This blog is six years old

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And I missed its birthday thanks to, well, being in a bit of a blogging lull at the moment.

Anyway, 5th March 2003: that’s when I started this place – on a basic Blogspot account with a standard template, long before such wonders as WordPress existed and handy tools like RSS feeds and trackbacks had become widespread, and at a time when I wasn’t aware of a single other political blog (though I must have been aware that they existed, as I remember feeling that 2003 was far too late to get into this blogging game to hope to have any kind of impact).

The first post (with most of the links now broken, as that was in the days when few sites gave their articles permanent URLs) can be found here. The first paragraph ever written on this blog – surprisingly – still largely stands:

This blog will contain the musings of a one-time Eurosceptic turned pro-European. Turned largely by the inanity of the innumerable Eurosceptic rantings. However, there will be few cases of rampant Europhilia – the zeal of the convert has not overwhelmed me. The arguments will be mostly balanced, and stupid claims from both sides will be equally vilified.

And now for the next six years – hopefully full of the long-promised increase of articles providing historical context to current debates, as well as some of the same old stuff.

The trouble is, you see, that the EU hasn’t progressed AT ALL in the six years I’ve been writing about it. I’ve been over all the arguments countless times, and they’re all still the same. Take this post from November 2004, for example. It covers all the bases: the EU’s identity crisis post-Cold War and enlargement and Europe’s role in the world, eurosceptics sniping from the sidelines, the fall-out from the Iraq war’s impact on EU-US relations, Britain’s relationship with both, the EU Constitution (that (d)evolved into the Lisbon Treaty) and the need for major EU reform. Go through the archives, there’s scores of similar posts, many of which could have been written last week – or at any point in the last decade, so little has the EU progressed since the run-up to the Treaty of Nice back in the late 1990s.

Little wonder, then, that I’m finding it hard to drum up much enthusiasm at the moment – but genuine wonder that I’ve managed to stick it out for so long. After all, as I’ve repeatedly noted over the years, if the EU could be summed up with one handy phrase it would be this: incomprehensible and boring as hell.

“A week is a long time in politics”, they say. Not when it comes to the EU, it’s not. Hell, the last decade has seen so little progress, ten years may as well have been a week.

17 thoughts on “This blog is six years old”

  1. Happy Birthday, Nosemonkey blog!

    Would you share with us some figures about how many people usually visit your blog each month? I think it would be really interesting for other euro-bloggers to have something to compare with.

  2. Nosemonkey,

    Congratulations on your six years, but your comments made me wonder if your calling is history or palaeontology.

    If you are looking for Napoleonic set-piece battles or WWI style slaughter, you may be right that nothing much has happened this millenium.

    But if you start looking for guerilla warfare, there are scores of small battles taking place in and around the EU institutions every day. Actually many more than one individual can observe and report on.

    So it depends on your perspective.

  3. Brusslsblogger – Readership isn’t huge – the only time it was was following the London bombings of July 2005, when I was getting about 2-3,000 uniques a day (peaking at 37,000 unique on the day of the bombs, and 10,000 a day for the next couple of weeks).

    I’m currently averaging about 7,000 unique visitors per month to the actual blog, though the daily visit rate usually doubles when I actually bother posting (which you may have noticed is only about once a week at the moment). RSS subscribers are knocking around the 350-450 mark. But that doesn’t include additional readers on the likes of Blogactiv, Agoravox etc. that sometimes reproduce content.

    Ralf – no doubt there are loads of interesting battles going on every day. But if you’re not based in Brussels and actually participating in them, there’s no way of finding out about them. This is, of course, one of the many reasons why we need more EU bloggers. The fact that I’m one of the best-known despite posting only intermittently from London and having only been to Brussels twice in the last two years (and not at all during the last 12 months) shows just how poorly-developed the EU blogosphere remains, even after all this time. I also rarely get emailed tips from insiders, despite being one of the top results for “EU blog” in Google. Until more people knocking around the EU institutions start to engage, this will no doubt remain the case.

  5. Nosemonkey,

    through you I found my way into the EU blogosphere, and so I am glad you are there with us after all these years which look like endless for somebody entering the EU blogosphere only last year.

    Happy birthday, looking forward reading from you!

    Best,

    Julien

  6. Happy Birthday from cafebabel.com, we have just turned eight ;-)

    I share your view when it comes to EU politics, which are still complex, detached from everyday life and mainly driven by national interests. But there has been incredible change within Europe itself and the perception EU citizen have of themselves today.

    When you started your blog, states like Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were still UFOs for most; nowadays cities like Prague, Budapest or Warsaw are vibrant European capitals.It shows that EU citizen are actually much more advanced than the well-dressed man and women in the Berlaymont building

  8. Nosemonkey, thanks for sharing your traffic figures.

    I think 7000 unique visitors / month are really great. It’s probably much much more than many other EU blogs can hope for, especially non-English ones.

  9. Perhaps – but that’s more a sign that the EU blogosphere is sorely under-developed (and that no one is interested in the EU) than that I’ve got a lot of traffic. In the world of UK political blogs, that sort of readership puts me firmly at the bottom of the second tier. The leading British political blogs pull in a good 100,000+ per month (at least), while leading eurosceptic blog EU Referendum averages 3,600 A DAY. In that context, 7,000 a month is dire.

    But it’s quality, not quantity that counts – and the quality of this blog’s readership is pretty high. I actually don’t want to have mass appeal. I’ve experienced what it’s like to have a high traffic blog – albeit only for a few months – and it just means you get loads of maniacs in the comments and it becomes a chore to engage with the readership. (Hell, in my day job I help edit a site that gets more than 3.5 million visits a day – and you should see some of the comments that turn up on there… No thanks!)

  10. Actaully, just realised – that EU Referendum figure is visits, not unique visitors. But still.

  11. Interesting.

    100.000 uniques per month for UK political blogs is already impressive I think. I am sure the picture in German language blogosphere looks totally different although I can’t provide any figures.

    Regarding niche vs mass content: I think you would have the same results when you compare Euronews / Euobserver / EurActiv figures to the ones of Guardian / BBC / Times.

  13. Dear Nosemonkey, stay with it! We have only just entered the euro-blogging scene, but when we did, you were very nice about us, with the comment which most encouraged me personally at the outset of a project which represents something of a departure (a very necessary one) in EU communications. (You said, if you don’t mind me quoting you: “they seem to get it – both tone and approach are altogether different from what we’ve seen from official EU bodies to date.”)
    I was told at the time that such effusions from Nosemonkey were as good as it gets in the euro-blogosphere, so, please, you can’t disappear now!
    Apart from all that, a great blog. I see your disappointment in what you see as the EU’s failure to progress, but maybe what has happened is that it has in may ways progressed to a point of being politics-as-usual, with the mix of genuinely important stuff, boring detail and tangential beltway obsessions that implies. Still much to talk about, though, I assure you.

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