Year: 2005

Sweden’s no 1 daily Dagens Nyheter today has a long article about blogs and their role in the next Swedish election and I’m interviewed (second time my blog appears in DN this week). The article can be found here.

[Edit: bad grammar]

Annica Tiger is the queen of blogs. ICA-Kuriren has the full story. More here.

Via Poynter Online I notice that Google have launched a beta version of a service where users can upload videos of any size and Google will host it for free. Google Video Upload Program allows you to charge whatever you want for users to download your videos.

Poynter writes:
“Another angle to consider is the effect this will have on news. If someone captures an incredible event with a camcorder, how many would be inclined to give it to a local news channel for free when they have a free micropayment system to sell it to a worldwide audience?”

Could mean a lot for the development of citizen journalism.

I participated in Global PR Blog Week 1.0 last year and now it’s time for the sequel.

WHAT
The Global PR Blog Week 2.0 is an online conference on how new media technologies are changing the practice of Public Relations and corporate communications. We’re talking weblogs and participatory journalism, wikis, podcasting, and RSS – but the list of topics is open.

WHEN
Sometime between May and October 2005, most likely the week starting June 13.

WHERE
On the Web. The conference planning is hosted by the NewPR Wiki, and the conference will take place at www.globalprblogweek.com.

WHO
People interested in the subject of the conference. You don’t have to be a blogger in order to participate.

1. You can be an organizer. We need a small, result-oriented, consensus-driven 🙂 group of people that will take care of all the aspects of the conference: hosting, web design, press release writing, editing, communicating with participants, etc. All organizers are volunteers, and they will receive credit for their contribution.

2. You can be a participant, if you are interested in posting an original, consistent article, or an audio interview/debate (podcast) on the conference’s weblog.

The number of people blogging on PR-related issues has grown since July 2004, from about 30 to more than 180. We’ll have to find a way to:

* have great quality content
* accommodate as many participants as possible
* encourage new voices to join the conversation
* organize the content in a way that makes sense for readers.

Strongly encouraged:

* original content. No republishing or refactoring of old articles.
* fresh content. Not yet another “blogging is good for business” type of article.
* research. Quantitative research, case studies, best practices.
* collaboration. Articles written by two or more authors.
* group discussions. Podcasts featuring more than one interviewee. Round tables. Debates.
* non-commercial, non-partisan approach. Don’t pimp your company, services, or expertize; put everything in a larger context.

HOW
There are many decisions to be made: what topics should be excluded, if the numbers of postings/participant should be limited, how to select postings/authors, who will make the selection and on what criteria, and so on.

1) If you want to participate in the decision making process, subscribe to the discussion list available at http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/prblogweek2/ (send an e-mail to prblogweek2-subscribe@yahoogroups.com – your subscription will be approved in the next 12 hours).

Please note that, for transparency purposes, this is a PUBLIC list, so all messages and archives are public. No other data (like e-mail addresses) are public.

2) If you DON’T want to participate in the decision process, but you WANT to participate to the event, then please send an e-mail to Constantin Basturea (cbasturea at gmail.com) or Elizabeth Albrycht (ealb at ampcomm.com) with the title of the article/ posting/ podcast you want to contribute, and we’ll add it to a special page on the NewPR Wiki. Later, you might have to send a half-page summary of your contribution.

The weblog’s content will be licensed under a Creative Commons license (its type will be determined later).

GET UPDATES
If you want to get updates about the event, you can:

* watch this page on the NewPR Wiki:
http://www.thenewpr.com/wiki/pmwiki.php/PRBlogWeek2/HomePage
* subscribe to the RSS feed of the discussion groups:
http://rss.groups.yahoo.com/group/prblogweek2/rss
* read the messages on the discussion list:
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/prblogweek2/
* subscribe to Global PR Blog Week’s RSS feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/globalprblogweek

SPREAD THE WORD
Feel free to post this announcement on your weblog, or to e-mail it to someone who might be interested in participating.

Centrum mot rasism (Center Against Racism) urge consumers to boycott ice cream manufacturer GB Glace because their advertising is racist. CMR mean that the ads for Nogger Black are “tasteless with a touch of racism” because the licorice, the graffiti like type face and the name Nogger all give associations to the word “nigger”.

“I GB-reklamen omformar ett hjärta texten: Nogger + Lakrits = sant. Bredvid står det Nogger Black i graffititypsnitt. Genom reklamkampanjen läggs symboler som anspelar på svarthet ihop, förpackas och säljs: den svarta bakgrundsfärgen; namnet nogger och så den svarta lakritsen.

Varför finns det ett sådant behov av att framkalla dessa associationer? Är det bara en slump att dessa symboler implicit har “negern” som källa och mål för sina tankeanknytningar?”

CMR manage to forget that Nogger comes from “nougat” and that the brand name has been around for years. Now CMR have reported GB Glace to DO, the Ombudsman against ethnic discrimination, which is a great move. I guess that DO has absolutely nothing else to do and we need to see those tax kronor work a little harder. Besides, this whole story puts a spotlight on potential hidden messages in the brand names of ice creams. Who would have thought that GB Glace secretely are manipulating our brains via ice creams? See these ice creams as an example:

> 88:an – Obviously they are promoting a promiscuous lifestyle which goes against all moral values of [pick your religion of choice]. The number 88 is used in sexual parlance to describe oral sex performed twice (ate twice).
> King Cone – The king of all ice creams and feminist target no 1, where is Queen Cone? And don’t you dare make it smaller than the King.
> Solero – A pink ice cream named after a town in Italy. A clear case of discrimination against Italians since it cements a view that Italians are lazy, spend most of the day at the beach and in general being girlie men dressed in pink.
> Sandwich – Both sexist and racist at once. Consists of two brown biscuits surrounding a piece of vanilla ice cream. As you all know, biscuit in Swedish is “kex”, also a slang term for girl, so the ice cream symbolises a threesome with two black women and a white male.

Let’s all help fight the important ice cream driven discrimination in society and for a moment forget about less important cases like immigrants being denied apartments or this open minded guy. [I hope you get that I’m joking.]

Skype Journal has a detailed instruction on how to record conversations over Skype and turn them into podcasts.

“For the last few days I’ve been recording podcasts using Skype. As the call ends with a couple of clicks it is converted to mp3 and uploaded to a blog.”

Sounds easy, right?