Month: June 2005

“Who reads blogs? I don’t get it.”

It’s an interesting phenomenon, journalists who take their first plunge into the blogosphere, read journalist blogs, find them boring and then conclude that blogs are pointless for one reason or another. Here’s the most recent example. A journalist at Arbetarbladet heads out on a quest to solve the mystery about blogs and starts with 1) Linda Skugge at Expressen, 2) Fredrik Virtanen at Aftonbladet, 3) Helle Klein at Aftonbladet. Maybe she read some more, but the article doesn’t give it away.

I guess it is natural to turn to the familiar and check out your buddies blogs. But by picking the low-hanging fruit they miss most of the point in blogs. It should be required by any journalist who intend to write about blogs in the future to check out one of the aggregator services like nyligen.se or svensk.lemonad.org so that they manage to read at least one non-journalist blog before announcing their verdict.

The journalist continues to question who on earth reads these blogs.

“Och vem läser dem? Vem har tiden och lusten att sitta och surfa runt bland de miljarder bloggar som finns? Jag fattar inte.”

Well, to quote my blog reader survey, the average Swedish blog reader is a man, 26-30 years old, has a college or university degree and would vote for the moderate party if there was an election in Sweden today. Half of them spend more time (34 minutes or more) per day reading blogs than the average Swede spends reading newspapers (28 min), like Arbetarbladet. Maybe the question should be the opposite – who has time to read all these newspapers?

The blog survey can be found here (pdf) in Swedish. An English version is just about ready and will be up any day.

Blognapping common in Poland

Kaye Trammell has a excellent podcast about blog research that I recommend that you listen to. Some of her comments in regards to what motivates people to blog are:

– Bloggers are mostly motivated by self expression – a will to share thoughts and feelings with others.

– People who give feedback in form of comments are motivated by social interaction – a desire to interact.

– People who give feedback in the form of trackbacks are motivated by information – a will to share interesting information.

I believe this graph is associated to this research.

Dr. Trammell also mentioned a Polish blog survey that found that bloggers in Poland are more often female than male and that female bloggers are more motivated to blog by social interaction reasons than male bloggers. Polish blogs are often password protected so they are not open for everyone to read. It is also common in Poland that people steal others blogs, which means that they try to find out their login and password and then take over the blog.

LA Times wikitorial fails

Updated. Kaye Trammell posts about an experiment at LA Times called the wikitorial “that allows readers the ability to re-write published editorials”.

The paper wrote on June 17: “Who knows where this will lead? It may lead straight into the dumpster of embarrassing failures. Or it may lead to a new form of opinion journalism, reflecting the opinions of everyone who chooses to participate.”

The first day was declared a success. However, the site has already been shut down due to abusive use.

Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material.

Thanks and apologies to the thousands of people who logged on in the right spirit.

Sydsvenskan about Adland

Sydsvenskan writes about Adland which undoubtedly is the largest blog run by a Swede. Congrats Åsk.

“Medan svenska bloggare med runt 3000 besökare om dagen bråkar om vems blogg som är störst sitter svenska Åsk Wäppling i Köpenhamn och räknar in tio gånger så många surfare på sin sajt.”

But the article should have included a link to the blog.