Finally things are starting to happen in the Swedish blogosphere. Thanks to an initiative of Stefan Geens and Erik Stattin, there will be a blog forum - simply called BloggForum Stockholm 2004 - on Nov 15, sponsored by Internetworld. The forum will have three different debates about politics, knowledge and media. I will be participating in the media session along with PJ Anders Linder, chief political editor of Svenska Dagbladet, Billy McCormac of JKL and Jonas Söderström of Cross Consulting. The session will be moderated by Mark Comerford from the Department of Journalism, Media & Communication at Stockholm University.

Entrance is free. Register on the website.

Swedish Internetworld launches an RSS-feed: http://internetworld.idg.se/tjanster/rss/rss.xml

The Swedish marketing magazine Sälj & Marknadsföring presents its list of Sweden's 100 most influential marketers (see pdf). Top 10:

1. Richard Sjöberg, Information Officer, Coca-Cola
2. Maria Erixon, Designer, Nudie Jeans
3. Thomas Areskoug, Brand Manager, V&S
4. Thommy Bindefeld, Head of Advertising, Indiska
5. Stefan Olander, Head of Advertising Europe, Nike
6. Anna-Lotta Model, Marketing Director, GM Norden
7. Karin Rågsjö, Information Secretary, Alkoholkommittén
8. Anne Thunman, Project Manager for Alcro Designers, Alcro Färg
9. Karin Ahlström Jensen, Information Officer, Öhrlings Pricewaterhouse Coopers
10. Michael Smirnoff, Information Officer, Nokia

There is not a single PR consultant on the top 100. Are they not (like the information officers) considered marketers?

Link via Researcher.se.

New PR blogs:

> David Kistle, The Chairman of IABC (International Association of Business Communicators)
> The Good Seed (Giovanni Rodriguez from Eastwick Communications)
> Drew B's take on tech PR
> JMWs blogg (Swedish)
> Södertankar (Pär Henriksson of JKL blogs in Swedish)

Links via PR Opinions, Media Guerilla and Billy Mccormac.

I wrote last Friday about how podcasting is spreading round the internet at warp speed. I did a follow up today, and the number of hits on Google has doubled in five days, from 66,000 hits on Friday, October 15 to 118,000 today on Wednesday, October 20. And it's not just talk (!), some are actually trying it out. Swedish blog pioneer Steffanie Müller has started audioblogging on her blog "logblogwhatever".

Footnote: Googling "podcasting" got 15-20 hits a month ago. On October 8 it gave you 13,000 hits. On October 15 you got 66,000 hits.

(This is "google journalism" at its finest...)

An 8-year old boy and a 56-year old woman yesterday were tragically stabbed to death in the Swedish town Linköping. There is just no way you can imagine the grief and the sorrow that has struck these individuals' families and close friends. When the two Swedish tabloids Expressen and Aftonbladet today had a photo of the boy on their posters, it is a hideous and extremely unnecessary exploitation of a tragic incident. This is stepping so far over the line that I can't even express what I'm feeling. Why the boy and not the woman? Why a photo at all? These are the victims, not the perpetrator (who of course hasn't been caught yet). As a father of two small children I urge media to protect our children and I wish no-one would buy these papers today.

One of the weirdest things about being in PR and having a blog, is to be on the receiving end of a PR pitch. I get emails now and then from PR people who want me to blog about a new book or a service. It is actually very rewarding for someone like me who make a living out of pitching others, to see what it feels like to get a pitch that is not personalized, misspelled or with a Word-file with "track changes" still in it (see Tom Murphy's comment on that pitch).

Up till now I haven't really found any of the pitches to be worth commenting on but today I got an email from John Gerstner about the launch of a new knowledge portal for communications, PR and marketing professionals called Communitelligence.com. It could actually be worth checking out in the near future. And I won't even say a word about how he sent me a press release today that was out on PRweb.com on October 8...

What happens when the rebel becomes market leader? Author Seth Godin's reaction to the success of the iPod is that he has become a "closet iPod user". He doesn't use the white earbuds because he doesn't want to be recognized as an iPod owner.

"Apple is at a critical fork in the road when it comes to the iPod," said ad man Drew Neisser. "You can already begin to see the initial iPod pioneers, who embraced the value of individuality, shunning the storm of homogeneity that's growing with each new purchase."

Godin tells a story about a friend who got a pair of black earbuds.

"He gets on the subway, being very independent and a maverick, which is what New Yorkers like to do, and he sees another guy across the car wearing black headphones. And this guy pulls out an iPod to adjust the volume. My friend catches himself giving this guy the look, the I've-got-an-iPod-too wink. It proves people like it when they find other people like them. People who don't like being part of the main tribe still like being part of a smaller tribe."

Wired has the complete story.

Ahoy, hockey buffs. The Swedish hockey web site Hockeymagasinet now has an RSS feed (in Swedish): http://hockeymagasinet.fpgroup.se/newsfeed.xml

ILO, the International Labour Organisation, will discuss a report called The Future of Work and Quality in the Information Society next week in Geneva. The report shows how new information technology has created more jobs globally in the media sector and that the demand for journalists will continue to be strong.

There is an interesting paragraph in the report about journalism and the impact of blogs.

Ultimately, the new media channels have in many ways turned primary sources and ordinary people into de facto journalists themselves, perhaps reducing the previous monopoly that journalists used to have in producing public information. However, they are also giving a greater voice to all of those people who feel, for one reason or another, and some of them justifiably, that the media do not reflect their views, while every month new electronic information sources appear also in some of the poorest, least developed nations where increasingly skilled news men and women are leaping with alacrity over several stages of technological development to exploit the new platforms. Meanwhile, weblogs have grown exponentially in importance, allowing readers of online newspapers and other web sites to see the original sources behind the news – a somewhat troublesome development for many media organizations and some public authorities. In addition, message boards and readers’ comments on Internet stories have become a discussion group in their own right. “Disintermediation” allows Internet users to go straight to the source of what they want. Has this diminished or improved the quality and availability of information and opinion? If the mass media were previously involved in one-way communication, disseminating the world-view of those that controlled it, that is no longer so, and communication can now be more truly interactive.

If it is "troublesome" for media organizations that weblogs make it possible for readers to see original sources behind the news, what does that tell us about how media operates today? It can only be a positive thing that transparency increases and media will find a way to adapt to this new world order.

More in Svenska Dagbladet (in Swedish). Full report (pdf).

There are no free lunches so the fact that ads are moving into our RSS feeds may be something we must accept (until Bloglines includes some filter function). But when the ads outnumber the real posts, it borders on spam.

From my Bloglines subscription to MediaGuardian, powered by Newsisfree.com:



UPDATE: More on the down side of RSS advertising.

You've just learned about blogs and wikis. Now you need to know the latest buzzword - podcasting, the process of sending audio content directly to an iPod or other MP3 player. Googling "podcasting" got 15-20 hits a month ago. On October 8 it gave you 13,000 hits. Today, one week later you get 66,000 hits. Now that's what I call a buzzword.

Steve Rubel has a good roundup for PR people. Wired also published a story about it last week.

Apparently Joshua Kinberg of Bikes Against Bush-fame is working on a video blog aggregator over at Vipodder.org. Stay tuned.

Swedish furniture giant IKEA is the target of this campaign from "Elite designers against IKEA" who portray IKEA as the source of all evil design. The designer Van den Puup writes:

"We design profound and beautiful furniture for those with wealth and taste. Which is why IKEA makes us furious livid and angry. Do their designs live, breathe and growl? Are they born from tears of pain? Do they gently touch the bottom of the human soul? Pah! Of course not, no more than weeds can attract a bee. The big blue place is odious, its affordable design is sickeningly shallow and we loathe it even more than we loathe football. Please join us in our unqualified hatred."

Or at least that is what we are supposed to believe. From what I can tell, this seems to be a marketing stunt by IKEA's Danish advertising agency Robert/Boisen & Like Minded. The domain elitedesigners.org is registered by Michael Robert at Robert/Boisen & Like Minded and on the ad agency's own web site, IKEA is listed as one of the clients. The agency has launched other web sites for IKEA, like IKEA-fans.dk with an amateurish look, complete with rotating gifs and dreadful design to look as non-corporate as possible.

Clever and fun you guys. Maybe this will start some buzz about IKEA. I've done my part.

UPDATE: It seems that this is part of an ad campaign in the UK with three tv commercials and print ads on the theme "At home with Van den Puup". Seems like a cool campaign, but since web sites have global reach we who don't see the rest of the campaign might not get the message.

I've been nagging about the lack of interest for blogging in Sweden. Now Dave Sifry of Technorati has some stats that might get a few local trend watchers up and running. Apparently the blogosphere doubles every five months and Technorati now tracks 4 million blogs. That figure was 3 million just three months ago. Ignore at your own peril. (Via Corporate Engagement).

In another post today, Sifry examines the relationship between blogs and big media in terms of inbound links. Big media sites are on top but "a large number of people are getting news, information, and opinion from outside of the mainstream media, and ... these sources are rivaling or exceeding the attention paid to smaller “professional” sites".

In Sifry's chart, the top five web sites ranked by number of inbound links are still traditional media web sites (www.nytimes.com as #1). But 20 of the top 40 are blogs, which shows how blogs are eating into big media's business concept of delivering consumer attention to its advertisers. If blogs are already this influential it can only mean that we are witnessing a transformation of considerable ad spending from big media to blogs. It may not yet have happened but ad money goes where eyeballs go, that's just the way it is.

Sifry also writes that there are approximately 8000 blogs that have between 100-1000 inbound sources and tens of thousands of blogs with between 50-100 inbound sources.

Journalists may sometimes depend on having a good relationship with influential PR people and therefor more willing to accept an embargo on a news story, but 1) you can never count on it and 2) bloggers don't. So if you are distributing a press release with embargo your whole launch plan might be out the window if the recipient doesn't feel like playing along with your rules. I never understood the purpose of an embargo anyway.

Sam Whitmore's Media Survey spills the beans on today's launch of MSNBC.com's RSS feeds. The story is a bit embarrasing for the PR agency who sent the email. The agency just changed name to DBC Public Relations Experts and then managed to spell the headline wrong: "EMABRGOED: MSNBC.com Users Get Personally Relevant Headlines Delivered Directly to Their Desktops". Maybe Sam didn't understand what emabrgoed meant.

Via Micropersuasion.

More Swedish media with RSS feeds. Today IDG launched an RSS feed for MacWorld.se (http://macworld.idg.se/tjanster/rss/rss.xml).

On top of that, Mikael Zackrisson, chief editor of Internetworld in Sweden, informs us that IDG has several other RSS feeds:

Computer Sweden - Latest news
IDG.se - Latest news
IDG Test centre - Latest tests
IDG Eforum - Latest posts in forum

Thanks for the tip Mikael.

Another Swedish PR agency has launched a blog about PR and communications, following in the footsteps of JKL and W PR & Info. This time it is JMW Kommunikation. The blog is in Swedish and has been up and running since August. The RSS feed is not visible on the site, but here is the address. Welcome to the blogosphere.

Dave Sifry has an interesting graph on the number of blog posts in the blogosphere and how it relates to certain events. The Kryptonite bike lock controversy for example created two spikes - first when the news broke in the blogosphere, and second when traditional media picked up on the story which made bloggers discuss the implications.

The Kryptonite case will go down in history as classic example on what happens to a company's reputation if it fails to handle crisis PR in a blog enabled world.

Via Mymarkup.

SR, the Swedish public service radio, have launched 33 RSS feeds (via Mymarkup and Persilja.net). Along with the feeds added below, my list of Nordic RSS feeds now has more than 110 feeds.

News:
SR Ekot - News
SR Ekonomiekot - Economy
SR Kulturnytt - Culture
SR Mitt i musiken - Music
SR Musikjournalen - Music
SR Radiosporten - Sport
SR Sisuradio - Finnish
SR Vetenskapsnytt - Science

Local news:
SR Blekinge
SR Dalarna
SR Gävleborg
SR Göteborg
SR Gotland
SR Halland
SR Jämtland
SR Jönköping
SR Kalmar
SR Kristianstad
SR Kronoberg
SR Malmö
SR Norrbotten
Radio Stockholm
SR Sjuhärad
SR Skaraborg
SR Sörmland
SR Uppland
SR Värmland
SR Väst
SR Västerbotten
SR Västernorrland
SR Västmanland
SR Örebro
SR Östergötland

As a reminder, here is my previous list of more than 80 RSS feeds for Nordic media. Included are also press releases RSS feeds.

Sweden:
Beyan.net - Kurdish news
Dagens Nyheter - Top headlines
Dagens Nyheter - News
Dagens Nyheter - Business
Dagens Nyheter - Sports
Dagens Nyheter - Football
Expressen - News
Expressen - Sports
Expressen - Entertainment
Motornyheter FART - Cars and motor sports
Motornyheter FART - Cars
Motornyheter FART - Motor sports
Ny Teknik Technology trade publication
Stockholms Fria Tidning - Opinion
Stockholms Fria Tidning - "Inledare"
Stockholms Fria Tidning - Sweden
Stockholms Fria Tidning - Culture
Stockholms Fria Tidning - Calendar
Stockholms Fria Tidning - Reports
Stockholms Fria Tidning - Sports
Stockholms Fria Tidning - Stockholm
Stockholms Fria Tidning - "Synpunkten"
Stockholms Fria Tidning - TV/radio
Stockholms Fria Tidning - Foreign
Svenska Dagbladet Daily
Sydvenska Dagbladet Daily
Yelah.net "Radical digital news"

Norway:
Aftenbladet
Aftenbladet - News
Aftenbladet - Local
Aftenbladet - Norwegian
Aftenbladet - Abroad
Aftenbladet - Business
Aftenbladet - Politcs