Young Europeans do not want political parties in their lives. Only 4% of young people (15-29 year olds) participate in a political party or trade union (on Euronews (2:02 mark) from Eurostat statistics). This is a clear figure of what young people want or do no want. Political party politicians and their acolytes would quickly blame the education system, capitalism, the television or even the Playstation for the lack of interest in politics of young people.

Andrew Rasiej and I are excited to announce that next year's Personal Democracy Forum, our seventh, will be taking place on June 3-5 in New York City, with the main conference on June 3rd and 4th at the CUNY Graduate Center and an unconference on June 5th (location TBA). Early registration will open with special discount rates just after New Year's, so watch this space. In the meantime, we think you will want to hold the dates so you can join the illustrious group we have already confirmed as speakers:

An online fire is burning in Europe. It was set by what appears to be a designed campaign to transform the European intellectual property regime, towards a more restrictive set of rules directly affecting the fundamental rights of freedom of expression and information. We're seeing its implementation in Sweden, France, Italy, UK or at the EU level in Brussels.

Ears couldn't help but perk up when, at PdF Europe, a presenter showed this map of the European blogosphere and noted the almost total lack of overlap between national online conversations, but pointed to the middle of it all and said something to effect of 'that's Jon Worth.' As the European Union takes ever greater hold, with the legal enforcement of the Treaty of Lisbon just yesterday, is there a pan-European online political conversation? If not, why not, and should there be? The Brussels-based Worth, the blogger behind Euroblog, was nice enough to join me on IM for a chat.

Help us understand what the presenter at PdF Europe meant when identified you at the lonely center of that mapping of the European blog world?

First of all it's worth saying that Anthony [Hamelle of Linkfluence] was talking about political blogospheres, not blogospheres about cooking or Formula 1 racing. Essentially political blogospheres operate rather nationally in Europe. It's to do with languages, prevailing political culture, and the fact that the European Union as a whole does not necessarily lend itself to blogging. I am somewhere in that gap between the national blogospheres. I'm British, I live in Brussels, I am an EU politics person by background, and I can do tech. And I have been blogging about the EU for more than 4 years. So what transnational/EU wide political blogopshere that exists one way or another passes through my blog quite often.

I was not remotely surprised by what Anthony presented. It's essentially what I've intuitively understood.

Can you expand on that idea that "prevailing political culture" helps to explain why there doesn't seem to be a pan-European online conversation?...