...check back later.

A guy takes a photo of a photographer taking a photo. Guy posts photo of photographer on Flickr. A friend of the photographer finds the photo and the photographer then joins Flickr and posts the photo she took while being photographed. Phew... You'd better read the story at FlickrBlog instead. It's quite amazing.

New York Times Link Generator: Creating weblog-safe links to NY Times articles.

Hardly anyone reading PR blogs could have escaped last week's hoopla about Jay Rosen's attack on PR bloggers accusing PR bloggers of ignoring the Armstrong Williams-Ketchum affair. For those of you who missed the whole thing, I list some links at the bottom of this post.

Now it seems that yet another journalist got paid to promote an initiative from the Bush administration. Maggie Gallagher had a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to help promote the president’s initiative encouraging marriage as a way of strengthening families. But she failed to disclose it. In her syndicated column she dismissed the arguments against "President Bush's modest marriage initiative" as "nonsense".

“Did I violate journalistic ethics by not disclosing it?” Gallagher said yesterday. “I don’t know. You tell me.” She said she would have “been happy to tell anyone who called me” about the contract but that “frankly, it never occurred to me” to disclose it.

Duh, yes, that would be pretty obviuos.

Later in the day, Gallagher filed a column in which she said that “I should have disclosed a government contract when I later wrote about the Bush marriage initiative. I would have, if I had remembered it. My apologies to my readers.”

It never occured to her, and she didn't remember. How lame is that?

Considering Jay Rosen's response, it is important for both PR professionals and journalists to clearly state that the practice of payola is not acceptable.

Footnote: Links about the Armstrong Williams debacle:

Jan 7: USA Today reveals that PR agency Ketchum paid Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote the No Child Left Behind initiative.

Jan 7: Richard Edelman responds.

Jan 9: Jeremy Pepper responds.

Jan 11: Half-hearted response from PRSA.

Jan 14: Shel Holz comments.

Jan 19: Jay Rosen blasts the PR blogosphere for not commenting enough about the incident. PR bloggers try (and succeed to some extent) to prove him wrong and that his research is shallow.

Jan 20: Lisa Stone at PressThink does a follow up.

Jan 20: NY Times (reg required) about Ketchum's apology.

The aftermath:

Jan 21: Shel Holz again.

Jan 21: Elizabeth Albrycht

The new prime minister of Ukraine Viktor Yushenko has a blog-like personal site which is enabled with an RSS feed. (English version here, and RSS). Yet again we see that the former proud IT nation Sweden is beaten back to the stone age by less developed but more clever nations. Sigh.

OK Sweden, let's pull our act together. Things that should be RSS enabled in 2005:

From the parliament/Riksdag:
* Minutes from debates in the parliament - It would increase the transparency and the interest from ordinary citizens in different political topics.
* Press releases
* Calendar of the parliament

From the Swedish National Labour Market Administration (AMV)
* Platsbanken - the web site with vacant jobs

Movies:
* SF.se - movie premieres based on my choice of location

E-commerce stuff:
* Tradera.com - RSS for different categories
* Hemnet.se - houses for sale based on my preferences

Businesses:
* Press rooms (like this one) [disclosure: this is my employer]

I'm sure I can think of a hundred more, but that's about enough of free lunches.

Swedish blogger Sara thought that an ad from L'Oréal could be interpreted as being pedophile-like. She reported it to ERK (The Trade Council Against Sexist Advertising) and sent out a press release. A TV station commented on the story and it didn't take long before L'Oréal had responded and promised not to use the ad again. The reason the photo looked like a man holding a child was that the breasts of the woman had been retouched (read removed). Well done Sarah and a swift and correct response from the advertiser.

Before and after retouching the photo:

The end of the first year of blogging is approaching and I thought I'd post some stats from my blog.

I have two RSS feeds:
http://www.kullin.net/feed/atom.xml
http://feeds.feedburner.com/MediaCulpa

The first feed currently has 88 subscribers in Bloglines. The second feed has 70 subscribers, according to my Feedburner stats, of which about a fourth are from Bloglines. I'm guessing (dreaming?) that the Atom feed in total has between 250 and 350 subscribers based on current research that indicate Bloglines market share to be between 25% and 33%. That would mean a total of 320-420 subscribers, which isn't that bad actually. But that might be too optimistic considering that many readers don't read Atom feeds. My reader stats from Feedburner:


A further analysis of the most popular posts, clearly showed that information related to the tsumani tragedy drew considerably more attention than other posts, the top post more than 12,000 click-throughs. Stats for the Feedburner feed:

Rank/Click-Throughs/Content Item

1/12388/Ministry for Foreign Affairs finds missing Swedes with SMS
2/75/Swedes: "What is a blog?"
3/61/Newsweek about participatory journalism
4/59/Check out Global PR Blog Week 1.0 next week
5/58/Timbro in the blogosphere #4
6/55/PR blogging in Iran
7/54/BitTorrent video files from the tsunami
8/48/RSS to be included in Apple's browser Safari
9/42/Accusations of plagiarism at Dagens Nyheter
10/42/Mother in photos survived tsunami

Unique visitors/page views on the web page (stats from April 2004 and onwards:

April: 274/299
May: 1,696/2,221
June: 1,829/2,410
July: 1,653/2,028
August: 3,021/3,737
September: 3,602/4,675
October: 2,952/3,847
November: 6,389/8,955
December: 12,194/14,919
January: 9,797/11,586 (Jan 1 - Jan 25)

Total: 43,483/54,780
Average per day: 119/150

Top referrers:
PR Opinions 113
Technorati 79
Micro Persuasion 59

Giovanni Rodriguez, vice president at Eastwick Communications predicts that lawyers will be the focal point of 2005 due to the unknown territory that new media constitutes.

With the rapid emergence of new media (blogs, wikis and other tools), marketers are now confronting an unprecedented number of questions about the law, technology and marketing reform. [...] More than anyone, the American lawyer will take center stage in 2005, sweating and vetting the biggest questions of the year -- and taking and receiving the biggest rewards and punishments.

His top 10 predictions for 2005 include The rise of citizen journalism, Marketing gets transparent and Open-source marketing. I second that.

Commuter reading: more on the tyranny of choice.

"Maximizers," people whose goal is to get the best possible result when they make decisions and "satisficers," people who seek only "good enough" results from their choices, are the ones that are most troubled by an abundance of choice. [From Feb, 2004]

MotherJones.com writes about George W. Bush's inaugural address and apart from the political comments, the article is a ruthless dressing-down of the American press.

"In a world where Gaia -- the Earth as a single throbbing organism -- is already a cliché; where "globalization" remains a buzzword; and where we happen to be ruled by the greatest geopolitical dreamers and gamblers in our history, our demobilized media treats the world, if at all, as a set of hopeless fragments and just doesn't consider puzzling them together part of the job description. If you want to grasp our world as it is, you might actually have to click off that TV, use your local paper to wrap the fish, and head for the Internet."

The Swedish Language Council call themselves "the official language cultivation body of Sweden" and it has "no legal powers but fulfil their task through recommendations". That means that whatever use of the Swedish language the Council recommends, most official bodies and media will conform to it. However, one of the Council's recommendations on how to use the Swedish language is very unlucky, namely the translation of SUV to Swedish, which is translated to stadsjeep, or "city jeep".

One could argue that it infringes on a company's immaterial assets, in a way that might degenerate the Jeep brand name. I've been posting about this before, without much reaction.

On the Council's website there is a FAQ section which contain the very question on how to translate SUV.

In Swedish:

Fråga:
Hur skriver man biltypen SUV så att alla förstår vad som menas?

Svar:
Skriv stadsjeep.
SUV av eng. Sport Utility Vehicle är onödigt att införa.

In English:

Question:
How do you write the type of car called SUV so that everyone will understand what you mean?

Answer:
Write stadsjeep/city jeep.
SUV from English Sport Utility Vehicle is unnecessary to introduce.

I think they are wrong for two reasons. First, regarding the word "stad" (city). A survey by Bil Sweden showed that SUV's are predominantly not bought by people in the city, so the term city jeep makes little sense. Second, Jeep is a registered trademark by DaimlerChrysler and it can't simultaneously be a registered trademark, and a generic term in the same product category.

Recently some Swedish media have started to use the term suv (pl. suvar) which is more appropriate. I could learn to use that term and hopefully the Swedish Language Council could reconsider before SUV Expo in Täby in april when a lot of media will report about "suvar".

I'm so not going to start with this, because I know I wouldn't be able to stop. Blogshares is a "fantasy stock market where weblogs are the companies. Players invest fictional dollars on shares in blogs. Blogs are valued by their incoming links and add value to other blogs by linking to them. Prices can go up or down based on trading and the underlying value of the blog."

Here's how my blog is doing, currently valued at $71 (is that good or bad?). A bunch of other Swedish blogs are in the game, like Patrick Strang, Stefan Geens and Erik Stattin. And you need to picht in $160 to get a share of Annica Tiger.

Reporters Without Borders are accepting nominations for "outstanding examples of blogs defending free expression". The organisation will compile a shortlist from which online users vote to choose the best. The motive behind the awards:

"We want to draw attention to the importance of weblogs in countries where the traditional press is under the control of the authorities. Throughout the world, Internet users are adopting this new tool to combat censorship and circulate independent news and information."

Nominees should have been up and running for at least six months and not belong to a governmental or non-governmental organisation.

Link via Yelah.

Free papers in metropolitan areas increase their circulation at the expense of their paid colleagues. Stockholm City increased circulation 32% to 531,000 readers last fall compared to the same period in 2003 and at this pace will be larger than Göteborgs-Posten in the next survey. Metro Stockholm gained 8% to 681,000.

Traditional (paid) dailies like Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet drop in circulation, DN down 2% to 897,000 and SvD down 2% to 468,000. Malmö-based Sydsvenskan drops 1% to 198,000 while Gotheburg’s Göteborgs-Posten increases 3% to 577,000 readers.

The tabloid Expressen is closing in on rival Aftonbladet. Expressen is up 2% to 1,207,000 readers while Aftonbladet is more or less stable at 1,425,000 readers.

All according to Orvesto research published in Dagens Media.

If your car breaks down, cross your fingers it won't do it on a Sunday. I came to think of this as I read Chris Anderson's blog The Long Tail. He writes about the long tail concept as something that emerged in two steps, the first being "the abundance boom of the 1990s that arrived with an explosion of variety on supermarket shelves". The exploding supply of a wide range of consumer products even made it difficult for consumers - how could you choose between 150 kinds of toothpaste or 273 versions of cereal? It even introduced the concept of the "tyranny of choice" .

In many ways that's true in most industrialized nations, but in other cases the interaction between the market forces supply and demand are not working properly. Last week my car wouldn't start because the battery had gone to meet the battery maker, and it was time to buy a new one. Problem was that it was Sunday and the retailers I knew about that sell auto parts were closed. Idiot that I am, I borrowed a car from a friend and went to the nearest gas station thinking that I could easily get one there, but gas stations today hardly sell any products with a connection to vehicles. Instead, antifreeze fluids and wiper blades are hidden behind racks of the latest DVD's, freshly baked cinnamon rolls and four isles of groceries.

At my first stop, they had batteries but they didn't carry one that fit my Saab 9-5, Sweden's third most common car brand. At my second stop they only had a few different batteries left, none which fit my car. At my third stop I struck gold, i.e. they could offer me the choice of one battery at the reasonable price of 800 SEK (about 90 euro).

And it's not like I live in the middle of nowhere, I live in a suburb to Stockholm, in a city with the third highest average income in Sweden so if I want to spend my money on a product I expect that I would have a few choices on where to spend them. Not so in Sweden. The same goes for clothing and several other consumer products. Have you ever tried to buy winter overalls for your kids in December? Impossible, all the good ones are taken. Another example, I am tall and skinny and tried to buy a pair of black corduroy pants in January, which I guess is pretty late in the season and had to go to a bunch of stores to find a pair that fit. And if you wanted the best Christmas presents, don't wait until the last week to buy that cool Spider Man game, or you might be stuck with a geeky animal puzzle. I could go on and on.

One could argue that gas stations get a higher revenue from selling DVD's than from selling batteries, but if they won't do it, consumer demand should allow someone else to. After all, there are 4 million cars in use in Sweden and they all need new batteries once every few years. Question is why there is no "tyranny of choice" in the Swedish market for so many products. One answer could be that there are so few of us in this country that companies can't satisfy all our needs. If someone wants to buy a new iPod on Sunday night, tough, stores are closed.

Another answer would be that there isn't enough competition. A few companies become so dominant that they own their niche and create a niche monopoly in which they don't have to serve all the needs of the consumers. Consumers will have to suffice with what's being served, and to a higher price. In the latest issue of Swedish business weekly Veckans Affärer, there's an article about price levels in Europe, and according to Eurostat Sweden has the third highest prices in Europe. A portion of this can be explained with a lack of competition. Writes Veckans Affärer: "Increased competition would result in lower prices". Hopefully increased competition would also give consumers more choices or the long tail will only be something we read about in Wired.

If a certain practice increased with 29 per cent in a month, you'd be a fool to ignore it. Recent research from Pew Internet indicates that an increasing percentage of the online population is using RSS readers. So I thought I'd take a closer look at the adoption rate for Swedish media with RSS feeds by studying the increase in subscribers in Bloglines (who has about a third of the aggregator market, so the numbers could indicate where the market is heading).

During a one month period (Dec 9, 2004 and Jan 11, 2005) we see that the average increase in number of subscribers in Bloglines is 29 per cent. Some RSS feeds have seen a much higher increase, like IT publication Computer Sweden, while others haven't gotten any new fans. Sure, this is from very low numbers (Hockeymagasinet has 2 subscribers) and I wouldn't read too much into it, but the trend is indeed very positive. Imagine how it will look in a year from now, at the end of 2005 which I predict will be the year of RSS.

Maybe this will end the discussion about the left lagging in the blogosphere. Margot Wallström, vice-president of the European Commission and commissioner for communication and institutional relations, started a blog yesterday, according to the EUobserver.

Via Micro Persuasion.

Britain introduced a Freedom of Information Act on January 1 and BBC recalls how they went to Sweden to be able to get their hands on Tony Blair's letter to Göran Persson. The letter was sent after England beat Germany 5-1 under new coach Sven-Göran Eriksson.

With all the current fuzz about podcasting and vlogging (video blogging), this discussion about copyright issues in regards to tsunami video footage is indeed well worth reading.

Via JD Lasica.