Month: November 2004

Spinning around

Precis, The Association of Public Relations Consultancies in Sweden, are hosting an event tonight that I am going to attend. The event is called Spinn 2004 and during the evening Precis will hand out awards for best marketing PR in 8 categories. The name Spinn upset people at agency Spinn Action Marketing AB, who thought Precis should have managed to give their competition a name that had not been taken by an agency.

I have another problem with the word “spin”. It doesn’t have very positive connotations to it and I am surprised that the PR industry really wants to be associated with spin or to be recognized as spin doctors.

Some negative definitions of the word spin:

> twist and turn so as to give an intended interpretation; “The President’s spokesmen had to spin the story to make it less embarrasing”

> make up a story; “spin a yarn”

The name was coined by Citigate Gramma.

Swedish Television: Blogging is not ok

One of the leading Swedish bloggers, journalist Per Gudmundson has decided to quit blogging. He had come clean with his employer SVT (Swedish public service television) about his blog and his boss noted that the blog articles goes against the policy for SVT journalists to refrain from public statements or actions that might jeopardize the objectivity of the company [SVT]. And since blogging is a job at below minimum wage his decision was pretty easy. Job: yes. Blog: no.

Per says in his final blog post that “the blog is stopping me in my career and I need to move on”.

Sadly one of the few blogging journalists and one of the best blogs will be no more in the blogosphere. For some, blogs will be a career booster but for others it will be an obstacle. About three weeks ago Gudmundson was named Sweden’s fourth most influential blogger by media monitoring company Observer, but that information cannot have reached his boss at SVT.

UPDATE: Tobias Billström, member of the Swedish Parliament says about the decision:

– I question the management’s evaluation of Per Gudmunson’s blog. Of course a journalist can’t watch a demonstration he participates in himself, but to comment on different courses of events on a blog is not a problem for impartiality.

Swedish media about blogs

I was interviewed last week by news agency TT Spektra for a “how-to”-article about blogs. These articles will probably be published in several smaller Swedish dailies the coming week and maybe promote blogging on a wider scale in Sweden. The first article can be found online today in Hudiksvalls Tidning.

> Bloggar ger folket en röst.

> Så kommer du igång att blogga.

> 10 bra bloggsidor.

UPDATE: The article has now also been published in Ljusdals-Posten, Hälsinge-Kuriren and Karlskoga-Kuriren.

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Add Technorati to your browser

Technorati have launched a beta version of a new cool feature called Technorati This. Add it to your Links Toolbar and you can access Technorati from your browser, no matter what page you’re viewing.

You can use the Technorati This favelet in three ways:

– Select some text on any web page. Click the Technorati This favelet and it will search over 4.7 million weblogs for that text.

– While browsing any web page, click the Technorati This favelet and it will show you what bloggers are saying about that page right now.

– If the browser window is empty when you click the Technorati This favelet, it will ask you for a keyword or URL to search for.

More about Technorati This here.

Other useful favelets to add to your toolbar can be found here, for example Babelfish translations from Italian, French, German and Spanish into English. Finally I can read La Gazetta dello Sport in English.

Google reports success with internal blog

In an article in Network World, Jason Goldman, Blogger product manager at Google reports about the tremendous benefits from the first 18 months with an internal Weblog system. Google deployed an internal blog shortly after acquiring Blogger in early 2003. Says Goldman:

“Since then, we have seen a lot of different uses of blogs within the firewall: people keeping track of meeting notes, sharing diagnostics information, sharing snippets of code, as well as more personal uses, like letting co-workers know what they’re thinking about and what they’re up to. It really helps grow the intranet and the internal base of documents.”