Jon Worth's Euroblog

16.11.2023 Technology

We’ve got a broken social web (or at least the bits of it I liked are broken) – and I don’t know what to do

I somehow stumbled across this 2016 piece by Giles Wilkes last week. The economic blogosphere, he writes, is like “eavesdropping on clever people arguing”. Those words are perfect, and if you can get past the paywall, the whole piece is

11.10.2023 Technology

Ursula von der Leyen on Bluesky – and how institutions need to think about verification on new social networks

NOTE: this post has been superseded by this one. However the post below has been left unedited – it is as it was on 11 October 2023! Yesterday a post popped up on my timeline on Twitter alternative Bluesky purporting

25.09.2023 Technology

From The Who to The Rolling Stones – or why I will not trust Bluesky just yet

Change, it had to come We knew it all along We were liberated from the fold, that’s all And the world looks just the same And history ain’t changed […] We don’t get fooled again So the classic lines by

03.07.2023 Technology

To tweet, to skeet, to toot? Vocabulary for Twitter and its rivals

When I was growing up you didn’t vacuum clean the house, you hoovered it. More recently, to google something was synonymous with the internet search engine. And – like it or not – Twitter had its whole own vocabulary synonymous

21.06.2023 Technology

It is ease of use, and ease of search, that’s going to make or break a Twitter alternative. Not the ethics.

For years I have been fighting a losing battle with friends – trying to make them see that the choices of the tech they use should be similar to how they choose what food to buy, or how to travel

15.06.2023 Technology

From #UKriots on Twitter, to Bluesky and Mastodon – it’s only once we lose something that we are conscious of why it mattered

Back in the summer of 2011 I had a bit a tricky conundrum. I needed to get from Bow in East London to Camden in North London avoiding the riots that were happening at that time. And ideally I needed

06.06.2023 EU Politics / Technology

How Twitter’s role as pre-eminent social media in EU politics ends

When Twitter pulled out of the EU’s voluntary Code of Practice on Disinformation, European Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton of course took to Twitter to respond: Twitter leaves EU voluntary Code of Practice against disinformation. But obligations remain.

24.04.2023 Technology

The demise of Twitter: don’t whine, organise!

Out of the window of the train just north of Brussels you can see the poster pictured here – Niet panikeren, organiseren it says. Don’t panic, organise in English. The past few days a slightly alternative slogan has been on my mind. Don’t whine,

14.03.2023 EU Politics / German Politics

German coalition squabbles reach Brussels – but it’s Scholz who’s deficient here, not really the Greens or the FDP

Within a couple of days of each other The Economist and the FT have written pieces about how tensions in the governing coalition in Berlin are having an impact on EU policymaking. The central topic is Germany’s decision to oppose

01.03.2023 EU Politics / Technology

In EU politics we treated Twitter as a social network, not as digital public infrastructure – and built it all on a platform we do not control

Looking back it was a pretty good dozen years in many ways. From when I started using Twitter for EU political purposes early in 2009 until it all started to go wrong throughout 2022 I managed to achieve a hell

17.02.2023 Technology

WordPress spring cleaning – especially Media files

This blog has been running 17 years, and a good 14 of those the blog has been powered by WordPress. But in that time not only how I write has changed, but the way WordPress organises everything has changed a