1. We don’t have any

None. Reason is: our significant others stay in Brussels, most of the time. Another incapacitating factor is also our condition of civil servant. Grey suits, parliamentary reports as main subject of conversation, eurojargon volapuk don’t rate high on the sexiness scale.

2. Those who have one don’t tell

Yes, I don’t think it’s very team spirit like, but that’s the truth. Although we know a lot (too much?) about each other, we still maintain a red closed curtain on our private sports. During October’s session, three out of eight members of our Strasbourg’s crew were in town with their significant other (either because he/she works at the Parliament or in a professional field linked to Parliament’s activity). The five others may have behaved like wild cats on a hot tin roof or like reclusive nuns, we have no idea.

3. There’s a dog involved

One of our colleagues, who comes to Strasbourg every month always comes with his girlfriend. And their dog. The dog squats 40% of our chats – which says a lot about our art of conversation.

4. Two girls, one guy, one bedroom

Two of our female editors were supposed to share a bathroom connected to two rooms while staying in Strasbourg. One of them had arranged the venue for her other half but… the hotel only offered them one single room (with three beds). So that must mean the lucky one shared a room with two of our female editors. And he doesn’t even belong to our team. This proves both the existence of God and His peculiar sense of humor. Wait, there’s worse: they refuse to tell us anything about their nights! How selfish one can be…

5. Pajama parties are for dummies

Of the same female editors mentioned above, one never wears pajamas and the other forgot her pajamas in Brussels. Is it me or is it getting hot in here?

Wait! You forgot your pajamas again! (c) Lastnightsparty

6. We have rules

The staff regulation is the civil servant’s Bible. Here what it says on the subject we are dealing with here:

“Officials shall refrain from any form of psychological or sexual harassment.

An official who has been the victim of psychological or sexual harassment shall not suffer any prejudicial effects on the part of the institution. An official who has given evidence on psychological or sexual harassment shall not suffer any prejudicial effects on the part of the institution, provided the official has acted honestly.

Psychological harassment means any improper conduct that takes place over a period, is repetitive or systematic and involves physical behaviour, spoken or written language, gestures or other acts that are intentional and that may undermine the personality, dignity or physical or psychological integrity of any person.

Sexual harassment means conduct relating to sex which is unwanted by the person to whom it is directed and which has the purpose or effect of offending that person or creating an intimidating, hostile, offensive or disturbing environment. Sexual harassment shall be treated as discrimination based on gender.”

So, we refrain.

7. We don’t have condom dispensers

The H1N1 threat has brought to all Parliament’s facilities tissue dispensers impregnated with some viral repellent, nice foam dispensers and smart instructions regarding best hand washing modus operandi, but no condom dispenser. That makes us less equipped than the average French high school but we don’t know if it has something to do with the staff regulations or with the actual and real level of our collective sexiness.

“It’s a pity there is no more European pornstars anymore, like Rocco Siffredi” complained loudly a male editor

8. There’s a wallpaper debate

One regular member of the Strasbourg crew uses a photo of Ms Kate Moss, topless, as his desktop wallpaper. Every time there are female nordic editors present in Strasbourg, he gets sharp remarks about it, which makes him stick to this wallpaper although he used to change it every month. Latin female colleagues don’t frown at him, though he suspects this could change, should he favour a topless photograph of, say, Ms Monica Bellucci.

9. The golden years are behind us

“It’s a pity there is no more European pornstars anymore, like Rocco Siffredi” complained loudly a male editor in our open space. Everyone nodded vigorously, expecting more. But he never elaborated. Men have the focus ability of goldfish.

10. So all the fun is in Brussels

While we are sweating and typing and running between meetings, we *know* that the fun is, actually, in Brussels, where we suspect the core of our team is having deliquescent orgies, lap dances and exquisite flirting just to keep us on our toes. Or maybe they just work and go home as usual.

It’s possible that you landed on this page by “feeling lucky” in Google while doing some university researches absolutely not connected in anyway with sex, p0rn nor foam dispensers. If this is your first visit on our blog, you may want to read our About page as well as our Team’s.

If you are interested in the October Plenary session, why don’t you have a glance at our 10 things we learnt during last plenary story?

A while ago, in February to be precise, I wrote a post entitled “Sex, Porn and Britney Spears“, at the end of which I wondered “whether an article titled and tagged as this one is, especially when these terms appear in tempting conjunction with “European Parliament”, gets any bump in traffic?”. Well, since we’ve been in the mood for number crunching I went and checked.

Thanks for the traffic, Britney

And the answer is: since records began (as they say) “Sex, Porn and Britney Spears” is our “most read” page on this blog – homepage excepted – by a street. The page has been viewed over 3000 times, which is roughly six times the number of the next most popular page, the Team, and over seven times the score for the next real post. What’s more, it maintains a constant flow of readers, so, yes, some search terms are, well, timeless.

People are looking for sex and go away the moment they realise they’re not getting it

It amuses me to imagine the disappointment of hopeful teenage internauts* who find themselves confronted with my earnest musings on search engine optimisation. Actually, I don’t have to imagine; I can see the disappointment in the 94.95% “bounce rate” on this page, and the average 1.34 minutes people spend there (so, actually, some-one must be reading it!).

What do we conclude? Well, the obvious I suppose: people are looking for sex and go away the moment they realise they’re not getting it. (You didn’t need me to tell you that, perhaps?) Oh yes, and that if you want your comments section spammed by a world-full of internet sleazeballs, just publish a post entitled “Sex, Porn and Britney Spears”. Now I know why Tibo looked heavenwards when he saw what I’d done. But he found a good spam filter, so all’s well that ends well, right?

Anyway, what about our real top posts? Here are the top five “real posts” on our blog so far in 2009 (in reverse order, of course):

no. 5

“Moderation in all things“. My own best scorer (without cheating), with some thoughts about moderation v. censorship on Parliament’s website.

no. 4

“New technologies: keeping up without being killed in the attempt“. A “guest blogger” piece, this, by Jaume, a.k.a. The Director, about how to deal with unruly WebCom subordinates. A recent publication, so probably has the legs to move up the rankings.

no. 3

“The importance of being normal” by Manja. This one involves Manja meeting her friend and normal person, Ola-dele Kuku, and getting a bit of real-world perspective on what we call Europe.

no. 2

Are people looking for love as well as sex?

“P.S: I love you“. Eirini talks about meeting real people at the 2009 Open Day. (Actually, honesty dictates that I reveal that this one has a highish bounce rate too – are people looking for love as well as sex?)

no. 1

“Europe is nothing but a big bad wolf“. Eirini again, this time priming her readers for the European elections. Well done, Eirini! A few more people reading our blog and we might even have got turnout to go up…

And finally, quality…

Since we are believers in quality, not only quantity, a “special mention” here also for the post with the longest average time spent by readers reading it. This goes to Tibo, for a post (alternatively cri de coeur) called “Living in a world of meetings“. It’s good, so why not go and read it, but be sure to spend at least 4 minutes 42 seconds doing so, so you don’t depress his record-winning online stamina.

So there you have it. Totally scientific and statistically rigorous, of course. By the way, do you think I got enough dodgy search terms into this article to make the top five?

*****

PS The Irish said “Yes” to Lisbon today. Should I have blogged about that? Never mind, the EP reaction is on Parliament’s website (on a Saturday!!!), thanks to our friends in the press service. Besides, blogwise, there’s always our soon-to-be new friend Julien Frisch to do the heavy lifting (looking forward to meeting you, Julien). I keep checking for the inevitable post.

PPS and * English language readers may have enjoyed a great new word: “internaut”. Yes, the French have this great neologism for internet users. I has always amused me. Just thought I’d share that.

“When men say they cannot find a suitable women, I would say: you should have your eyes checked.”

With the elections for Parliament only one month away, this is the time to finally achieve a 50/50 representation in the hemicycle. In order to achieve this, it would help if more women would vote and that they would vote for a woman. But would that do the trick? To start, we would also need a good representation of women on the voting lists.  A glance at the lists of the seven Dutch parties that are currently represented in the European Parliament, however, does not lead to much optimism: only two parties have a woman as a frontrunner….

Support the 50/50 campaign

Dutch Commission Kroes is equally pessimistic. She would like to see two of the six top positions that will or have been opened this year on EU (President of the European Commission, EP-President, High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy and in case the Lisbon Treaty enters into force, President of the European Council) and NATO-level occupied by a woman but said this week: “You need to have about eternal life before half of the politicians is a woman”. Assuming the 67-years old Commissioner does not have eternal life, wouldn’t it not be nice she would actually be able to witness equal representation in her lifetime? Kroes said to find it strange that there are not even women in the picture for the position of EP President: “When men say they cannot find suitable women, I would say: you should have your eyes checked”. The link to the interview is here for those who read Dutch.

If you want to support this cause, sign the “Females in Front” petition that is about the four different leaders of the European Union that will be appointed during the next 12 months only (not about NATO). The humble aim of this campaign is that one of them should at least be a woman.

You can also sign the 50/50 petition that aims at getting women on those high EU-posts as well but is also about “putting  pressure right now on all national political parties and require them to ensure the equal representation and ranking of women and men on their electoral lists and to include gender equality as a priority in their programmes.”

“The reason why women have not yet achieved equality, despite the fact that they have been trying for decades, is the idea that they can do it by themselves, that they do not need men.”

Women’s Rights Committee Chair Anna Záborská recently gave us an explanation for this male-domination: “The reason why women have not yet achieved equality, despite the fact that they have been trying for decades, is the idea that they can do it by themselves, that they do not need men.”

In order to achieve the 50/50 representation we indeed need the help of men. They are certainly not unwilling or unintersted as a Eurobarometer poll showed in February that 83% of women and 76% of men agree that women can bring a different perspective to politics. So we can gently ask them to vote for a woman but will it be enough?
Perhaps men do need an incentive and we can learn something from the women’s rights movement in Kenya who announced on 1 May to boycot sex for a week in order to enforce better rights (today they will be able to take stock). The sad situation of women in Kenya cannot be compared to the situation of women in the European Union, but we may copy some of their good action practices and… improve them on the way…..

So, tell your bed partner as a little reminder that if on election night it seems there will be no equal representation of women in the European Parliament, there will be no sex during the whole summer (until the next elections would be better but that may have devastating consequences for Europe’s gloomy demographic crunch) .

And finally a plea to the 368 male MEPs that will be elected for the next term: follow in the footsteps of MEPs Raül Romeva i Rueda , Giovanni Rivera and Konrad Szymański : elect twenty lucky devils among yourselves to join the Women’s Rights and Gender Equality committee. They have plenty of work!

With thanks to Lena and Raffaella for their suggestions.

P.S. Still have not read enough about this topic. Go here, even if it were only to check out the great illustration

Another memorable snippet of internet insight which stuck in my mind a while back from an “Online PR” course I did (yes, training works at least to that extent), was that: “On the internet, there is a God, and he is called Google.” Disconcertingly, however, it would seem that we are dealing with a divinity pandering to the basest impulses of mortals. (Note: I discover that this Google/God notion seems actually to be taken quite seriously in some quarters)

No-one knows what Google’s “algorithm” is. It is a Mystery worthy of medieval theology, beyond human understanding. Ours as mere mortals indeed not to understand, but merely to please the divine whim.

To push the metaphor a bit further, how do we mortals (web-users) demonstrate our devotion? Search engine optimisation, of course. We turn to the internet gurus (you see? religious imagery abounds in this area) to seek enlightenment: how do I please Google so people will come to my site? And before I move on from the religious metaphor, of which the reader is doubtless tiring, I cannot but note one nice little point: the Mystery. As the gurus invariably point out, not without a geekily admiring frisson, no-one knows what Google’s “algorithm” is. It is a Mystery worthy of medieval theology, beyond human understanding. Ours as mere mortals indeed not to understand, but merely to please the divine whim.

Which is, as I say, disconcerting, given that this deity seems to have a predilection for sex, porn and Britney Spears.

“God vs Google’s trademark lawyers” Flickr by zimpenfish

Where do we fit in all this? Simply that my mind has turned to the question of how it is that people end up looking at a site, ours specifically. According to our figures for the new elections website, just over half of the visits to the site are via direct links, just over 30% come from referring sites, with the rest coming from search engines, a.k.a., for practical purposes, Google. This blog, with much lower traffic, sees about 60% direct visits, 37% referrals and just under 4% from search engines. It goes without saying that in both cases we need a dose of search engine optimisation.

Or does it? A new breed of gurus are telling us that it’s not about scattershot supplication on the big bad internet, but about networking, interlinking (which itself helps with Google, of course) and the “quality” traffic of participants in the Great Conversation. Others still – shall we call them Wise Men, will tell you that all that hocus-pocus is all very well, but what really matters is Content. If it’s good, they’ll find you, and when they find you – neglected point this – they may also read you.

Your regular web-editor Everyman, undersigned, can only see as through a glass, darkly. As ever, I suspect that all are right, from tricksters to sages.

Meanwhile, I am just curious to see whether an article titled and tagged as this one is, especially when these terms appear in tempting conjunction with “European Parliament”, gets any bump in traffic.