Category Archives: Blogs

Vote Created in Birmingham

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Mad Melanie Phillips has pulled ahead in the Weblog Awards but Created in Birmingham can still stop the gong going to a right-wing harpie who appears to enjoy nothing more than stirring up racial tensions and pandering to the basest prejudices of society while pretending that some of the most wealthy and powerful military-industrial complexes on the planet are the poor, put-upon victims.

Vote now – and (thanks to the flaws of online “democracy”) vote often. To those still voting for me – thanks, you’re very sweet, but even I’m not voting for me any more.

A letter to Private Eye

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(I’ll copy the offending article below the fold, for those who are interested. And for non-UK readers who don’t know what Private Eye is, it’s the UK’s best satirical political magazine – and also one of the few publications to still bother with proper investigative journalism. I’ve been reading it pretty much every issue since the early 90s, and can safely say that it’s far and away my favourite magazine, and probably the prime thing that inspired me to start blogging.)

Come on, Strobes – your EU coverage is becoming laughably bad. In Brussels Sprouts in Eye 1227 you quote the “director” of “The National Platform EU Research and Information Centre” (later just “the EU Research Centre”), who has supposedly “exposed” yet more devious details of the Lisbon Treaty as Ireland looks set to vote again on the damned thing.

Aside from the fact that what is supposedly “exposed” is actually just re-hashed, unproven speculative analysis that did the rounds of the Euroblogs well over a year ago, what’s most shocking is that had you bothered to look it up on Google you’d find that the impressive-sounding National Platform EU Research and Information Centre is actually nothing more than one man and his blog, most of the content of which consists of cut and pasted newspaper reports. Not only that, but judging by blog search engine Technorati, it’s a singularly unknown blog (only six inbound links) – probably why I’d never heard of it.

I’ve been running a well-regarded blog on EU affairs for nearly six years now (shortlisted for Best UK Blog in the 2008 Weblog Awards and given the Jury’s Commendation in the UACES-Reuters Reporting Europe Awards 2008, among various other accolades). But now I see where I’m going wrong – I should start referring to myself as the director of some grandiose-sounding institute and start spamming people with “press releases” to make people assume that I’m from a thinktank.

Seriously – if you need a fact-checker for your EU stuff, let me know. Brussels Sprouts has always had a tendency to believe the worst of the eurosceptic conspiracy theories, but now it’s getting silly.

As for the rest, keep up the (mostly) good work!

Yours,

J Clive Matthews (aka Nosemonkey)
Nosemonkey’s EUtopia
(henceforward to be known as The European Institute for EU Insight and Objectivity – E.I.E.I.O.)
www.jcm.org.uk/blog

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Vote for me (if you like, that is…)

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The 2008 Weblog Awards

Update: Actually, scrap that. Vote for Created in Birmingham instead. Never heard of them before, but they seem to have the best chance of preventing mad borderline racist Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips from winning. Last year the Best UK category was taken by the barking Stalinist Commie Neil Clark (him of “Iraqis who work for the British deserve to be raped and tortured to death and so do their families”* fame) – let’s not have a repeat of the most idiotic maniacs ruling the roost. There’s enough of that on this here internet already, thanks very much.

While you’re there, check out the Best European Blog poll – where this place is arguably a better fit, and consider chucking a vote to Kosmopolito or Siberian Light. And then lend your support to uber-Euroblog A Fistful of Euros, inexplicably shortlisted in the Business Blog category.

Update 2: At the request of Mr Clark, this post has been amended. He claims not to be a Stalinist and asks me to provide evidence that he has ever said nice things about Uncle Joe. Not being of a McCarthyite mindset – and not having the inclination to read any more of his dross than is necessary – I’ll take him at his word, having merely referred to him as one having seen him described as such on numerous other blogs whose opinions I respect rather more than I do his.

* Mr Clark also seems incapable of grasping the concept of the satirical paraphrase, so to be clear, he has never written the statement “Iraqis who work for the British deserve to be raped and tortured to death and so do their families”. That was instead my own short summary of this horrifically callous and smug article that he wrote in August 2007, in which he strongly hinted that he felt that reprisals against Iraqi “quislings” (that is a direct quote) were justified, and stated explicitly that “The true heroes in Iraq are those who have resisted the invasion of their country” (another direct quote), thereby explicitly giving his support to bomb-throwing murderers of women and children along with those Iraqi nationalists who have used more traditional and less abhorrent methods of armed resistance to the occupying Coalition (and subsequently UN) forces.

It is perhaps worth noting that Mr Clark did not take exception to me calling him barking or referring to him as an idiotic maniac. I think we can now see why…

I’m a 2008 Weblog Awards finalist

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How exciting. Last time was 2005, when I did singularly poorly in the face of tough competition.

This time I’m up against the usual suspects of Dale and Guido (each with a daily readership that this blog would struggle to get in half a year, by their own accounts), mentalist lefty Neil Clark (who won last year by getting out the Socialist Workers/Respect/We hate Chimpy Bushitler vote), barking right-wing Islamophobic harridan Melanie Phillips, and a bunch of others I’m not familiar with, and which aren’t linked, making checking them out tricky.

In the Best European Blog (non UK) category, good to see Kosmopolito and Siberian Light get nods (though how is a Russia-focussed blog European, and how is it non-UK when the guy who runs it is London-based, like me?).

More details, no doubt, when the proper voting pages are up. And more posts from me at some point soon – it’s been a rather busy couple of weeks…

The Economist, the EU and online media strategies

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The EconomistI’ve been rather busy this week, so have only just realised that The Economist’s superb EU-focussed blog Certain Ideas of Europe is – for reasons unknown – being cancelled.

Public Affairs 2.0 asks a few questions. Has the writer left? I doubt it – I’m pretty certain it was produced by more than one staffer. Has The Economist given up on blogs? Well, it doesn’t seem to be cancelling its other blogs – Free Exchange, Democracy in America, Gulliver or The World in 2009.

So, is it that The Economist has run out of ideas on Europe, as Public Affairs 2.0 asks, or is it something else? With the Summer’s European Parliamentary elections fast approaching, with Ireland likely to hold another referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, with the European Commission soon to change over, surely interest in EU affairs is likely to rise? Surely now, more than ever, is the time that regular daily analysis of EU affairs is vital?

Well, yes. But The Economist is a business, not a public service organisation. I for one would be astounded if Certain Ideas of Europe ever got anywhere near the traffic of the other Economist blogs – not due to any lack of quality (I often used to cite it as one of the best), but purely thanks to the subject-matter. Producing any kind of commercial publication – even a blog – about the EU simply will not make you much cash. Unless, that is, you target the obsessives. And that, generally speaking, means targeting the eurosceptics. Certain Ideas of Europe, aiming for balanced and restrained coverage, simply wasn’t angry or sensational enough to draw in the crowds.

EU affairs remain a specialist interest. Providing free information is not worthwhile, because there are so few people who care. This is why The Economist’s EU-focussed spin-off European Voice keeps so much of its content locked behind a subscription wall. By my calculations, I get a similar monthly readership to the print version of the European Voice (based on their paid-for sales – more likely to be read than the vast number of comp copies they put out). And that’s in a month when I’ve not been posting much.

Of course, the way European Voice survives is the complimentary copies that make up a good 89% of its 18,500 print run. Because as these are sent to so many EU bigwigs, free of charge, it enables the European Voice sales team to claim that 7,398 individuals in the European Commission, 505 in the European Parliament and 433 in the Council of Ministers are subscribers. “Ooooh!”, think the advertisers, “that means we can get our message in front of people who really matter!” It’s the same loss-leading advertising strategy used by fellow EU news weekly The Parliament Magazine, as well as UK-centred ones like The House Magazine and Total Politics, among others.

It’s a perfectly valid ad sales technique, and been going on for years. As long as you’ve got a decent sales team, you can pull it off. It doesn’t matter whether every single one of those complimentary copies is put in the recycling bin by some beleaguered secretary as soon as they arrive without even entering the same room as the political bigwig whose name is on the subscriber list – the fact that it *might* be read by them is usually enough for the advertisers.

Not so online. Online, statistics can be padded (using visitors rather than unique visitors, page loads rather than visitors, hits rather than page loads, etc.), but they are much harder to bluff completely. If an advertiser asks outright how many people visit your website and you give them low number, why would they bother advertising with you? You can’t possibly get away with “well, we may only get 200 visitors a day, but every single one of them is really important, honest” in the same way that you can with print.

What does this all mean? Well, by the European Voice’s own media pack’s figures (warning – PDF), fewer than 2,000 people a week are willing to pay money for that publication. That’s significantly less than most paid-for local newspapers in the UK. It could never survive on subscriptions alone – there simply isn’t enough interest.

Likewise, the lack of interest in EU matters means that online readership would be similarly dire even if they did put all of their content up for free, and this would not be enough to attract any advertising whatsoever. (Case in point – I’ve recently started a BlogActiv mirror for some of the content on this site. Even on days when I’ve been featured as Editor’s Choice on their front page and in the daily EurActiv email bulletins, it’s got less traffic than this place. Both BlogActiv and EurActiv survive off grants and sponsorship, not traditional advertising.)

So the European Voice survives purely through the advertising attracted by all those comp copies to the bigwigs – something almost impossible to pull off with an online-only publication. (Well, I could pull the same trick with this place if I wanted – I’d just have to enter the email addresses of everyone who works in the Commission and EP into my email subscriber list. 99% of them would mark all my emails as spam, but, by the same logic as works with complimentary print publications, who cares? They’re on the list – that’s what matters.)

Certain Ideas of Europe, of course, was online only. Without a print presence, it had no advertising potential – just as most individual blogs have no advertising potential (hence the plethora of blog advertising networks like BlogAds and its imitators that use strength in numbers approaches, grouping dozens of blogs together to offer a combined readership that might be of interest to advertisers).

As a commercial publisher trying to make money, for The Economist to continue publishing a blog about EU affairs evidently does not make any business sense. Because it is all but impossible to make money out of writing about the EU. No one is interested. No one cares. This place is one of the longest-running and better-known English-language EU-centred blogs, and it’s not even in the top 100 UK political blogs by inbound links or readership. And of those top 100 UK political blogs, only about five or six have enough traffic, capital and business know-how behind them to even approach being viable commercial concerns.

Last week media blogger Gary Andrews asked whether the current credit crisis might see local newspapers shift to online only publishing. As I noted in the comments, I can’t see it. Local newspapers may fold as the web removes traditional sources of advertising revenue (largely by offering alternatives to local newspaper small ads for free on sites like Craigslist and its clones) – but without a print presence to give the potential of at least some big buck adverts, I can’t see how special-interest websites (be they local newspapers or EU-centred) will ever be able to generate enough money to survive.

Online ads are still pretty much restricted to banner, skyscraper, MPU and text-based (either links or advertorials), with only a few other options for sound- and video- based sites. None of these have any hope of having as much impact as a full-page newspaper advert, even if they can be seen by many times more people. And for all of them, advertisers are canny enough to demand exact viewing/readership figures – something that will always be impossible for print. And all of this means that online adverts will always be restricted in the amount of revenue they can generate – because most advertising rates are based on little more than what the ad salesperson can get away with. Online, they can get away with far less.

All this, of course, means not just the slow death of proper scrutiny of borough and county councillors as local newspapers begin to die out, but also the continued lack of serious scrutiny of EU-level politics, and the continued lack of that kind of European public sphere or demos we’re always told is a precondition for genuine democracy.

Because if you can’t make money out of publishing something, no commercial publisher with any sense is going to try. This applies to the EU just as it applies to local newspapers or magazines specialising in knitting scarves out of human hair.*

And so it is that we are losing one of the best EU blogs just as we approach a crunch year for EU affairs. Unless you’re like the BBC, and forced to cover events that are deemed “in the public interest” (even though the public remains singularly uninterested), writing about the EU is never going to make you any money. Not until it becomes more interesting to the public at large, at any rate – and there’s no sign of that happening any time soon.

* There are (almost) always business models that will work for special-interest publications – but they will rarely involve much expenditure on either editorial content or publicity, being produced at minimal cost and very, very carefully targeted. There are several magazines devoted solely to alpaca farming, for instance – but when was the last time you saw a copy at a newsagent?

With a minimal editorial team and a skilled couple of ad sales people, it would be possible to turn a decent profit from a magazine devoted to EU affairs – if anyone’s interested in launching one, get in touch. But in the present climate it’d only be possible in one language – two at a push. Try to do a genuinely EU-wide magazine published in several languages? Not a hope in hell that there’d be enough interest to justify the expense of all the translators and language-specific subs. Just as it wouldn’t be worthwhile producing a magazine on alpaca farming with a 20-strong editorial team.

The state of EU debate

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A subject worth another look every year or so – especially with EU elections looming in 2009 – is what sort of discussion (if any) the European Union is inspiring among its citizens. After all, I remain top Google result for “EU debate” (and second only to the EU’s own Debate Europe forum without the inverted commas), and the nature of political discourse surrounding the EU was one of the reasons I first started blogging about the whole thing. (Largely to slag off some of the nuttier anti-EU types, at first, but I’ve expanded a bit since then…)

I last had a look at EU debate nine months ago, which provides a fairly handy overview of how nothing much has changed during the time I’ve been blogging (Don’t believe me? Here’s a post on the subject from four years ago) – and that followed an intensive series of posts on the possibilities for building a genuine European demos that I did for openDemocracy (that’s the thing that I got shortlisted for that Reuters award for).

As such, for me to do another post on the subject is largely redundant. Thankfully, however, the newly revamped Kosmopolito (at an all new address and with an extra vowel) has had a stab, and brings a different, yet complimentary, take to the whole thing. One point in particular that stands out, however:

It is still cumbersome for non-experts to monitor the EU decision making process. Especially the internet and new online tools have the potential to make it easier to monitor and control EU decision making processes. Even though the europa.eu portal contains most of the information, it needs a serious relaunch. A new EU portal needs to be transparent, with a focus on policy processes that makes it easy to follow documents, combined with some interactive elements.

This cannot be stressed enough. I’m actively interested in the EU. I’ve been blogging about it for five years. I know my way around most of the sources of EU information available online, and I know (roughly) where to start looking to delve deeper into particular subjects. Yet even I still find it difficult to find what I’m looking for sometimes. (Where is an EU equivalent of TheyWorkForYou or The Public Whip? The only thing similar is Brussel Stemt, a Dutch-language site tracking the votes of Dutch MEPs – as far as I’m aware there’s nothing else out there.) The Europa portal has a near impossible task in trying to provide so much information in so many different languages, certainly, but it remains one of the most confusing, unintuitive sites on the web.

One of the major reasons why Euromyths spread so quickly – and also why the Lisbon Treaty has sparked so much opposition – is that the people find it impossible to find out information about the EU for themselves. (As noted the other day, to argue against the classic straight bananas Euromyth necessitates hunting down an obscure EU regulation and then trawling through and attempting to understand seven pages of legal jargon. Far easier just to believe what your newspaper tells you.)

If information is hard to come by or hard to understand, the power of the press and other self-professed experts to influence public opinion is massively increased. When the experts and the press are themselves ill-informed (as most journalists writing about the EU and many national politicians commenting on it sadly are) or biased (as is certainly often the case in the UK), the public is – intentionally or otherwise – going to be misled and misinformed. A misled and misinformed public in turn leads to misinformed debate, and that to an ineffective democracy. (Indeed, it’s arguable that part of the reason the public are so uninterested in the EU is that they’ve been consistently misinformed about just how important it is to their daily lives – if only they knew, claim some eurosceptics, they’d be up in arms.)

I’m afraid I can’t see this situation changing any time soon. EU debates outside the Brussels beltway remain largely non-existent, dominated by lack of solid factual knowledge and understanding (by both sides) and a lack of interest from anyone bar obsessives (as Jon Worth noted is still the case as recently as June, and as I’ve been saying for years). Hell, sometimes even the obsessives aren’t that interested.

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In support of the freedom of speech of someone with whom I almost completely disagree

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Of course, this is no doubt a lot more complicated than it appears at first glance, but nonetheless the apparent attempts to shut down UKIP press spokesman Gawain Towler’s long-running England Expects blog are to be heartily condemned. As the man himself says, it is his job – as the spokesman of a party that exists to attack and ridicule the EU – to, erm, attack and ridicule the EU.

He hasn’t (that I can recall) incited violence or hatred. He hasn’t (that I can recall) threatened anyone. He hasn’t (that I can recall) even leaked any particularly sensitive information (after all, how sensitive could it really be to find its way into the hands of UKIP’s press office?) So why try to shut him down? It’s hard not to see this as being some jobsbody official’s ill-considered plan to silence a source of irritation.

This is by no means a Hans-Martin Tillack, Marta Andreasen. But it does play into the hands of the EU’s critics in just the same way. If someone criticises you and your response is not to engage them in debate but to try to silence them, it is you, not they, who ends up looking bad.

Democracy is about discussion. It may be inconvenient to have to discuss things with parties like UKIP, but if they have been elected then you have no choice. This is what democracy is all about. (And yes, I have argued the same thing about fascists – more than once. UKIP may be many things, but they’re not fascists.)

The only way the EU is going to be able to build the kind of cross-continental demos that it needs is through fostering discussion and debate – and moves like this will do precisely the opposite.

Can I sue Iain Dale?

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Being labelled a left-wing blogger in Iain Dale’s latest unscientific guide to the world of British blogging is one thing (though something I was not alone in thinking was somewhat odd – check the comments below that list). Sometimes I do go a bit lefty – just as sometimes I go a bit right-wing (mostly economically, but still). A casual reader could be forgiven for getting the wrong impression.

But I’ve just had a gander at the full version (warning – PDF) – and he’s got me down as a Labour blogger.

I’ve been doing this blogging business for long enough not to take these things too seriously, as – like busses – there’ll be another one along in a minute. (Only 155th best political blog in the UK according to that list? Meh – last month I was named blog of the month by the UK Good Web Guide, whatever that is. Best blog lists are ten a penny.)

But still. Me? A LABOUR blogger? That’s one insult too far.

I am not, nor ever have been, a member of ANY political party. Indeed, I hate the very concept of political parties. At the London elections back in May I voted for four different parties in the end, allocating those votes largely on the basis of the individual politicians concerned. That post, please note, has been (for reasons that escape me) in the “Most Popular Posts” section to the right there for the last couple of months. Anyone confused as to my political leanings could have found out in just a couple of seconds that I am not a party beast.

I rarely get too riled by online insults – but this isn’t just an insult, it’s a slander. A libel. I’ve long prided myself on my lack of party affiliation – to the extent that, on principle, I refused to join the party of the MP I worked for at the House of Commons. Especially in the current climate, with Labour ever more embarrassing in its ineptitude, I am not at all pleased.

Nosemonkey interviewed: On EU blogs and Russia

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Believe it or not, from time to time people actually ask me for my opinion on things, rather than me just spouting out unsolicited words into the electronic ether and hoping that someone may spot them and correct my mistakes.

As such, this evening I’ll be doing the talking head thing on the BBC World Service’s World Have Your Say, trying to come up with a coherent theory about Russia’s current plans and how the rest of the world should respond. (Likely argument? Russia’s being childish and throwing a tantrum, and there’s usually two responses to tantrums: smack them or ignore them. Unfortunately, neither option’s really possible in this case.) Any suggestions much appreciated.

Oh, and some content from this place may soon start appearing in syndicated form on the website of a new PBS world news show – about which more details when I have them. (Check me out – I’m a regular media whore…)

Meanwhile, last week the chap behind L’Europe en blogs got in touch to ask my take on all things Euroblog. The write-up can be found here and is, I believe, the first in a series of interviews they’re doing with leading EU bloggers. Below the fold is a longer version of my somewhat pessimistic take on the state of the EU blogosphere – a taster:

the EU continues to work largely unscrutinised by the public – because us bloggers ARE the public, and if we’re not doing it, who the hell is?

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Blogs, Georgia and David Miliband

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There’s a rather good look at blogland’s attempts to cover strange going ons in faraway lands of which they know little from the chap behind tip-top Central Asia blog Registan, which is well worth reading in full:

“Elite bloggers often portray their analytical and news-gathering skills as equal or (more often) superior to those of professional journalists… But in the case of the ongoing conflict between Russia and Georgia, the blogging world mostly failed to live up to its promises… Days after the fighting began, even normally excellent sources of analysis and insight… were still linking to the same narrow set of news sources —sources that offered little more than thin quotes from government officials. While this isn’t necessarily a knock on, say, Reuters or The New York Times (it takes a little time to get a correspondent on scene), it is a tremendous failure on the part of the blogosphere, noteworthy for precisely how it failed to deliver on its original promise: breaking out of the mainstream media’s tendency toward groupthink.”

It’s hard not to agree with pretty much every word. I’m no Caucasian expert, and wouldn’t call myself a Russia expert either (hell, I’m not sure I’d even count as an EU expert), so these criticisms apply just as much to this place as elsewhere, but still. From skimming the blogs, you’d never get the impression of the complexity and lack of clarity of the situation. You’ll get constant references to the same news sources. The same bland platitudes about sovereignty, territorial integrity, self-determination, Russia’s Cold War mentality and the like – all repeated Chinese Whispers style from some pundit in some paper somewhere, with little secondary thought, criticism or research applied. Hell, some places are still picking up on my pipelines post as if it’s an amazing new discovery that Georgia is a major point of transit for energy resources, rather than something that anyone who knows anything about the region at all has known about for years.

But you know the really worrying thing? It’s when the British Foreign Secretary ends up taking the same approach as the blogs:

“These actions need to be taken in the context of a clear diagnosis of the events of the last two weeks. For me, the fog of war does not obscure the basic points.”

Well, it should – if armed conflict doesn’t make you question your existing policy of containment of one of the belligerents, then what the hell will? The situation has changed from a year ago when Miliband first decided that escalation of the UK’s ongoing post-Litvinenko spat with Russia was the way forward. Russia has moved its troops into a sovereign nation. The Kremlin has gone from vague threats and subversion (via cyber attacks and withholding energy) into physical attacks. This requires new thinking and new approaches – not least because it shows just how ineffective the existing British strategy towards Russia has been.*

Me? I’m just a blogger, not Foreign Secretary – and yet I’m trying to revise my preconceptions of Russia. I’m reading more widely, researching in more depth, trying to work out how this might play out, and what the best options are for both sides. I haven’t got there yet, but I plan to work at it constantly – because the joy of international relations is that they are constantly shifting, affected by myriad factors, many of which are both obscure and obscured. If a week is a long time in politics, a year is an age in international relations. So why is the British government still pursuing the same course with Russia when the rules of the game have shifted once again?

(* Of course, it could also be a sign that the current policy is working fine and that Moscow is beginning to get desperate… But although I’m increasingly firmly in the “Russia is weak and trying to hide it” camp (as is the decidedly more knowledgeable Registan, I was pleased to note), this strikes me as both worrying and wishful thinking.)

EU Blog Directory – new additions

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It’s about time I updated the EU Blog Directory, so here are the latest additions – some new, some merely new discoveries, all worth checking out. If I’m still missing any, please do let me know…

The 8th Circle
- “Corruption, democracy, and Eastern European politics.” Welcome addition to the world of Eastern European blogs, covering the region – and its relations with the rest of the EU – with rare insight and intelligence.

Alphasources
- Focussing primarily on European (and occasionally Japanese) macroeconomics, this is a handy addition to any reading list for those of us still struggling to get to grips with the complex interrelations of the European economies.

Blogging from Brussels
- Yes, that’s right – an EU politics blog written by a GIRL! Or, alternatively, a left(ish) leaning Swedish media officer at an unnamed Brussels-based think-tank, looking at European politics in the widest possible sense.

Brussels Media
- “A blog about the EU media landscape in Brussels” with an emphasis on the role the internet is starting to play in the EU public sphere.

EU Corruption
- “Despite appearances this isn’t a eurosceptic blog. But transparent and honest government is good government.” Critical and often insightful, it can only be hoped that it keeps going – we need more of this sort of thing.

Euro Watch
- Has been going for years (since 2002, in fact) and is a stupidly handy resource, packed full of in-depth yet easy-to-understand economic analysis and data – and with sub-blogs on the economies of France, Germany, Italy, Greece and Spain. Essential reading.
europa-eu-audience
- “The Institutions of the European Union endeavour to be transparent, open and accessible. They want to be seen in the best possible light by the public at large. We share this objective, and intend to contribute to its achievement.” – focussing primarily on EU politics on the web.

European Avenue
- EU news linklog, mostly rounding up EU content from the UK broadsheet press.

Ironies Too
- “A continuing chronicle of how democracy is being destroyed across the entire Euopean Union” – unsurprisingly, this is another eurosceptic blog, albeit one that’s readable, regular and interesting for a change. Worth a look, and long-running.

Julien Frisch
- Only launched in July 2008, even in its first few weeks this blog managed to attract attention for its frequent, eclectic and insightful posts on all things EU-related. If the same rate of posting is kept up, it could soon become one of the big boys…

Yellow Stars Blog
- “Christian Democrat and Pro European Union blog in support of a European world order!” Irregular posting (averaging just 4/5 a month) on eclectic European subjects, but well worth a look when new content appears.

Stanley’s Blog
- The first blog from the Blogactiv stable to merit its own listing – regular, informative and insightful, and already deserving of a place on the “must read” list.

The Tap
- From EU Referendum’s “Umbrella Blog” stable, little wonder this is another British eurosceptic. But despite a tendency to repeat many of the anti-EU/centre-right memes, there are nuggets of unexpected insight and better analysis than we have come to expect from the majority of anti-EU British blogs.

The Turko File
- “Blogging Turkey’s road to membership in the European Union” – we need more of this sort of thing: blogs analysing specific countries’ relationships with the EU. We’re inundated with British eurosceptics doing this sort of thing, and there’s a moderate number of French ones, but outside these two they’re surprisingly rare. Yet they’re also essential to understanding how and why the EU is doing what it’s doing.

Whitebull
- Blog spin-off of EU video news YouTube channel EUX.TV, there’s some good stuff here, as well as all their latest videos. Launched in May 2008, fingers crossed they keep the blog going.

Check out the rest on the EU Blog Directory.

UK political blogs just aren’t profitable

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And so another attempt to make money out of someone blathering on about politics has failed, with the closure of Westmonster.

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so…

Note to any other wannabe online publishers thinking of starting a UK politics blog: don’t bother. The audience figures even for the biggest aren’t sufficiently high (certainly in terms of uniques) to warrant any advertiser forking out anywhere near enough money to make such ventures profitable. The only way to make money via British blogging is adapting the long tail model, stealing some ideas out of AdSense’s book, and setting up an advertising platform across numerous blogs. Only Blogads has already done that – and the UK version, MessageSpace, is backed by some of those self-same big boys of the UK blog world.

Or, of course, you could lobby for funding and sponsorship – seems to work for places like EurActiv, that’d never (that I can see) be able to survive on advertising revenue alone. But the thing to remember is this: if newspapers only had political news in them, they’d swiftly go bankrupt.

Top blogs list

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Via DK, it appears that leading UK Tory blogger Iain Dale is putting together another of his top blogs lists. Last year it was somewhat hampered by selection bias – evidence of which is still on display in Dale’s new Total Politics blog directory, which lists this place in the “Non Aligned” category but not the Europe/EU one (a list that also fails to mention Jon Worth, among others). I wasn’t even aware of the list until I discovered I was in it…

Anyway, if you fancy it the instructions for sending in your pics can be found here – basically, email in your ten favourites – UK-based or UK-focussed blogs only – in order of preference. Whether you believe he deserves it or not, one thing is certain – Dale seems to be regarded as something of a British blogging expert, and his list is bound to get some attention. It would be a shame if decent, deserving blogs end up losing out simply because their readers don’t bother reading blogs by Dale and his readers.

(Personally, I find making top ten lists almost impossible at the best of times – let alone top tens in order of preference… This may take me a while…)

Seconded

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Jon Worth on the futility of being an EU-focussed blogger.

The only thing I’d say he’s missed is that the EU is also insanely boring, which makes getting up the motivation to write about it even more tricky than the minute readership and constant feeling that your few good ideas are being nicked by people who are then getting paid for it…

Of course, the plus side is that a small readership of people who know their stuff or will intelligently engage (hello, dear readers, etc.) is infinitely preferable to a large readership of idiots. In professional journalism you always end up writing for the audience you’ve got (for example, just last week I ended up using the phrase “gossip-fest” in the headline of a piece I was working on – not something you’d normally see here…).

The point of blogging, I always thought, is to write to the audience you want. Want a large one? Saying remotely positive things about the EU – if you’re writing in English in particular – simply isn’t the way to go. Instead you need populist conspiracy theories, knee-jerk politician-bashing, and plenty of rumour and innuendo. Just be prepared for a flood of comments from nutters. Want an influential one? Be thoughtful and original. Just don’t expect a great deal of credit – and don’t expect to be able to tell whether you’re influential or not half the time…