purely psychologic. I have a plan. I can now stop triple checking all BBC and news website every five minutes. By the way, if you think our EP website is complicated, try this one.  But their use of Twitter is really great. Exactly how an institution or an administration should do – check their time-line.

Good luck to all people under the cloud. I hope my next post will be written and published from Brussels ;-)

Original post:

I am writing this almost live from my favorite Café in Riga. I am stuck in the city for three more days than expected (at the time of writing) because of a certain icelandic ash cloud. Report from a lucky refugee.

NB: if you are trapped in an aiport, check your passengers rights here.

I was sent to Riga for a conference about social media. Initial plan was to stay two nights and come back on Friday morning to Brussels. On Thursday morning, before heading to the conference, I watched the volcano eruption on BBC World. My Twitter time line started to show signs of cancelled flights in the U.K. I didn’t think it could concern me. That shows how bad I am when it comes to stratospheric thinking.

By the end of the afternoon, the Belgium sky was closed. Then the Northern French airports. All flights from Riga to Brussels were cancelled too – but only Thursday’s ones. At 20h00, I did two smart things. I booked two more nights in my hotel and I went to the airport to evaluate my chances of flying the next morning. In the taxi ride, I checked Internet news: they announced the closure of Riga Airport until Friday 18h00. Once there, the airport staff didn’t know. They told me not to bother queuing at Air Baltic desk since my 6 o’clock flight was not officially cancelled yet. I showed them my cell phone where they could read it was.

Virtual world lost even when it was right.

At 20h30, the line looked like a four hours time of waiting. The atmosphere was tense. Some of the angry passengers could soon turn their back to civilization to jump on good old cannibalism, I thought. It’s amazing the variety of weapons one can craft from a suitcase and a cellphone, mind you.

Back to my hotel, I packed and had dinner. At 23h00, I decided to go back to the airport. My strategy was that I’d better queue for two hours now then getting up at 5h00 in the morning. Once at the airport – where the news of Friday’s closure has turned official IRL, the queue had barely reduced. Maybe by a quarter. I took my place in the line. Ahead of me, a Finnish couple back from Paris had just finished three hours of waiting in another line. They were distressed – in their own quiet Finnish way. All ferries and buses to Finland were full, they told me. They left the line 15 minutes after. “We’ll try another solution” the husband said. As a fine connoisseur of the Finnish “sissu” (heroic courage but also stubbornness), I suspect they’re walking their way to Tallinn.

My new neighbors were two American teachers. They were in transit to Israel when their flight was cancelled. They had no news of their students, who were transiting via Vienna. I checked on the net: Vienna airport had not closed yet, so their pupils might well be on their way to the Promised Land. They didn’t know if they should be more worried having their students in Israel or in Austria. They asked me in which country was the closest train station. They were considering heading South, with a blurred concept on which actual South that would be. The South to Austria? The South to Caucasian Sea? I found interesting that their second major concern (after the sake of their students) was the impact on the economy. And immediately after, they narrated where they were on 9/11. How flights were cancelled. How they were crying and surviving in business class lounges. I told them that on 9/11, I was in a pizzeria in Paris – everyone remembers where they were, don’t they?

See the cloud? I am under it. (c) BBC

After one hour of queuing, I barely had progressed. After 30 minutes more, maybe two groups of people had made their way to the desk, far, far, far away, in another galaxy from where I was standing. There were families, foreigners, crying babies. The tension was less palpable. It was more the sense of extreme tiredness, anguish about the close future.

I couldn’t help my brain analyzing the situation as the professional coordinator I am. You see, dealing with mess is mostly what I am paid for. I am good at it, possibly because I am psycho-rigid. All around me was a raw, pure, huge mess. It was like a fountain of crack for a wanna be pop-star. And my coordinative brains suggested this for all people working in airport when a crisis like this happens.

1. Stand-up and talk. People were distressed, in an alien land, and they were given very little information. You need someone to speak out loud and tell them. What’s going on. How long it’s gonna take and why. Because all airports are closing. Because we need to rebook you and you are hell of a lot of people. Because we are booking hotels rooms for you. People crave for information.
2. Organize a quick and dirty system of tickets with numbers. So that people don’t stand. So that family can be together, babies can be taken care of. People would be less tired and less upset. Lonely traveler wouldn’t turn paranoiac, holding their luggages and anxious to go to the bathroom and not daring to do so, in fear of losing their place in the line. Take post-it, write a number on them, give the number to people. Have the standing speaker to explain the rules. Every ten minutes if needed. Bring some authority and order. Your desk staff and the travelers would feel relieved.
3. Bring water and food. Don’t tell me there is not an emergency budget. Give those four hours stand buyers some comfort.
4. Open the free Wi-Fi. People wanted to check on news. They wanted to send e-mails, possibly to Skype with their family. To try rebooking online. It doesn’t make sense not to have free Wi-Fi in public space but it’s more than an absurd nightmare in times like this.
5. While we are on the online subject: open an online hotline. It was impossible to do anything on Air Baltic website yesterday, neither to send e-mails to anyone (I did write to the online booking as instructed. I still wait for a reply). Come on, don’t tell me “major situation leading to cancellation of most of the flights” wasn’t in your website concept. There should be a system for this. That would allow people to rebook themselves – reducing your lines.
6. Watch E.R. TV Show. There was once one instance when the Emergency room was full of injured and sick people. The waiting took ages, because of the paper work needed by American Health insurance. The heroes, leaded by Carter, decided to do their real work: to act as doctor. And they started to give consultations in the waiting room, one patient after the other, quickly and more effectively – but with no red tape. In an event like the ash cloud, everyone should act the same. Forget about the paper work, the frustrating waiting for delivering vouchers. Call the hotels you have deals with, set-up a procedure on the fly – like people with numbered post-it won’t pay, send us the post-its later.

I decided to go back to the hotel and get some sleep.

At 5h30, I was back there. If I was on Foursquare, I’d have been elected Mayor of Riga Airport, believe me. The waiting took me 40 minutes. Air Baltic people were nice and professional. I was lucky: I had my hotel booked earlier (all the hotels were full they told me), I could wait until Sunday.

I know very well and like very much Riga. I’d prefer to be with my family, of course, but there are far worse place to be stuck in than Latvia’s capital. I have my bars, my restaurants, I know the city and I have some friends around. I will certainly spend most of my time writing, taking advantage of this unexpected free time alone from a very demanding baby to put on paper some ideas. Some of our colleagues are in Khartoum, Sudan, out of cash because there is no plastic money there… I will have a thought for all travelers who are in worse situations.

And I cross my fingers for my Sunday flight.

Loving

1. Babies are born with an in-depth knowledge of Murphy’s laws. They always get ill on the first day you enter your new job or at least during plenary sessions. There’s never a clash of family and career.

2. Your employer is 100% sure babies are never ill for more than 2 days in a row. For some secret reason, babies are not so sure about that.

3. If there’s no way you can stay home with your ill baby because of work, there’s always professional medical help available. Be sure to inform them around 1 week before your baby gets ill, otherwise they won’t be able to assist you.

4. If you think that parents’ uninterrupted night sleep chances constantly ameliorate, you should refresh your math skills and remember what sinusoid is.

Caring

5. There’s no such thing as green babies: they waste food, soil clothes and outgrow them. And yes, they need some kind of diapers.

6. Babies and toddlers tend to have their own schedule which might be incompatible with your own.

7. If your parents living in your home country visit you, your baby will surely bring some gastroenteritis from the crèche and will share it with the grandparents just to be sure they have the ultimate experience and come to visit more often.

8. Bumps on toddlers’ heads tend to multiply: if they have one, they will surely get another one for the sake of symmetry

9. An angel might turn into a monster if you miss the bedtime by mere 15 minutes

10. American word “pacifier” is much more exact that British “dummy”, just because it brings peace on earth.

This inexhaustive list should not discourage you to have babies. It is an incredible learning and loving experience that you should not waste. Enjoy it ;) because kids do not belong to us, they are just given to us for a temporary care and protection.

Crazy webcommunciation unit

Then we have the blog here, where we really try to show a much human side of us, we want to give in the fact that we are real people as well. We speak 22 different languages within the Unit, we come from all around Europe, we all have our culture we are so proud of and this comes with totally different (and sometimes even strange for others) habits. This is quite visible from the inside, so my intention with this blog is to grab this and through it on the surface, for others to get a taste as well.

Here is a small compilation of ten things you most probably don’t know about our Unit:

Raffaella, our Italian editor, would never leave her office without her espresso cup.
• Evita and I:  you can feel the smell of galletes from the other end of the corridor. But make sure that whenever you feel like having a snack, Evita has dozens in there.
• Thibault likes music a lot. This I can see every day after 6 pm when he plays his music loud and starts singing. Does he hear the same thing as we do?
• Anete is the plant doctor for this corridor. Ever since we had discovered the power to cure half dead plants her bright perfectly sunny office has, it has been changing into a botanical garden.
• Speaking of light, opposite from this is Hanneke’s office; she likes to keep her office dark, lights off.
• Our head of unit has a special time frame, I was told. For a while, he used to keep an out of order clock on his wall and regularly check it out when late comers were popping by at work in the mornings.
• Josh likes tuna; my guess is that whenever he has his door closed, he is eating tuna and cottage cheese in the office.
• Please try to stay for more than 5 minutes without a jacket in Hanna’s office (Finnish editor) and let me know what you think afterwards.
• Whenever he needs a break, Pavel likes juggling, quite a good show, I admit!

I have no idea how you find all these, but for me, one cannot possibly demand for an extra proof – we are all just humans, I say.

But my latest experience made me look at the topic of it from completely new angle and perspective. How far is one able to go and what kind of information willing to provide to be able to enter another country?

 I am Czech. I am coming I still believe from a democratic country which is EU member state for almost 6 years. I have lived and worked in Brussels for almost 7. One day my family comes with this great idea. “Let’s go to visit some relatives in Canada.” Cool! Buy a ticket, pack few things, take som leave and … And apply for visa! Yes my friend, I come also from a country that has obligatory visa requirements for Canada.

According to the official Canadian pages there is a list of things you have to provide along with the form in order to have at least an eligible application. And still there is no guarantee you will be successful and get the visa, of course. Aside from the detail you have to pay quite a fee to be sure they will deal with your case you have to fill a form. Name, address, date of birth, purpose of visit. Ok, ok, ok, I have no problem with that. Your partner, his name and date of birth, your children, their names and dates of birth…Are they travelling with you? No. Never mind, just give us the details. Wait! Is this really necessary? In the additional side of the form it’s even funnier. You have to specify name, date of birth and address of all your relatives and parents, alive or even dead! You should mention even your dead children if you have any!

And you still haven’t seen the list of additional supporting documents yet. Invitation letter, itinerary, confirmation of employment, certificate of salary, bank or credit card statements, proof of property possession. Name it, it’s there. I am really surprised they don’t ask what size of bra I wear.

I am quite sure my data are safe in Canadian hands. At least until someone in a few years forgets to discard them properly and suddenly they appear on junkyard somewhere in India.

How much information required is too much? I don’t know. The European Parliament is discussing SWIFT, data protection and personal data. I am not afraid that someone will be too interested in my persona. There is nothing to be interested about. I am quite sure my data are safe in Canadian hands. At least until someone in a few years forgets to discard them properly and suddenly they appear on junkyard somewhere in India. Anyway, by the time we arrive on Canadian ground they will have body scanners installed. At least they can link my dossier to a very nice naked picture ;)

You may argue I don’t have to go there. And you might be right. If I have a chance to choose whether to go or not, I would really hesitate. There are so many nice countries where you can go without any obstructions. But sometimes you don’t have so much chance to choose and then you have to bend your head and provide what they ask for. So now the have my fascicle and we see in two weeks…

Like the film-maker, I too grew up on a small, disconnected island, so discovering this newfangled thing called the internet and the possibilities it offered was perhaps one of the most mind-blowing discoveries ever during puberty (learning how to cook fish fingers and learning how to unclasp bras thanks to repeated viewings of Revenge of the Nerds were more monumental discoveries of course).

Anyway – I agree with the documentary that in the same way it is acceptable for academic papers to be replete with quotes and citations from other papers, journals or books I feel the same should apply for other forms of information, notably audiovisual work. Remixing is part of the culture I grew up with – from vulgar football singalongs poking fun at the other team (set to the tune of well-known pop songs), to the widespread availability of bootlegs and unauthorised remixes on Malta’s open air markets (or at least they were when I was younger). Invalidating this part of the culture I grew up with would seem very odd to me, to put it mildly.

Major labels weren’t too quick at ‘discovering’ the internet – their business model was generally quite simple: find an artist, ‘groom’ them, release their work on CD, reap profits, repeat. When digital music came about they should have been sharp enough to notice that this would be an ideal opportunity for them to minimise their costs and maximise their profits. Instead, they launched into a somewhat misguided attempt to suppress it. It obviously didn’t work and the technology to download or manipulate music or film is so widely available at this point that it is futile to try to change the course of things.

What of our music then? ‘Netlabels‘ are an interesting development. Online-only labels which are, for the most part, run out of love for the music by the label owners allowing the artists to get paid, or not, depending on their Creative Commons licence. Unsurprisingly, they spent their infancy as the Esperanto of the music world: a fantastic idea but one which isn’t really taken seriously. But things are starting to change – many music magazines are featuring netlabel music as well as music released directly by artists and ‘online-only’ music shops like Juno, Beatport and others are sprouting like mushrooms. The roll call of artists who ’made it’ without having a record deal or who eschewed traditional means of distribution and promotion is constantly increasing.

So what changed? Simply put – quality control. If the stuff being offered is as good as a regular label (and is free to boot) why shouldn’t it be taken seriously? Electronic music, for example, doesn’t require much in the way of investment to make: a PC or a Mac, some good software and lots of cables (except the ones you need when you need them, of course).

As the co-inventor of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee, said in an interview with the European Parliament, the future of the internet lies increasingly in sorting out the wheat from the chaff.

The internet already provides choice – lots of it, too – but the internet is finally coming of age. We need people, whose taste or judgement we trust and feel is close to ours, to take the time to trawl the internet to find the hidden diamonds. Some might bemoan the fact that this ‘undemocratises’ the web. This is debatable, but it might well be true… but, really, it’s either that or browse for hours on end trying to remember old links, mouth agape – like Lieutenant Columbo trying to remember what he had for lunch last Tuesday.

The music will not be any less creative but money will come less from physical items (CDs, etc) and increasingly from ‘services’ (concerts, live appearances, etc). As far as the quality of the music is concerned, I feel that the bar is even higher now… even if the music is given out for free. The technology to make music is cheaper than ever before but the competition is just as tough (perhaps even tougher).

The difference now is that, perhaps, only the best artists - the most inventive, the most persistent and the most tenacious – will survive… and I guess that’s the way it ought to be.

I remembered the technical discussions about mac users not being able to watch some debates, while struggling to see some of the commissioners hearings from my own mac. You do get much more passionate about a problem when you encounter it “face to face” than when you think of it in a meeting room, believe me!

I also had the strange experience of meeting “my baby” after it was already born and kicking. I am talking about the hearings website, a project in which I had long been working together with Florent. I had to leave it days before the birth and I only saw the final result when it was already online, and it looked great. Wow. 

Florent doing such a huge work alone and informing me about “our project” (another wow to him) brings me to something I am also looking at with my new eyes: my colleagues. I have always appreciated the team, I am not referring to that. But my first day in the office consisted on a planned 2 hours meeting that was finally prolonged for almost 60 more minutes. Why? Because the team being so enthusiastic. Nothing new, but the amount of questions and ideas caught my just-arrived attention. Passionate discussions during a work meeting, isn’t it unusual? It was interesting to follow them almost as an outsider!

I could go on and on, but let me just use the blog this time to thank the web team again; it is such a challenge and a privilege to work with people like you. If you, reading now this post, are not part of the team … I would like to know how you see us from the outside.