The Euroalert Community expands to Google+

In addition to wish you a happy and great 2012, we want to start sharing with you our new Euroalert's Google+ page. This page has been created to provide a new place to share our contents and for the conversation among the Euroalert Community members. If you add Euroalert page to your Google+ circles, you can make comments to the most significant contents provided by Euroalert. Of course, you can keep doing +1 to any content we publish and you liked or that have been useful for you.

Likely you are already part of one of the platforms and services that we use to enable to the Euroalert Community members a direct way to enjoy our contents. However, we will use this post to summarize all the services where you can find our contents completely for free. For example, more than 2200 users are already following Euroalert.net content concerning the European Union in both English and Spanish via Twitter. If you decide to follow Euroalert on Twitter, you will be able to find the latest news about the EU, the EU grants to finance projects and information on relevant public contracts and tenders. In other words, you will enjoy a small sample of the free contents published on the Euroalert website and included in more advanced products and services that you can find in our online store.

If you use other social networks like Facebook, Euroalert has also a page there and you can always contact us through this page, and through Euroalert page on Linkedin. Our team is available to receive your comments and suggestions through these channels in addition to other more traditional ways such as our e-mail.

On the other hand we also want to remind you about Euroalert free newsletter, that is currently being sent to several thousand people every week, and in which we inform on the most significant up to date European content, EU grants and public contracts. Besides of course this blog, which has as main objective to keep you up to date on our product enhancements and our small achievements as a company. Through Euroalert's profile on SlideShare we share materials from all the events where we participate with the aim of contributing with our experience as a company. From Euroalert albums in Picasa you can download the photos that we have taken in our visits throughout Europe and that we provide to the whole Community.

We would like to know your opinion, as we are always listening to our users in order to figure out the best ways to improve our services, so you can enjoy all the content related to the EU that we provide to the Euroalert Community. By the way, just for those who are already part of our Community, you will enjoy special offers and promotions like the one that we have just launched. Inserting the EURLRT11 code, you are able to get a discount on public contracts alerts and on the customized newsletter on European information.

Europe around blogs

As you know, in Euroalert.net we bet for the blogosphere as a communication tool that uses the possibilities of the Internet to publish ideas in a mass medium, and this is a way of democratizing information and opinion in a global society.

Therefore, from Euroalert.net we crawled the web looking for new blogs where you can expand your vision on the European Union and its present, and we have updated and expanded Euroalert blogs directory. It compiles both personal blogs and general information and institutional blogs, all of them with the common characteristic of having the European Union as its main axis.

If you write or follow a blog about the EU and want to appear in our directory, please contact us and we will visit it. We will review it for review before inclusion in a future update Euroalert blogs directory.

The “most aware” Europe's Ear

A complete success, that's what's making Macarena Rodríguez with her blog La Oreja de Europa (Europe's Ear). Just a couple of days ago, we knew about La Oreja de Europa being elected as the Spanish representative in the Internet category for the 2009 European Parliament Prize for Journalism.

The European Parliament Prize for Journalism, which the EP awards for the second time in 2009, is a public reward for all those journalists who cover EU issues and contribute to a better understanding and image of Europe among its citizens. It is in the first phase of the EP Prize of Journalism, where La Oreja de Europa has been shortlisted as the Spanish representative in its category.

Euroalert.net has been in luck having Macarena as a contributor sending us some articles from the very heart of Brussels for the current news from the European Union section, and we are, of course, very happy for her nomination. Congratulations Macarena!, you are The most aware Europe's Ear ;-) All Euroalert.net Team wishes you the best for the finals!!!

Bye, bye 2008...

We have almost reached the end of the year and, as everyone does, it's time for Euroalert.net to turn a look back and see what these last twelve months of work have been.

In 2007 we already paved the way for new developments and set some objectives for this year always seeking to offer you more and better contents and tools. We are not going to bore you with a listing of aaaaaal the posts we've sent you this year (for those of you who are in a nostalgic mood today, you can have a look at the list of post published by month... :)), but what we would like to do with you is remember those changes and improvements we are most proud of.

2008 has been the year when we formally launched the new international version of Euroalert.net and, as a consequence, when this international Euroalert.net official blog was born. Since then, we have little by little been adding to this version features and tools which were already available for the Spanish version, and today, nearly at the end of the year, we can affirm that the international Euroalert.net version has already become an adult ...

Some new features were added during this year for the automatic publication of EU contents in any site or blog using Euroaler.net widgets, such as new icons, buttons and tools to improve their aspect when you implement them in your own web or blog, and some other possibilities to improve their layout and give you more options to include them.

But we have also made some improvements in the way we publish everyday contents in the Euroalert.net site. As accessibility is one of our main concerns when developing such features, one of the changes we introduced was the new format for the contact addresses which are referred to in all the tenders and commercial opportunities we publish.

Some challenges we had to deal with over the last year came directly from the EU, such as the adaptation of the tenders and commercial opportunities section of Euroalert.net to the new published CPV codes, which we made from the very first day of their official introduction, both for the publication in Euroalert.net and for the filters introduced in our widget.

Besides all this, the blog itself has also come through some improvements. Once the Euroalert.net Official shifted its regularity from a fortnight to a weekly basis, we decided that these posts should also have their place in the newsletter, giving an opportunity to all those who did not knew about it, to join the Euroalert.net community.

As we found out that it was an interesting information for you all, we started to create the Euroalert.net Directory of EU blogs. Your contributions have been, and still are, really valuable for this task, and we therefore keep on encouraging you to send us all your suggestions about useful interesting EU blogs.

And, for those of you who are Facebook users, 2008 has been the year when we released the Euroalert.net Facebook fan page, so that the community would have a new space where they can meet and interact.

Let's leave this post as an exercise to review the work of a whole year. A year in which we hope Euroalert.net has provided you with more useful and interesting contents for your work. We will post on our new ideas for 2009 and the projects we plan to launch when the New Year comes, as the starting shot...

So, the last thing for us to do, is to wish you all to celebrate a great farewell for 2008 and welcome year 2009, which we hope it will be full of joy, success and new projects for all of you. We also hope to be here with you, offering always the best.

Happy 2009 for everyone!!

A new Directory of Blogs about the EU!

July is coming to its end... And although some of you might already be suntanned, or are about to flight to your holiday destinations, we can't stop giving you some news. So, we will finish this month announcing that we have just inaugurated a new content section: the Directory of Blogs about the EU of Euroalert.net!

During the last years the blogosphere has not stopped growing and, step by step, a lot of Euro-fans, Euro-sceptics, Euro-students, Euro-journalists, Euro-politicians, ..., and many other kind of internauts interested by the adventure of the EU, have joined it. Well, now in Euroalert.net we have a new space specially dedicated to them, a new space for you... :)

We are just getting started and for the moment we have a short selection, so all your contributions will be welcomed! If you have among your favourite blogs some that you think could be interesting for our Community, or if you maintain your own blog about the EU, just send us an email so we can have a look at it and add it to the Directory.

We will keep on updating the Directory with your contributions and with all the blogs we will find interesting for you. And don't forget that Euroalert.net is multilingual :), so if you have some Spanish skills, have a look at the Spanish version of the Directory of blogs!

Euroalert blog posts in our weekly newsletter

As all of you know, this blog is mainly dedicated to the new features and improvements that we are adding continually to Euroalert.net. Today's topic will be brief, telling you about the European newsletter from Euroalert.net, which has been weekly since last month. We hope now that subscribers to the newsletter, whom still are many more than those subscribed to this blog, will be better informed of the new services we are releasing.

If you are still not a user of our newsletter, you can subscribe by entering your email address and start receiving every week an essential selection of information published in Euroalert.net . We will not request more personal information because it is not necessary to receive the newsletter in your email inbox. Furthermore, if you decide to stop receiving, it is possible to cancel your subscription very easily, :)

For those of you only interested in information from our blog, in the lateral panels you have links for subscription to the most popular feed aggregators:

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