Oooo, here's a clever new gadget

Bloggingportal.eu has just been launched as a one stop web aggregator of EU related blogs. It has been set up by Jon Worth and Stefan Happer of Politik Portal withy assistance from elsewhere.

What’s the idea? Essentially we aggregate the content of 278 blogs about the EU in all European languages and all that content is available on the ‘Posts‘ page of the site. But that’s no good in itself - we want the good content to gain pride of place on the site. So a team of diligent editors flags up this good content, and this appears as the ‘Editors’ Picks’ on the homepage of the site.

Given its provenance one might conclude that it will be largely a supportive portal, but Mr Worth suggests that some balance will appear.

There is no large Brussels media business backing us, and we’re not in any way tied to any sponsors because, well, we don’t have any.

We’re also not just ‘pro-EU’ - we won’t include posts if you just think the EU is some sort of conspiracy but we welcome a critical perspective.

But Jon, I don't think that the EU is some sort of conspiracy, I know it is...

Mr Corbett writes

It appears that I was wrongly informed and Richard Corbett is not taking comments after all.

Dear Gawain,

Thanks once again for taking an interest in my blog but the link up on England Expects (from the the update on your Pot Kettle post), takes people to a fake of my blog, which I have absolutely nothing to do with.

My blog is put up through an FTP server and the address is ww.richardcorbett.org.uk/blog and the blog itself, as is made quite clear from reading it, dates back to February 2005.

I would be grateful if you could take your link to the hoax blog down and point out to your readers that http://corbettmep.blogspot.com/ is a fake, which I am in no way responsible for.

Thanks,

Richard Corbett

So at his express request I would like to confirm, that there are two Corbett blogs, one with and without comments. The one with comments does not have archives going back anywhere near as far as his for example. It would appear that it is a mirror blog, I am not sure what the legal position of it is not being savvy in these things, maybe somebody could let me know? For example, if there are really libellous comments posted upon it, who is responsible? Is it a breach of copyright? I don't know.

That being said I would have thought that there is no harm in it as it allows the comment section, but otherwise faithfully reproduces what he has written. (Apart from anything else it doubles his web presence).

So I hope that I have done what he asked in the Spirit of good and fraternal relations, but I shall still be looking at the mirror site every now and again to find out what the great unwashed think of his musings.

Comment Forum

"Twats"...Well she said it

I went along to The Centre (gut churningly self-described as a "think-do tank") last night, for the launch party of Zoe Mccarthy's book of the blog, "My Boyfriend is a Twat".
The keynote speaker, barring of course Zoe was that paragon of the Brussels blogosphere, the Propaganda Commissioner herself Margot Walstrom.

To be fair to her she was on very good form, and I paraphrase,

"I am a reader of Zoe's blog, but did not understand what a Twat was, so I went to my Swedish/English dictionary to find out. There was no word between 'twang' and 'twit'. So I had to look further. And discovered that I already knew what twats were, they are the commentators on my blog".

Others in attendence included Rachel North, Spanish Goth, Daphne, Tippler and a host of others.