Written on April 19, 2008 – 11:33 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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As we reported last week, France is on the verge of adopting a law against “incitement to anorexia” that is mainly focused on the web. It wouldn’t be the last Internet-related law this week, since the European Union announced some tight laws against “incitement to terrorism” on the Internet. By doing this, the EU wants to fight militant groups who amongst other things recruit and mobilize young people.
A statement by the ministers said that the existing Framework Decision of 13 June 2002 will be expanded by introducing three new offenses: “public provocation to commit a terrorist offense, recruitment and training for terrorism.”
Reuters reports that countries like Spain and Italy already punish public provocation to terrorism, but others, like Scandinavian countries will have to change their laws. Spain’s secretary of state for justice, Julio Perez Hernandez, told the press agency that “The battle to anticipate terrorist acts is crucial for Spain. One should not wait for smoke to know there is terrorism.”
Although the statement says that it’s “well-balanced in terms of its effects on freedom of speech and general respect for human rights”, civil action groups will probably ring the alarm bells. Though I’m not sure whether the public will actually care. Europeans have seen so many anti-terrorism laws that limit their freedom already, that they might have become numb for amendments like these.
Written on March 31, 2008 – 11:07 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
This morning I stumbled upon a site that shows a visualization of the popularity of Spanish bloggers. It’s called Blogocosa and based on data from the social network Bitacoras.com, that has more than 250,000 subscribers. They started tracking the popularity of these writers in January. The size of the images, 30×30, 60×60 and 90×90 pixels, depends on the number of followers each user has on the network.
Blogocosa gives a nice overview of a blogosphere that is totally unknown to me. Apparently Jordi Lagares, Andres Nieto Porras, and Fran J Saavedra are national blogging heroes. I found this link on the personal blog of Dutch social media maven Polle de Maagt and agree with his remarks on the poster. He says the page gives an incomplete overview, since it only includes bloggers from Bitacoras. Moreover, they don’t take expertises and niches in account.
However, it remains interesting to create some sort of ranking. International marketing bloggers already have a top 150 list: The Advertising Age Power 150. The ranking is based on eight sources, like the Google Pagerank, Technorati Authority, Yahoo InLinks, and Alexa Traffic. Although the ranking won’t ever be perfect, most people do take these ranking seriously.
Maybe it’s an idea to start a European Technology Blog Top 100? Hm, I’m gonna take it to the drawing board. Stay tuned.
Written on February 12, 2008 – 9:06 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A week ago I reported that start-ups had a hard time seducing European venture capital firms to invest in their companies. The VC’s are backing the fewest companies on record since research group VentureSource began tracking investments in 1999.
Telefónica office in Madrid
After this disappointing conclusion, it may well be time for positive news about European venture capital. Well here you go: the Financial Times reports that Telefónica, the Spanish mobile operator, will on Monday announce a €40m venture capital fund to invest in new technology companies.
This move by Telefónica is part of their strategy to increase the accessibility to new technologies for mobile phones and the Internet.
Telefónica is one of the largest fixed-line and mobile telecommunications companies in the world. They’re second in terms of number of clients and in the top five in market value. The only companies that are doing better job globally are China Mobile, AT&T and Vodafone.
[WebTipr: David Petherick, United Kingdom]
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