-90 to European Election Days
The countdown to the European election days is started, maybe owing to the economic crisis, but it is not an interesting topic for our media: after the decision of the barrage to the 4% for parties (and we may discuss about the utility of this barrage, as in Europe there is not a problem of governability) and facing the crisis of the left party, Italians seeems to have different priorities.
And to me, it seems that European parliament, is just like a “clearing house“for our politicians (like Bersani, Santoro, Bonino and maybe also Prodi).
To fight this lack of interest, not only of the Italian people, from Bruxelles they started some iniatitive. The idea behind Think about it , promoted byEuropean Journalism Centre (EJC), is a blogger competition, to promote and raise awareness of the coming election:
“The focus of the competition is the European Parliament Elections 2009. EJC wants to offer a platform for journalism students, aspiring journalists and bloggers to express their views on European topics as well as to report and cover the elections.”
Last January, three bloggers for European country (but who are the Italians?) were invited in Bruxelles for a two-days of training. The contest is about writing at least one post related to European election: every month the most voted (by whom? the th!nkers?) post wins a prize. You can also follow the project, joining to the related ning community.
EJCT created also another website, Milkshaker a news aggregator
I found very interesting Bloggingportal.eu, started by John Worth:
Bloggingportal.eu is a new way to read blogs about EU affairs. We syndicate the content from more than 300 blogs about the EU in as many European languages as we can find. We then rate the posts, giving you the best summary of the analysis of the EU in the blogosphere.We don’t think the EU is a nasty conspiracy, nor do we love everything it does. [...]
John Worth
launched the idea from his blog a month ago, with an analysis of the information blog pyramid, that have individual blog as his base, then collective blogs, than enabling platform, like
Blogactiv and then at the top a “question mark”, where a month ago we could only find three aggregator web site: one in german language, one for the uk labour party, and the third was EuroBrussels for recruiting.
A must read website (also available in Italian) is the portal launched by Cafebabel, called Eudebate2009
I am grown up with the myth of United Europe, and for this reason I would like to get also advantages from Europe, and not only the single teacher at primary schools, libraries pay-to-read and women retirement at 65 years old…
