Author Archives: Tobias Schwarz

About Tobias Schwarz

German, turned 30 a while ago, balding slowly, hopefully with grace. A carnival junkie, who, after studies in business and politics in Mannheim, Paris, and London, is currently living in his hometown of Mainz, Germany, again. Became New Labourite during a research job at the House of Commons, but difficult to place in German party-political terms. Liberal in the true sense of the term.

His political writing is mostly on A Fistful of Euros and on facebook these days. Occasional Twitter user and songwriter. His personal blog is almost a diary. Even more links at about.me.

27, 491m.

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Since I doubt anyone of the afoe crew will be anywhere close to a computer when it will happen later tonight, this little announcement about the latest and probably last EU-enlargement in a while will have to do for the time being.

At midnight, Bulgaria and Romania will become members of the European Union, increasing the Union membership to 27 countries and 491million people – despite numerous remaining doubts about the countries’ ability to cope with the administrational demands of the EU and the imposition of special obligations and limitations, especially regarding the free movement of labour. Thus, as with the big Eastern enlargement in 2004, some commentators have called this enlargement-round a “second class” enlargement.

Still, that the countries’ accession has caused almost no public debate is probaly a consequence of the limited economic impact the two countries can possibly have, despite low labour costs. In 2004, Bulgaria’s and Romania’s GDP was a mere 0.2 resp. 0.6% of the joint EU-27 GDP.

Then again, on New Year’s Eve, all glasses are half-full and figures like the ones just mentioned only indicate a significant growth potential. Happy New Year!

A Fistful of Evro?

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I see from EurActiv that the Bulgarians are runing into some linguistic trouble over the single currency:

The country has expressed concern over the differences between Bulgaria’s Cyrillic and the EU’s Latin alphabets, in response to renewed European Central Bank (ECB) demands that ‘euro’ be spelled and pronounced with a ‘u’ and not a ‘v’ as Bulgarians wish (‘evro’).

(Strictly speaking of course the argument is whether or not the Bulgarians should be allowed to continue calling it the “евро”, not the “evro”, as nobody plans to use the Latin alphabet for the word.)

Nobody seems to have noticed that in Greek the word ευρώ is also pronounced “evro”. Those who are more familiar with ancient rather than modern Greek (which is probably the majority of those outside Greece who have bothered to think about this issue) will have assumed that the word is pronounced with only one consonant rather than two.

Anyway, it’s not as if other languages are uniform. If that Latvians can say “eiro” and the Maltese “ewro”, the Bulgarians should be allowed their spelling, and not be made to go down the road of the Slovenes, who are forced to use “euro” officially but continue to use “evro” unofficially.

Wikipedia has a page about this. (Of course.)

The Bob for the Best Weblog in English goes to

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Deutsche Welle’s “Bobs” Cermony in Berlin, photo by ix

paidcontent.org, Rafat Ali’s great blog and, not at all ironically, flourishing micropublishing business about the economics (well, actually more the business) of digital content. Congratulations!

I haven’t found any English blog covering the Award Ceremony taking place in Berlin right now, but if you can read German, check out wirres.net where Felix Schwenzel updates as the awards are handed out.

afoe 3.0a

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Someone once said that there’s nothing really new to the concept of „Web2.0“, that it is really just a marketing ploy designed to actually make those people (in German) get what it’s all about. Someone else said that it all could have been done just as well with a cgi and some Perl back in 1995. And that’s probably true in some sense. But just as my claim to a successful voice over IP telephone call using a 14.4kpbs modem in early 1995, it is also entirely misleading.

If you’ve not been on holiday for the last week, you’ve probably spent as much time on the web as you did in a whole month in 1995 – or more. In 1995, when Sandra Bullock ordered a pizza over the web in „The Net“, I had a good laugh thinking ‚why would anyone ever want to do that?’ Now, while the pizza is probably still best ordered with a traditional phonecall, the web has improved in a lot. Ten years ago, there was still scaffolding everywhere. Now, even if you’re not playing “Second Life“, it has become a not too uncomfortable place to hang out, read, write, watch crazy stuff, or chat with people.

Just as the social invention of the telephone followed its technological invention and, in many ways, surprised those who had to evaluate its potential value before, the web will keep surprising us. And occasionally, we will try to classify phases and identify them with numbers. So websites with increased interactivity and partly user created content – that’s web 2.0.

So what is 2.0 about afoe now?
Continue reading →

Good job, get a Bob!

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Well, that rhyme may not be a particularly, well, good job. But then, there’s really not that much that rhymes well with “BOB”, despite the fact that the BOBS, Deutsche Welle’s Blog Awards, have become a rather well known by now.

THE BOBs

And this year, A Fistful of Euros has been nominated in the category “Best Weblog (english)”.

So if you, gentle readers, think we deserve it more than any of the other great blogs on the shortlist, you can click here to go to their voting form and vote for us!