[We are getting suggestions from our readers about interesting initiatives and speakers for the PDF Europe conference. Thank you all.]

• EU | The European Commission Youtube channel...and a strange brand association
  EUtube is the Youtube channel of the European Commission, providing instructive and sometimes funny videos on many issues and EU initiatives, with a pretty innovative attitude.
  For example, watch the funny "Chemical party":

  But, as many observers pointed out, many of those videos use sex as their selling point.
  The EP webeditors have a roundup of those videos and reflect on the weird brand association and the way it is enacted: "I have to note in passing that the Commission is careful not to cross certain lines of political correctness. Different sexual orientations are represented, and there is a post-feminist aura about the women – these are not the girls gratuitously draped over the bonnets of fast cars beloved of seventies advertisers, but empowered twenty-first century women. Indeed, it transpires that the shower woman is no model, but the real thing, the young entrepreneur behind the foil-wrapped plastic thing. (A thing which, one notes, also serves an eminently politically correct purpose.)
  It seems a new, perhaps bold strategy, and some video may even go viral, but is it correct for an institution to use this kind of communication? The question remains open, even though, as they say, "Somehow, the Commission brand doesn’t say “sex” to me."

• EU | Digital natives turning stakeholders: a crowded are already?
  Digital natives are and will be crucial in the process of changing society and institutions. Citizens for Europe is an association of young adults, whose objective is "to foster and support the European Union project by developing and promoting a new and modern form of a transnational EU citizenship, that is emancipated from national and cultural attributes and empowers citizens in the EU to fully exert their desire for political participation".
  Young people's eParticipation seems to be a hot topic, since that projects like these are flourishing in the EU: eParticipation researcher Peter Cruickshank notices that Citizens for Europe is overlapping with HUWY (a couple of weeks ago we talked about it), a similar project.
  Is it becoming a crowded area already?Could it be an issue in terms of effectiveness of their activities?
• EU |  A serious EU blogger...
  Last Monday we reported on Julien Frisch's liveblogging at the EPP summit, an occasion to discuss about the accreditation of bloggers to the EU institutions, a debated topic in the euroblogosphere.
  But who should get accreditation? Is there a definition of "accreditable blogger" that can be used to work on the issue?
  The European citizen suggests one:

  ...a serious EU blogger is someone who has written about the EU for a year, over the course of the year. The articles wouldn't need to be spread out (or some figure like 2 posts per month given), but picking up on some matters of EU affairs as they affect the main theme of the blog over the year. For borderline cases, where the blogger hasn't written a lot/often about EU affairs, an extra condition of having contacted an MEP/Commissioner/EU official or institution for information that they used in a post would show some serious interest in following up and investigating an issue.

  Do you agree?

• UK | Power to the people: a local politics Manifesto
  Last week Tweetyhall attended the National Association of Local Councils (NALC) and has a report on the meeting and on the launch of their Manifesto:

  “The grassroots of our democracy works tirelessly to represent the local community, providing services to meet local needs and working to imporve the quality of life and comunity well- being.

  We need local councils to be able to play their part in meeting the economic, social, environmental and political challanges facing our country… There is also a fundamental need for greater recognition of the positive contrbution local councillors make…

  But through our approach to localism we must also achieve better performance, greater efficiency and ensure local councils are effective.”

  TweetyHall works on local politics: last March they launched the Social Media Guide for councillors, also collecting best practices from all over UK.

• EU | From our readers: The Future and Emerging Technologies Open Scheme
  Our reader and twitter follower Pietro Speroni points out to the Future and Emerging Technologies Open Scheme, "a roots-up approach for exploring promising visionary ideas that can contribute to challenges of long term importance for Europe. The scheme stimulates non-conventional targeted exploratory research cutting across all disciplines and acts as a harbour for exploring and nurturing new research trends and helping them mature in emerging research communities."
  Are you interested? FET-Open operates a continuous proposal submission scheme.