When I moved to Berlin in 2013 I needed to find a flat. I used a blog entry to help with my search, and wrote up my search experiences in the blog post “How To Find a Flat In Berlin” in January 2014. That post became one of the most […]
Tag: Social Media
My new, less tolerant approach to Twitter
In mid January I was more or less offline for a fortnight as my laptop had a serious problem (more about that here). Yes, of course I have a smartphone, but I tend to access social media the old way through a web browser, and Twitter through Tweetbot on my Mac. […]
If you want to do something useful in the EU referendum campaign, step away from this blog, step away from Twitter, and turn to Facebook
The deadline to add people to the electoral register has passed. The campaign is entering its final straight. Those of us caught up with the debate about the referendum see an end in sight after months of spending dozens of hours thinking and writing about nothing else. But up to […]
Social media and alternative versions of political reality
“Social media is overhyped” a friend said to me in a social setting yesterday. “Look at the Arab Spring – it failed!” I agree with the latter part – what happened at Tahrir Square (and how people came to the square), and indeed Gezi Park, would seem to indicate the […]
Twitter and publicness
Danny Yadron in The Guardian today wrote a piece entitled “Why do normal people struggle with Twitter?” that, via a conversation with Mathieu, drove me to write this piece. For Yadron’s alludes to an issue that has not been afforded much attention during Twitter’s current woes – namely the very […]
Teaching EU online communication through simulation – the twitcol case
For the first time in the academic year 2015-16 I am a member of the faculty of the politics department at the College of Europe in Bruges. My own MA is from the College of Europe (in 2003-04) and it is good to be back there as a teacher this […]
Why disliking Twitter’s “Heart” function is a matter of the head
Today Twitter turned its Favorite* function (with its star symbol) into a Heart – as the company explains here. This met with a lot of criticism from regular Twitter users, perplexed by the new function. Here are a few example tweets from Anne Roth, Armin Wolf and Patrick Jackson: These […]
Commissioners on Twitter – countering the critique
So, having taken apart the behaviour of European Commissioners on Twitter earlier this week, the critique has poured in – most of it to me personally in private, and some of it on Twitter. In this blog entry I am going to examine each main avenue of the critique, piece […]
European Commissioners seem to have missed the social aspect of Twitter and use it for one way, bland PR instead
In Gartner’s hype cycle, users of a technology encounter a trough of disillusionment after the initial peak of inflated expectations. The use of Twitter by the 28 Members of the European Commission (Twitter list here) feels like being in such a deep trough that it’s almost as if this is […]
Professionalise or fall into insignificance
This blog is now more than 10 years old. Now the little party to celebrate the anniversary is behind me, I need to set about working out what this blog is for these days. The brutal truth is that this blog is struggling – reader numbers are down month on […]
Few people are interacting on Twitter (and those who are aren’t the ones you’d expect)
On 18 May (18 days ago) I started a little experiment. Using SocialBro I started a private Twitter list called People Who Interact. This list was automatically created – out of everyone who either replied to a tweet I wrote, or RTed a tweet of mine. The summary of the […]
This blog will soon be 10 years old, and if you’re reading this you’re invited to the party
Back in 2005 I was coming towards the end of my term as President of JEF-Europe but I still had ideas. No one will ever invite me to speak at conferences again I thought, so I better try writing things instead. Some friends of mine in Swedish politics were blogging […]