Today we are celebrating bloggingportal.eu’s first birthday. It’s hard to believe it is still so young. It now aggregates more than 500 euroblogs and blogs talking about the EU in all kinds of languages. The project is grassroots. We are not getting any funding. It’s a team of voluntary bloggers who each day, during their free time, select the best euroblog content for you and tag the posts. Inevitably some languages are represented better than others (English, German, French and more recently Spanish). That’s because however multilingual our team of bloggers is, we do not speak all European languages. And if you want to join the team, please do! Just send an email introducing yourself and your blog at: info @ bloggingportal.eu See you on bloggingportal.eu!

What is The Story of Stuff? From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something, it’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever. (text from http://www.storyofstuff.com/)

PES Congress 2009 Highlights from PES_Party of European Socialists on Vimeo.

Then listen to this week’s podcast in Chasing Brussels!

A couple of days ago, I took part in the recording of the podcast Chasing Brussels. We were asked what we thought the highlights of 2009 were and what those of 2010 may be.

2009 has been a year of great renewal for me. For the first time, I got very involved in a European elections campaign, which was a fascinating experience. We have seen the premises of true European political campaigning at the Party of European Socialists. However the campaign in-country remained nationally focused, which was a great disappointment for European activists. In the end, the European Parliament is even more right-wing than before, and Barroso will be at the head of the European Commission for 5 more years. This status quo is quite depressing. On a more positive note, 2009 was also the year where I started to blog, tweet, and more generally use all kinds of social media tools avidly. I got involved in exciting projects such as bloggingportal.eu -the EU blog aggregator- and the Gender Balanced Commission Campaign. I’ve had the chance to meet many Eurobloggers in person or virtually on skype, chats, and Google Wave.

I don’t know if 2010 will be interesting in terms of European politics. There is no highest point in political life than the elections. After that, it’s more or less business as usual. Don’t get me wrong, lots of interesting stuff is happening in European policy-making all the time but I’m afraid it’s mostly ignored by mainstream media. Let’s see if in the 4 years to come our growing community of Eurobloggers can change this dynamic!

For now, if you have a little time, I invite you to follow the hearings of the European Commissioners-designate by the members of the European Parliament. They will take place from the 11th to the 19^th of January. You can find the agenda here and view the hearings in live streaming here. I’ll be live-tweeting about it here.