From a new trio of videos for the election. Love the animation. The rest are on the other side of this link.

I love the way that the Belgians have their crises. They set a date, have a panic, and talk of the end of Belgium. Then they seem to adjourn the crisis until a future date. I don’t profess to be an expert on Belgian politics (though I doubt many could), but if the problem is centered around the bilingual constituency of Brussel-Halle-Vilvoorde, would it not make sense to simply redraw the boundaries and split it into one Flemish, and one French constituency? My other suggestion for fixing Belgium is the Bosnian model and forced Esperanto, though I doubt that’d go down well.

Well I’m back sooner than I expected. I saw an article about social media on EurActiv this morning, and it did nothing but reinforce the feeling I have that nobody in politics really knows what to do with social media. The politicians try to reach the public with it, while the press talks about how that, inevitably, flops. If there is anything I have found from playing around with social media during election campaigns, and observing its use by the Obama campaign, it is that it is the perfect tool to mobilise your activists. Obama didn’t use tweets, Facebook, or MyBO (still a dreadful name) as a way to win voters directly; he used those tools to make his activists—who it seems are much more loosely attached to his campaign than we find in Europe—excited; he used the tools available to make sure that the people traipsing around with stacks of leaflets, spreading his hopeful magic, felt close to the campaign. At some point, we might perhaps realise that, on this side of the Atlantic; until then I guess we can just suffer through a few dozen more doomed attempts to convert people to vote Green with a Facebook page.

I think March was the first month in the history of the blog that I didn’t post anything. The reason for this was the jump into hyperdrive that my masters course took for a few weeks, but as of the 12th, the last remnants of that semester, taking the form of an essay on Scotland and the EU, will be completed, and I’ll be free to reboot the Thursday Briefing. So, don’t assume I’ve given up on this quite yet.