Thinking allowed
Lessons from America 4: Why America loves a failure
America is of course famously, notoriously even, the country which loves a winner. So why is everyone so keen on failure?
Lessons from America 3: Life beyond Facebook
Mid-life, it turns out that some of our obsessions are shared. One of these is worrying continually about What It All Means. Facebook, I mean.
The loop of infinite perfection
Ok I will come clean on this. I’m a moderate Mac fan, and have been for a very long time now. I sometimes can’t help lusting after the stuff the boys from Cupertino come up with but, for some reason, sometimes it all leaves me a little cold. In good old days of the Mac [...]
Lessons from America 2: The Panic is Over
“The Panic is Over”; these were the words of David Plotz, gravel-voiced editor of Slate.com and personal (anti?)-hero of mine. It has to be said that, as he leaned back in his chair and sized up the three be-suited euro-dudes who had unaccountably pitched up in his premises (actually the meeting was in Slate’s kitchen), Plotz looked anything but panicked.
Can (EU) foreign policy be dignified?
A question that was again puzzling my mind some weeks ago, when the democratic domino effect started sweeping over the regimes in the southern Mediterranean… Stories, synopses, meetings and a break in the midst of snowy winter scenery interrupted these thoughts – to be resumed now. And the world is not the same anymore – nor is EU foreign policy, I should think.
About the importance of being “outside”
Yes, I’m an insider, explaining the European Parliament from the inside. And yes, I do believe in the power people outside the institution can have. They may need us but, for sure, we need them as well.
New Year, new resolutions
Happy New Year everyone! I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions, to be honest, at least in my private life. But it could be a good idea to take some resolutions at work, and maybe even better to make them public. Let’s see if you, our readers, will remind them to me in a few months…
Why Wikileaks didn’t surprise me much
This tide of cables revealed by newspapers in the last two weeks, didn’t really impress me. The reason is not that, as many people said, there was nothing new, nothing shocking or nothing interesting. The reason is that it happened at the same time I was reading a book titled “Profondo nero” (Deep Black) about one of the darkest page of my country’s history.
The monkeys and the coffee machine
Let me tell you a story about monkey logic, and you may discover that you work in a case full of monkeys… and that you are a simian yourself.
Let’s feed them some tweets!
A provocative post from Marko giving the hard-bitten “PR professional”‘s view of what social media can mean to an Institution such as ours. So is that what we are? Discuss…
Is it about money, privacy settings or democracy?
I also belong to the lucky ones, as my colleague Evita said, who went to Barcelona for the Personal Democracy Forum one week ago. Steve already wrote about this event, the sense it makes for us to be present there, the creative atmosphere there was etc. I don’t want to repeat what has already been said, but just to share the schizophrenic dimension in which we work on Facebook.
Politics as a game
How is it to work in the European Parliament? I can experience it every day as a civil servant, but I’m pretty sure I will never do it as an MEP… Nevertheless, it’s now possible online! I found an online game organized by the Schuman foundation which proposes not only to be spectator of what happens in the hemicycle but to be a real actor defending his/her own opinions.
Some lessons learned with our (founding) father Jean Monnet
I read Jean Monnet’s memoirs during the summer… That could seem to be boring but his reflexions are still very accurate regarding the sens of the European integration and how we should process to get out of the crisis Europe is facing since years. Here are a few quotes which can be the starting point of more extensive reflexions.
Online editorial models #05 – The Huffington Post case
The Huffington Post, created in May 2005, is the new current star amongst online media. Forget about Slate, Salon and don’t event think about old media venturing into the digital era. HuffPo beats them all.
When Luther came to Brussels…
Citizens have a right to know. This is pure basics of a democratic system. Without knowing what is being and has been decided, and why, you cannot participate, nor can you try to hold decision-makers accountable.
The “official viral”
Like discovering that it’s FIFA employees who blow the vuvuzelas.
Some spice for the weekend
A certain team member, Tayebot, he of the highbrow articles on various editorial models, could not be accused of not having his finger on the throbbing pulse of the internet. Yesterday, he shared with us the current viral internet sensation – the latest Old Spice commercial featuring new über-hunk Isaiah Mustafa, which has gathered close [...]
Online editorial models #04: Meta-enabling journalism aka lol-journalism
Speaking lightly of serious things and seriously of light ones is not only a motto every educated French men is bound to follow – at least if he was raised by the same grand father I had – it’s also an editorial online model which prospers on Internet. To the extent that it could be [...]
Online editorial models #03 – Network journalism
There was a time networked journalism was called « citizen journalist. » Then a smart guy asked if you would trust a citizen dentist or a citizen brain surgeon and the term was dead, until it was rebranded as… network journalism.
The steamy EuTube video: right or wrong?
Observers of the Commission’s occasionally excellent offerings on EUTube cannot have failed to notice that among the top twenty most viewed videos on EU Tube, several unashamedly use sex as their selling point. Is this the right way to go?
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