Jackie Huba at the Church of the Customer blog writes about a phenomenon called Google Juice, which is supposed to be "the ethereal substance which flows between web pages via their hyperlinks (in both directions!" and "the mysterious quality that causes pages to come up high in a Google search". And since Google like blogs, bloggers get high rankings. For example, the number one Robert on Google is Microsoft überblogger Robert Scoble (except he's really #4 when I try the search). Turns out I am Hans #27 on Google, and like Scoble, I don't even have my name as the name of my blog. Other examples are Swedish blogger Henrik Torstensson, the #1 Henrik on Google, a few notches before writer Henrik Ibsen.

Swedish Radio are testing podcasting for their English language program Radio Sweden. What is interesting to see is that they use free tools like Blogdrive and Feedburner. The articles are distributed via an RSS feed at Blogdrive (http://radiosweden.blogdrive.com/index.xml) and the podcasts via Feedburner (http://feeds.feedburner.com/RadioSweden). And I don't think it's wrong to rely on external solutions because it shows that they are eager to try new things and get started, rather than wait for internal procedures which almost always slow these kind of initiatives down. One negative effect though might be if they decide to change tools in the future and have a new URL, they might lose subscribers.

For some reason the mp3 files are posted to a free blog on Blogspot.com while the actual files are located on radiosweden.org.

Apple has now stopped iTunes users who use DVD Jon's PyMusique hack. It made it possible to download songs without any copy-protection technology attached. But in order to plug the security hole, Apple is now requiring anyone who wants to buy songs from the iTunes Music Store to upgrade to at least iTunes 4.7.1, and it has some negative side effects.

Two weeks ago Virgin Radio became the first UK radio station to podcast a daily show. The shows are free thanks to advertising. Writes Brand Republic:

The programme will be around 40 minutes long and should be available from about 10.30am each morning for listeners to play back whenever they want. Ads will appear at the beginning and in the outro, with short ads interspersed through the programme.

This is quite interesting because it means that I will now have access to international radio even if I'm not strapped to my computer. It would also be interesting to see if this kind of advertising works or if listeners simply fast forward the ads.

Current.org has a list of broadcasters who podcast.

Former Vice Presidential Candidate John Edwards is going to start podcasting next week, according to CNET.

I just recently listened to my first podcasts. I hadn't really bothered to try it out until there was some content that I'd be interested in. But fellow PR bloggers Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson are doing a groundbreaking job with their podcast "For Immediate Release - the Hobson and Holtz Report" so I simpy had to tune in. And I must say it is a terrific show, it's like having a one hour radio show about PR and blogging twice a week that you can listen to any time you want. Highly recommended (although I had some trouble with the latest podcast which was all messed up in my mp3-player).

UPDATE: Seems that the file is working the second time I tried it. No idea why.

Now it seems that SR, Swedish public service radio, are starting podcast trials, initially with 5 or 6 shows that will be available in mp3-format. There are still some copyright issues to be solved regarding for example signature tunes.

This is not good. Really not. According to reports from the other side of the pond, well-known blogger Jeremy Wright has been "detained, strip searched, and banned from the United States after attempting to legally cross the Canadian-United States border on a trip to New York to meet with uber-publishers McGraw Hill, who were set to sign him as a consultant to the company on blogging."

Apparently the US Immigration officials accused him of lying as they didn't believe that he could be employed by blogging, with one official allegedly stating "you couldn’t be doing this blogging thing for a living".

Wright have since the incident removed certain posts from his blog for legal reasons, but knowing Wright he will post them once the whole thing is over. Hang in there Jeremy, you've got our support. [Link via Micropersuasion.]

UPDATE: Jeremy seems to be a-wright. Interesting comment to his post: "If Canadian bloggers had flown the planes into the Towers, I might understand."

Dylan Jones, editor of men's magazine GQ, reveals in Media Guardian (reg. required) that more than half of the magazine's editorial content has emanated from PR efforts. And he does not view it as a problem.

"In the last issue of GQ, of 155 editorial pages, over half were originally generated by PR. GQ is full of PR-generated material and this usually stems from personal relationships," he told a PR Week conference, PR and the Media.

On a similar note, this week's edition of Swedish business weekly Veckans Affärer has a long article about the ever growing importance of the PR industry (subscr. required).

Larsåke Larsson, associate professor at Örebro university, is about to publish a study about PR consultants, journalists and democracy. He says:

"PR consultants claim that they get a lot of articles in papers, while journalists claim that they can't. But my impression is that it is the PR consultants' view that is most correct. They do get a lot of stuff in."

The report The State of the News Media 2005 is out. It's the second annual report from Journalism.org about the state of American journalism. Some of the key findings are summarized in five major trends about the media landscape.

1) There are now several models of journalism, and the trajectory increasingly is toward those that are faster, looser, and cheaper.

2) The rise in partisanship of news consumption and the notion that people have retreated to their ideological corners for news has been widely exaggerated.

3) To adapt, journalism may have to move in the direction of making its work more transparent and more expert, and of widening the scope of its searchlight.

4) Despite the new demands, there is more evidence than ever that the mainstream media are investing only cautiously in building new audiences.

5) The three broadcast network news divisions face their most important moment of transition in decades.

See also my comments on last year's survey.

Link via Nu-heter.

Sweden's leading business daily Dagens Industri yesterday published a story about the world's best blogs, since it has become "so common that both politicians and political editors have joined in". DI write about South by Southwest Festivals and their blog award "Bloggies". But the award winners that DI list are not blogs but winners in SXSW 2005 Web Awards, which means they are great sites in general, not just blogs. Bloggies is something else and the 2005 winners are not the ones listed on DI.se although their winners will be awarded at a ceremony during SXSW. Had they checked the Bloggies website they would have found a Swedish site that actually won, namely Francis Strand's "How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons".

A popular pastime for Swedish bloggers is to look for alleged bias and factual errors in traditional media. Conspiracy theories are abundant. Today I found a new media watchdog (via Chadie) called Mediakoll. The site's RSS feed is not posted on the site, but this is the address: http://mediakoll.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Congrats to Steve Rubel and six other bloggers for making it to Media Magazine's top 100 list (pdf) of people to know in media (in the US). See Steve, I was right when I named you the most influential PR blogger in May last year ;-)

ABC's TV drama "Boston Legal" debuts in Sweden next Monday on TV3. Apparently the show's script is too controversial for the big media moguls on the other side of the pond. In a recent episode, the show debates the issue of media bias but it doesn't name any names, especially not Fox News Channel because ABC asked the executive producer and writer David E. Kelley to remove references to Fox. In the original script a school principal uses FOXBlocker to block Fox on televisions in his school. Instead, there is criticism of TV news in general and one unidentified network in particular. The network also refused to run an ad for the film Outfoxed.

Full story in Miami Herald (registration required). Link via the Media Drop.

Another European top politician starts blogging. Il Blog del Presidente is the name of former President of the European Commission Romano Prodi's new blog. Or is it a blog? It lacks many of the features we expect to find in a blog. And since he is the former President, shouldn't that be "Il Blog del Precedente Presidente"? (Precedente is Italian for previous or former).

[Link via CorporateBlogging]

Also, I noticed that the EUobserver now has RSS feeds.

There has been an intense debate in Sweden the last few days regarding a dawn raid against an internet service provider. The ISP had four servers in their office which allegedly had hundreds of thousands of illegal files available for downloading. Well, I have another question regarding measures to stop illegal file sharing, namely copy protection. Can a CD with copy control fail to play correctly in some CD players? I have experienced that my CD player cannot play the first track of some of my new albums, for example R.Kelly's "Happy People" and Christian Walz' "Paint By Numbers". I even went back to the store with Walz' record and got a new copy - same problem with that one. And they work ok when I play them on my car stereo, so something on these CDs is making my CD player go nuts.

Twice can be a coincidence but three times is a pattern. So does this have something to do with copy control? I read somewhere that some techniques include adding information in the beginning of the CD that ordinary CD players ignore but makes it able to control how it is being used on a computer. Can this cause my player to get stuck? I don't know.

Both examples of albums above are from the BMG label so I went to their site http://www.bmgcopycontrol.com to seek answers but scored zilch. I even wrote them an email asking for advice, but no reply. So now I'm asking the blogosphere. Any advice? To me this seems like I've been sold flawed goods.

Footnote: My CD player is a Denon DCM-360, which should have quality enough to play any CDs.

March 15 is the last day to vote for Sweden's best blog in Internetworld's poll. Just follow this link and cast your vote for Media Culpa or any of the other 49 nominated blogs, then click the grey button marked "Rösta" (Vote, in Swedish). Winners will be published on April 26.

Blogging goes mainstream. Yesterday on the front page of Dagens Nyheter, today on the first page of SVT text (Swedish Television). The article is about how bloggers who published information about Apple, might have to reveal their sources.

There are some interesting stats in the new blog reader survey from Blogads. Like for example that more than 5% of the readers are lawyers or judges. In addition, 7.1% say they are in the legal industry, more than in media, advertising and PR. Wonder if they are reading blawgs about their own business or if they are checking the blogosphere for their clients.

Other findings are that the New Yorker seems to be a popular publication among blog readers. Almost 18% subscribe to it. Furthermore, one out of five blog readers is a blogger.

Adam L. Penenberg in Wired, about the Wall Street Journal being close to invisible in Google.

If you can input the name of your publication into a search engine and not come up with any stories, you must be digitally tone-deaf.

Related article.

The blogosphere is currently abuzz about the entrance of advertising in RSS feeds on a broader scale. The other week, Kanoodle announced they were partnering with Moreover for the launch of BrightAds.

Through BrightAds RSS, Kanoodle's content-targeted sponsored links will be inserted directly into site owners' RSS feeds within posts or as individual posts.

As a response Ed Sim at the BeyondVC blog decided to launch a second feed to be able to fool around with the ads. He's convinced RSS ads will become standard procedure for publishers. Monitor his blog for feedback on the experiment.

First, the fact of consuming RSS feeds will typically reduce traffic at many publishers' websites giving them less opportunity to monetize their assets. Ads in RSS will help publishers overcome the lower traffic to their sites while still providing their users with up to date content. Secondly, ads embedded in RSS feed gives great targeting opportunities for advertisers and publishers.

In October, Pheedo estimated the number of RSS ad impressions for 2004 to be 77 million, up to 308 Million in 2005 and 1.2 billion in 2006. Now, I don't know if that's a lot or not, but it's fairly safe to predict an increase in feeds that add ads as publishers, both bloggers and traditional media, want to monetize on a large subscriber base. Not everyone can quit their day job to live on donations like Jason Kottke.

InfoWorld.com earlier this year reported that its top RSS feed page on its Web site was receiving more total visits than its home page.