I got a couple of useful suggestions after my previous posting on Euroblogging. Jon Worth presents a “pyramid” with four levels of Euroblogs and looks for ways of aggregating or synthesizing this mass of information. Jon writes the following about the bottom layer of the pyramid:
At the bottom level are the mass of Individual Euroblogs written by single authors, and blogs dealing with one small part of EU politics. People read these if the blog appeals to their niche area of interest, or they happen to know the person writing the blog. These blogs can be a success in their own right, but they are unlikely to generate a mass readership
This is undoubtedly true. While in no way denying the over-riding importance of “portals” or other sites that synthesize the most important information, I am looking for ways of finding focussed and structured information on topics that Ichoose. And I would like to see what do the Commissioners and the MEPs write about (for example) the Lisbon Treaty, what have the blog portals caught, what do the mass of individual bloggers say? What do the English language blogs write as opposed to the French or German language blogs? What do bloggers feel about Liechtenstein and the Schengen agreement? And so on.
One problem with automatic solutions is that they filter out the most “popular” items, not necessarily the “best” or “most interesting” ones. (This, btw, is something endemic to the whole “Web 2.0″ which I have written on in Swedish here).
I have now (manually) entered in BlogLines all the blogs in EurActiv’s list plus blog rolls from other leading Eurobloggers. The structure is the same as in EurActiv which among other things means that there is no distribution on languages. (Since English and French language blogs are absolutely dominating, I would also like to expand the list of German, Dutch and Scandinavian blogs – unable, unfortunately, to follow the Slavic languages.) I have “subscriptions” of 230 blogs for the time being.
The search function in BlogLines is very good and enables me to some extent to get answers to the type of questions I outlined above. But you cannot search for instance within a special category of blogs or blogs in a special language. Theoretically, I could open several i BlogLines accounts and export the relevant subscriptions to each of them but that would of course only be a cumbersome make-shift solution.
I would be most grateful for any comment or suggestions on this or similar issues.
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