Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
Read today on the Media Drop about problems with people sending trackback pings that have absolutely no relation to the post. It never occured to me that trackbacks could be abused, but it is very obvious once you think about it. All possibilities can be abused and exploited, just like email and comments.
…and it’s not even that new. Googling “trackback spam” gives you more than 9,000 hits! How long will we be able to have trackbacks that doesn’t require approval first?
Swedish business daily Dagens Industri‘s New York correspondent Lars Thulin yesterday went to a polling station, waited in line for the voting booth for 20 minutes, went in and checked out the voting machine. If he wanted to he could have voted. Problem is he is not a US citizen.
He cheated his way in by simply ignoring to have his signature checked and instead go straight to the voting booth line. Had he done it the proper way, the officials would have seen that he was not in the electoral register, but the world’s most powerful democracy was pretty easy to fool.
If he’d only had a camera phone with him to photograph the incident like Brian Nicks did when he tried to vote in California on Monday.
The Times today is shifting to full tabloid format for the first time in its 216 year history. The historic event gets covered from different perspectives in the Times and in rival paper The Independent.
Ever wondered how media so quickly are able to publish an obituary over a person who passed away? Well, in most cases it’s because of a highly skilled staff who are trained in research and used to speedy writing. But sometimes media write obituaries in advance to have them ready if a person who is ill is about to give up the ghost. Only trouble is if media happen to publish the obituary before the individual actually has died. This is exactly what happened to NRK.no, the website of the Norwegian broadcasting corporation NRK.
For one hour last Saturday, NRK.no had an article on the website about the death of Yasser Arafat. The article’s headline was “The star of Palestine has faded away”. The article continued “He never got to experience what he dedicated his life to; the proclamation of an independent Palestinian state. Nevertheless, Yasser Arafat’s name will always have a special standing in the history of the Palestinians and the whole Middle East.”
Link via Journalisten.no
Kristin Halvorsen, leader of Socialistisk Venstre, SV, (The Socialist Left Party) in Norway last week launched a blog. The premiere of the blog coincides with the launch of her book “Straight from the heart”.
The first two posts was by her personal “advisor” Roger, but then Halvorsen has been posting herself. She blogs about the American election, no/yes to EU and the rights for homosexuals to register a partnership, among other things. The blog has a comments function but no trackbacks or RSS feed visible, so she is not fully using the capabilities of a blog.
Fredrik Reinfeldt, are you reading this? Buy me lunch and I will show you how to launch a personal blog.
The Swedish software company Mindroute launches a new version of its content management software Lemoon which contains blogging capabilities. It is also possible to use Lemoon to publish RSS feeds. The president of Mindroute, Rickard Hansson, promises more blogging news during the coming months.