Nosemonkey\’s Ideas on Europe

13:19, 30 July 2009

To see how other academics have been using the web, you could do worse than visit the Academic blogs wiki at http://www.academicblogs.org – handily arranged by subject. The first thing you’ll notice is that there are as many different types of academic blog as there are academics. Some are jokey and informal, others could have come straight from the pages of a learned journal. Some are packed with text, others consist largely of photos or videos.

The major lesson? Find a way of blogging that you’re comfortable with and can enjoy. It’s that simple.

Blogging for Dummies - largely pointless

Naturally, the more you post, the more likely you’ll be noticed by other bloggers and the more you’ll get out of it – but don’t feel you have to post for posting’s sake. Don’t set yourself unrealistic targets and don’t put yourself under pressure. Blogging is something people do for the sheer love of it – be their main interest writing, discussion, showing off, or whatever – and if you start to find it a chore, not only are you doing it wrong, but it’ll be obvious that your heart’s not in it.

Of course it’s better for your readers if you aim to be interesting and regular in your forays into the blogosphere, but your blog is your blog – no one else’s. That’s often forgotten – and few guides to “successful” blogging bother to mention that if you’re enjoying yourself writing and publishing online, that’s the only success you really need.

To give you a few ideas and get an idea of the sort of thing that other Europe-focussed bloggers are writing about, you could do worse than starting with the aggregation site Blogginportal.eu or my own collection of European-focussed blog feeds at http://www.netvibes.com/nosemonkey – an ever-growing collection that I hope will soon include lots of Ideas on Europe blogs. If you head to my EU Blog Directory you can also find a (rather out of date) overview of some of the more interesting European blogs, with brief descriptions of their content.

The first thing you’ll notice is that even though we’re in silly season as all the politicians around the continent shut up shop for the summer break, there’s still plenty of politics to discuss.

The EU has long been in a crisis, and its future direction remains unclear – not just whether the Lisbon Treaty passes, but what the shape of the next Commission will be, whether the Union can expand further, how to solve the ongoing recession. Even the fundamentals remain in constant discussion: what it means to be European, whether we need a European Union, what such a Union should be for, and whether the current EU is up to the job being just the most obvious. Such is the crisis of confidence – with Barroso likely to get a second term as Commission president and everyone still discussing, with Lisbon, the same issues that they were a decade ago in the run-up to the Treaty of Nice – that a growing number of previously “pro-EU” bloggers have started to turn more sceptical.

In short, it’s an interesting time to be joining the online debate over Europe. Over the last year or so, bolstered by the elections of a few weeks back, the number of people discussing Europe online has boomed – via sites like Blogactiv and Th!nk About It, but also through countless individuals and organisations who have taken up the challenge of writing and discussing European affairs online, and the Euroblogosphere has begun to mature.

With any luck, contributors to Ideas on Europe will not only be regular participants in this new expansion of online debate, but also to both shape it and raise its tone. We get enough ill-informed comment about European issues from the newspapers – let’s try to do a better job here.