A peaceful revolution has changed the world as we knew it until the mid-1990s. The availability of almost any information throughout large parts of the world affected the way the economy and the global fight for power work. But it has also confronted Europe with new challenges, brought about new risks for privacy and excluded large parts of the population from the core of social processes.

Last week, the Lisbon  Council hosted one of my favourite events ever, The 2010 Innovation Summit. It was what an event on innovation should be: open to new ideas, collaborative and, well, simply different. Intellectually, the discussions were underpinned by a new e-brief we launched at the occasion, entitled Wikinomics and the Era of Openness: [...]

After one month of holidays, I just got back into the European affairs today. First thing in the morning, I checked EurActiv.com to read the latest articles and analysis about my favourite theme: ICT. And, oh, surprise, I saw that the web portal dedicated to the EU had been revamped (once again).
Duplicate content, an important SEO [...]

How Can You Improve Your Blogging?
When it comes to the web, being found by the search engines and read by visitors, the title of a blog post is very important. On the one hand, a title needs to pull in the visitors to make them want to read. This is a very important skill to [...]

At her speech to the Lisbon Council’s 2010 Innovation Summit last week, the EU’s highly charismatic and enthusiastic Chief Innovation Officer, Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn laid out her vision of transforming Europe into an “I-conomy”, connecting and speeding up innovation all along the whole policy chain from research to retail, building a functional single market for [...]

On Friday last week I had the pleasure of attending a Lisbon Council event on the subject of innovation. I can’t lie, it was a fascinating event with some excellent speakers and interventions.
However, I don’t want to dwell on the content. Instead, I’d like to recall a conversation I had in the coffee break.
One of [...]

eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is a tool designed for the digital communication and presentation of financial and business data. It has been developed to allow users throughout the world to easily access timely accurate and relevant financial information from both world-wide and local organisations. However, although internal use and basic forms of digital reporting [...]

A while back I and a number of others were blogging about how a very light, bottom-up usage of Web2-style tools and techniques (bloggingportal, delicious, tagging, google alerts, etc.) could help build links between national and EU online discussions and develop the slowly emerging European public space.
The importance of this was brought home to me [...]

The German Constitutional court declared the data retention law as unconstitutional, in a landmark decision given today 2.03.2010.
After data retention ruling: Civil liberties activists call for political end to retention of telecommunications data
+++ Data retention opposed by 70% of German population +++ European Citizens’ Initiative for repealing the EU directive on data retention announced +++ [...]

Sir,
Regarding ‘Google execs convicted in Italy for Down’s video‘:
It seems that all major commentaries around the world about this Google indictment miss the actual legal issue, i.e. the extension of data protection act. Google execs have been indicted - this is the charge - for having infringed sect. 167 of the Italian Data Protection Agency [...]

Sir,
Regarding ‘Google faces new EU antitrust probe‘:
I would contend that this is a subject on which the EU should not be trying to make a ruling.
As an Internet marketer and occasional search engine optimisation consultant (SEO), I can say from experience that all websites have an equal chance of high natural search rankings in Google [...]

ERRIN event invitation: “Hospitals of the future: care, sustainable development and regional advantage“
Date: 2 March 2010, 9.00 – 16.45
Venue: South Tyrol EU Office, Rue de Pascale 45-47, 1040 Brussels.
While we are all familiar with hospitals and demand high quality healthcare, the hospital itself is in many cases an institution that remains largely unreformed. Hospitals and [...]

The European Journalism Center (EJC) would like to invite enthusiastic journalists, bloggers, students and experts to join the third round of acclaimed blogging competition, TH!NK ABOUT IT.
TH!NK3: Developing World will bring together some 100 bloggers, journalists, issue experts and students from the 27 EU member states, as well as neighbourhood countries [...]

Article published in EDRi-gram 8.3
On January 28 and 29, the Council of Europe held a consultation meeting on the launch of work on a new international instrument that would create neighbouring rights for broadcasting organisations. The purpose of this initiative is to take up the work of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) which, following [...]

Article published in EDRi-gram 8.3
The transposition of the Data Retention Directive in Belgium has remained stagnant for a long time. Following a public consultation in May 2008 on a first draft law proposal and draft royal decree to transpose this Directive into Belgian law, a broad group of organisations voiced a strong position against the [...]

Regular readers of Blogactiv will know that there are a number of bloggers here writing about topics related to the enlargement of the EU (past and future).
Needless to say, this is one of the more emotive subjects in the EU debate since it can often include race, religion and nationality. Firery debate is always possible [...]

This article about social networks was published on 10th February 2010.
The European institutions launched a campaign yesterday (9 February) to raise awareness of the threats posed by social networking websites such as Facebook for minors under 18. Meanwhile, a new report highlights new risks associated with mobile social networking.
The majority of Europe’s youngsters who [...]

Who said the EU blogosphere was tiny?
Today, this post by Rado from EurActiv Slovakia has the honour of being the 5,000th post to be published on our homepage!
Post number one was made by Stanley Crossick on 11th October 2007. It has been quite a journey since then, both for Stanley and Blogactiv.
For obvious reasons, I [...]

That’s right - curation. Now officially Web2.0-buzzword-of-the-month (not quite sure which one).
And here was me thinking that curation was something knowledge workers have been doing ever since there was knowledge to work with.
So stand by for a totally gratuitous use of the c-word later on in this post. Maybe even two. But first, here [...]

I apologise for my long absence from this blog. Recently I have, of course, followed the Commission hearings, at least for those of the new Commissioners that are most interesting from a regional research and innovation viewpoint.
Clearly, this was a great moment for the European Parliament and for European democracy. One MEP quoted by [...]

Answer: when the blogger doesn’t publish comments or trackbacks. But why are so many of these Charade Blogs supposedly ‘blogs on European communications’? Are there too many freshly minted ’social media experts’ in Brussels?
I’ve found that Eurosceptic-oriented blogs are generally very open environments - I had a comment blocked once on Devil’s Kitchen, but otherwise [...]