The political blogosphere in Europe is divided along national and linguistic lines. Although EU topics are frequently addressed by blogs across Europe, it is cumbersome to get an overview of the EU focused blogosphere – one of the main problems that prevents a pan- European blog debate on EU issues. However, the EU focused blogosphere is growing and becoming more important. The Internet can be the place where a European public sphere and ultimately a European demos could be developed.

Andreas – Feb 2, 2009

Andreas wrote these lines just one week after a small group of eurogeeks launched the first and still only blog aggregator for EU-focused blogs bloggingportal.eu. That launch was exactly three years ago and marks today bloggingportal’s birthday: Have a happy one!

I wasn’t even in the group at that time. I only joined the team in July of that year. Since then I’ve met wonderful people, many of them in real life in Brussels or Berlin, and we’ve had crazy discussions about mad EU stuff during that time. Geekery on so many levels!

But in the end we had one simple yet challenging goal with bloggingportal: connecting European blogosphere & fostering a pan-European public sphere. Did we succeed? The fact that Andreas’ quote remains so valid even today would indicate otherwise. Twitter certainly connected many euro-think-alikes and eurogeeks. Certainly, we as avid social media users and EU nerds have contributed to building yet another Brussels bubble. But has the bloggingportal as a website played any significant role in the recent EU online years? Many might doubt, read Mathew’s thoughts about our performance for instance.

Sure, we had active times, we had prolonged summer breaks and early winter sleeps, but in the end the daily business of reading the many posts and selecting the most interesting ones always went on by a small number of editors. Here’s a small indication what we’ve kept ourselves busy with since the beginning:

• A little over 200,000 individual blog posts went through the portal since 2009. (That makes for a lot of blogging if you ask me.)
• In total we used 747,329 tags to categorize these posts.
• 5,239 individual blog posts were selected to be displayed on the homepage and more recently in our facebook/twitter feeds, the weekly and daily newsletter, as well as our weekly summary “the week in bloggingportal”.

Even if that makes almost 5 per day it also means that we have selected not even three percent of all posts. Yet, all of these have been read, checked and found interesting (in some way) by us, the editors. Bloggingportal.eu is 100% hand made from code to content. Admittedly, most of the work is done by only few of us. The following graphic shall give you an insight into who is behind selecting the many blog posts most of the time. It shows the total amount of promoted posts by editors in the recent 1,095 days. (By the way thanks Ralf!)

That being sad said .. if you’re interested in the project and want to help us to shape the future of both bloggingportal and euroblogging get in touch with us. It’s great fun and I wouldn’t want to miss it. Start by hearing from other editors and euroblog enthusiasts.