Europasionaria

My Worst Ennemy © Alberto Garcia Quesada

I’m a mosquito magnet. As a child, while I was spending holidays in Camargue, in the South East of France, I once counted the mosquito bites on my body. I had 56 of them. Yes, 56… and in spite of my extensive use of all kinds of anti-mosquito products. This summer on the French Riviera, I got devoured as usual. But this time, I discovered a far worse nuisance.

I had been dreaming for months of putting on my bathing suit, diving mask and snorkel and going to observe the magnificent fish of the azure-blue water. First day, first beach, first swim. One breast stroke, two breast strokes, and then Ouch! Electrical choc on my arm, a nasty little jellyfish had bitten me. The jellyfish is a tiny defenceless looking creature, almost transparent, that likes to squat the warm waters of sea shores… I later learned.

The Culprit © Emmanuel Froissant

The burn is not very painful but the problem is what comes later on. Itching that keeps you awake at night and a persisting burn mark two weeks later. A burn mark that’s probably going to stay on my skin for a much longer time.

Advice if one day you get stroke by this sea scum:

1. First, don’t listen to the lifeguard’s advice. He knows nothing about it, I later found out.
2. Scrape off the wound with a plastic card in order to remove the invisible particles of jellyfish that are still stuck on your skin.
3. Rinse off your skin with sea water, no soft water.
4. Against the itching that starts a week later, apply lavender essential oil every 5 minutes until the itching calms down. Twice or three times a day after that.

A few days later, as I was scanning my whole submarine environment through my mask before every breast stroke, I got electroshocked again. Right on my forehead. It was the only place where I didn’t have visibility. Fortunately, this burn is not visible anymore. It seems I had just head-butted the nasty little creature without touching its tentacles. Damn it.

A film telling the story of Facebook, Hollywood style, will be released in October in the US. The motto of the film is “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies”

Although there’s already a dedicated website for it, there’s still very little information on it. A perfect recipe for the creation of all sorts of rumours and spoofs.

Here’s the official trailer:

You heard me, that’s the official trailer, not a spoof.

Now here’s the spoof. It’s called The Video Website and its motto is: “You don’t get 500 million subscribers without making a highly fictionalized movie”

Honestly, which one do you prefer?

Thanks to the excellent OWNI where I found the video.

The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.

Rosie the blogger - CC Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com, after J. Howard Miller

With the folks at the Blogging Portal, we ran a funny experiment last week. Editors nominated their favourite Euroblogs and ended up with a list of 30. Then Blogging Portal users could cast a vote online for their top 5 Euroblogs. The results were announced yesterday.

I’m happy to see that at least one female Euroblogger made it to the final top 5. Congratulations to Lobby Planet‘s author for her continuous quest for trying and making the EU look funny. We need more light-toned Euroblogs, and we also need more female Eurobloggers.

I’ve analysed the top 30 through a gender lens (see full list below). If you leave out the collectively written blogs, which have both male and female authors, there are 6 female bloggers in the list as opposed to 18 male bloggers. That’s right, just one quarter of the nominated blogs are written by ladies, this is even lower than the gender balance ratio of the current European Commission. This is not too bad but it could be much better. As French feminist blogger Olympe points it in a reaction to the Wikio classification of top political blogs, women are as underrepresented in the blogs that are deemed influential as they are in high positions in politics and at work.

Generally women are not as comfortable voicing their political opinions as men are. I see this at every conference I go to, when it’s question time, only men dare speak. Surely not because they have more to say but because they are more confident that what they think is of interest to others. Ladies, your opinion matters. Whatever you write, you will find an audience, your very own audience. So, get blogging!

I’m still surprised each time I publish a blogpost to see that people read what I write and that they are not my family and friends. I’m flattered that my fellow Blogging Portal editors nominated my blog as one of their favourites, and even more so that I actually made it to the top 10 of the readers’ favourites! See, just like many ladies, I still lack confidence in the value of what I do.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it on this blog before but in the same spirit, with my Twitter friends Kattebel and Linotherino, we launched the EU Girl Geeks network last year. EU Girl Geeks is a group of women who combine a geekiness that is both linked to techie stuff and to the EU bubble. Thanks to the genius IT skills of Linotherino we have now a website where we list blogs about Europe that are written by women. Have a look and feel free to suggest other blogs we might not yet know of! We are also on Facebook and Twitter. By the way, we are meeting this week for drinks and dinner so if you are geekie and girly, feel free to join!

Results of the Blogging Portal's poll on your favourite Euroblogs

Thanks to the European blog search engine Wikio, there is now no need anymore to speak 5 languages to discover the best European blogs. Each day on e-blogs, blogposts from the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain are selected and translated into 5 languages. What a fantastic initiative! Bravo Wikio!

As far as translation is concerned, there is a novelty on this blog too. As a matter of principle, this blog is already bilingual. Almost all articles are available in English here and in French there. I took that decision right from the beginning in order to present a French view on European affairs to English speakers on one hand, and to build bridges between the Euroblogosphere and the French blogosphere on the other hand. However the fact that Spanish Eurobloggers such as Encarna of Más Europa, Emilio of europe@s and Jorge Juan of Cuidadano Morante have recently started to comment in Spanish on this blog pushed me to do more for multilinguism. This is why below the language button you can now see a Google translate button for all the people who are not comfortable with either English or French. This button can also be used to translate comments you don’t understand the language of, and even to reply in a language you can’t speak! Amazing, isn’t it?

You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.

As social media is now integrated in everything we do, the question is not anymore what is social media, but where is social media now? Great presentation by Marta Kagan.

In Brussels there are days when you feel the European Union is a magnificent creation, one of the most inspired experiments in mankind’s history. Then there are days when you feel disgusted by the pettiness, the short-sightedness, the incoherence of it all.

Farewell to Brussels, FT Brussels Blog