Constantin Basturea reports that he has more than 100 PR bloggers on his Blogdigger group “Headlines from PR Blogs”, up from 30 blogs in March last year. And that does not include the two Swedish blogs JMWs blog and JKL blog.
Year: 2005
Technology enables dialogue
Lundblad responds to my post yesterday about the importance of blogs. Among other things he writes: “But writing is the most important. Not blogging.” (What is blogging really?). And I agree, a democratic society benefits from having thinking citizens that are able to freely express what’s on their minds and blogs have enabled millions of people with easy access to a writing platform. But the technology does play an important role here and that’s why I pointed to syndication and connectivity yesterday. If we are to look at this topic from a democratic standpoint, then a million webpages with people writing is a good thing. But what is better than writing is dialogue. The way blogs enable people to engage in conversations with others is a strong power that has already brought down both politicians and media stars from their previously almost untouchable positions. This network effect would be hard to achieve if there were 6 million web diaries that only to a limited extent read and challenged each other.
About the connectivity: ego-searching on Google is not quite the same as checking Technorati links, for several reasons. Google is not updated (I think) as frequently and there is nothing that indicates that a new link automatically gets such a high rank in Google that you can easily find it. Technorati on the other hand is updated continuously. An hour after I wrote my last post, you could find it if you searched Lundblad’s domain on Technorati, and it was shown first because it was the latest link. And if you want to know what others write about your blog, you could do like me and create an RSS feed for Technorati links and subscribe to it in your news reader. The address to my feed is http://www.technorati.com/watchlists/rss.html?wid=13545. That way I don’t need to search myself, I get information automatically the minute it happens.
That is why I mean that the choice of channel is extremely important. Of course the writing is number one, that is the reason why we spend all these unpaid hours in front of the computer. But the result can be vastly different if you choose to write on a regular website or an RSS-enabled blog.
Blog or no blog – it matters
Nicklas Lundblad reflects on the current process at Internetworld to name Sweden’s best blogs and, as I interpret it, about why blogs are so darn important. He writes:
“…why is it so important for everyone to be a part of the blog phenomenon? I have a website – kommenterat – where I write.
That’s it folks. Is it a blog? Is it a wiki? Is it a Typepad-driven libertarian opinion machine?
Who cares?!”
Well, I do. There is a distinct difference between a website and a blog in that I would never visit Nicklas Lundblad’s site on a regular basis (sorry), but since it is now in a blog format with an RSS feed, I am able to subscribe to his texts and that makes it a hundred times easier to follow what he writes. I can scan his posts and read the ones I am interested in, without having to go to the website to check if there are any new updates.
And the connectivity between blogs makes them infectious. If Lundblad makes a Technorati search on his blog, he will find this post in an instant. That would never happen if we had two separate websites.
Let’s face it, a genius without a channel to reach an audience, will not be heard or read but a mediocre writer like myself have hundreds of subscribers much thanks to the ease of use of the blog medium. The choice of channel is everything.
Swedish blog awards – please vote for me
Swedish Internetworld has been kind enough to include my blog in the nominations for Best Blog, under the category “IT & Media”. 50 blogs in total are nominated in the four categories Politics, IT & Media, Culture and Misc. Voting ends on March 15.
If you like this blog please consider casting your vote here, just click the circle in front of “Media Culpa” and then click the grey button at the end of the page that says “Rösta” (“Vote” in Swedish). That’s all. Thanks.
DN: download instead of buy music
Coming from a company making its living producing intellectual property, today’s headline in Dagens Nyheter is all the more surprising. “Slipp slabbet, ladda ner istället” (“Avoid the trash, download instead”). DN today encourages readers to download 50 Cent’s new single “Candy Shop” to avoid seeing the distasteful cover (and indeed it is). But to most people, downloading equals getting access to illegal copies of digital music, and since iTunes does not exist in Sweden, and neither CDon nor Poplife has the single available for legal download, the suggestion can only be interpreted in one way. Instead of encouraging illegal filesharing, why not boycott 50 Cent all together until he realizes it’s the 21st century? [Article not online, appears on page 2 in DN Kultur.]