Per Gudmundson who quit his popular blog to be able to keep his job as journalist at public service channel SVT 24, is back in the blogosphere. He will cover the annual political mega-event in Almedalen on a blogg due to start on Sunday, reports SVT 24.

I'm not surprised considering the positive attitudes during mine and Per's blog presentation for SVT's management a month ago.

Link via Zaidas tankar.

It has almost become an established truth that the Swedish blogger is 1) man, 2) writes about politics and social issues and 3) has right-wing preferences. But these are just assumptions. So in order to get more facts about the Swedish blogosphere, I initiated a blog survey between May 12 and 16, 2005 where 600 blog readers answered a number of questions.

Here is a summary of the results:

Bloggers: The average Swedish blogger is:

· man
· 26-35 years old
· has a college/university degree
· both parents are born in Sweden
· does not know what party to vote for if there was an election today (largest party was Folkpartiet – the liberal party)
· blogs because he likes to write
· blogs in Swedish
· is not anonymous
· reads 6-10 blogs daily
· spends 6-10 hours per week reading blogs
· often or sometimes uses an RSS reader to read blogs
· reads blogs because it is more personal than other media
· finds new blogs via links on other blogs

Blog readers: The average Swedish blog reader (including those who have their own blogs) is:

· man
· 26-30 years old
· has a college/university degree
· both parents are born in Sweden
· would vote for Moderaterna – the moderate party - if there was an election today
· has his own blog
· reads 1-5 blogs daily
· spends 2 hours per week reading blogs
· never uses an RSS reader to read blogs
· reads blogs to get different views on news
· finds new blogs via links on other blogs

Other interesting results from the survey:

· Blog readers vote to the right. The right-wing parties get 62.4% of all votes.
· Bloggers vote (slightly less) to the right. 52.6% of bloggers vote for the right-wing parties while 47.6% would vote to the left.
· Male bloggers vote to the right (57.4%).
· Female bloggers vote to the left. (s), (v), (mp) and (fi) get 55.4% of the votes.
· Among blog readers who don’t blog themselves, the moderate party (m) is the dominant party. More than a third (36.8%) of this group would vote for (m).
· Many bloggers do not know who to vote for, but female bloggers are more uncertain than male (29.8% of female bloggers, 18.5% of male bloggers)
· Women blog anonymously (60.6%), men reveal their identity (69.4%)
· Most women don’t use an RSS reader to read blogs, but most men do.
· Female bloggers have slightly higher education than male bloggers.
· Male bloggers more often blog to influence others and to become famous, than female bloggers do.
· Those who use an RSS reader, read more blogs than those who don’t use an RSS reader.
· 96.9% of respondents who read 26 blogs or more daily, use an RSS reader (often or sometimes).
· Bloggers read more blogs and spend more time reading blogs than blog readers who don’t have a blog of their own.
· Half of all blog readers spend 4 hours or more per week reading blogs, which is 34 minutes or more per day. Compared to the average Swede who spends 28 minutes per day reading a daily newspaper.

The entire report can be downloaded here (pdf 429kb) in English or here (pdf 311kb) in Swedish.

In addition, here are a few of the graphs from the report in jpg-format. The first is a graph showing reasons why bloggers started blogging.



The second shows the reasons why blog readers choose to read blogs.



It is also interesting to compare the last graph with the corresponding question in Blogads US survey earlier this year. The results are not extremely different.

You can learn a lot about what media consider to be the most important issues on the agenda by looking at the way they structure their websites. Spot the odd one out in the top of the hierarchy at Expressen.se:

News, Sports, Entertainment, Weather, Archives, Search, Blog and Poker. Poker? Puh-lease...



I notice that both the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times have poker columns so I guess it's just logical. Aftonbladet has a poker page too. Diversity, anyone?

Like Magnus already noted, Ola Larsmo at Dagens Nyheter today writes about blogs and he wants media to stop arguing about journalist blogs and instead open up to new voices. Well put. I remember saying something along the same lines about a week ago.

"Vad är det egentligen vi bråkar om? Redan etablerade skribenters rätt att yttra sig i ännu ett medium? Men varsågod. Det är inte så problemet ser ut, utan den fråga man bör ställa sig varför medierna inte är mer öppna åt andra hållet - det spännande med den nya tekniken var ju att det skulle släppa fram nya röster, de där som de etablerade mediernas inskränkthet höll borta? Är det inte det pinsamma tomrummet vi bör diskutera, och kanske rent av göra något åt - i stället för att bli indignerade för att någon ifrågasätter behovet av fler ögonblicksbilder ur innerstadsmedelklassmediefolkets leverne? Exemplet Salam Pax är lysande i sin förebildlighet - och vad som fordras nu är en lyhördhet från redaktionerna, en nyfikenhet på de nya rösterna."

Belinda Olsson, columnist at Aftonbladet, writes today about blogs and delivers the quote of the day:

"Jag läser bloggar då och då, det är inte det. Jag förstår grejen med att om man älskar en skribent är det kul att få lite extra dvd-aktigt material. Jag skulle själv gärna läsa lite blogg (dagbok) av Carolina Gynning. Men revolution? Nu kan vem som helst bli journalist? Jag kan inte rabbla upp en enda icke-journalist som har en blogg."

"Revolution? Now anyone can become a journalist? I can't name one single non-journalist with a blog." How ignorant can you get? She has been given a platform to communicate to hundreds of thousands of readers and just because she can't name a blogger that isn't a journalist, blogs don't matter. I can't name a single French philosopher, but that doesn't mean no-one reads them. But then again, who cares what I think? I'm just a non-journalist blogger.

Here is another must-read from Poynter Online. Steve Outing outlines 11 phases of citizen or participatory journalism. How many Swedish media have come past step one?

1. The first step: Opening up to public comment
2. Second step: The citizen add-on reporter
3. Now we're getting serious: Open-source reporting
4. The citizen bloghouse
5. Newsroom citizen 'transparency' blogs
6. The stand-alone citizen-journalism site: Edited version
7. The stand-alone citizen-journalism site: Unedited version
8. Add a print edition
9. The hybrid: Pro + citizen journalism
10. Integrating citizen and pro journalism under one roof
11. Wiki journalism: Where the readers are editors

Steve Outing reports on a BugMeNot extension to the Firefox web browser that easily lets users bypass registration forms on websites. The death of mandatory registration?

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.

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.

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 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.

The world's gayest logos according to Radar Magazine. Yeah, but are rainbows really gay?

Link via Agenda Inc.

Dagens Nyheter today publishes another article (not online) about journalist bloggers (!), that has some points, but I question the "j-blogs suck therefore blogs are not a threat"-logic. In the introduction to the article it says "Blogs are often embarrasing but nothing to worry about".

Also see my previous post about the focus of the current blog debate.

"There's a revolution already underway, but it's one that's easy to miss. It's quiet. Revolutions on the net happen at the edges, not at the center."

It's a line from the report We Media - How audiences are shaping the future of news and information and I believe it is symptomatic for the current discussion, or lack of, in Sweden regarding the future of journalism. While media are studying the center, debating the pros and cons of j-blogs, the real change happens somewhere else.

There has been an intense debate the last weeks among Swedish journalists about the value of blogging, in particular the need for journalist blogs. Johan Croneman at Dagens Nyheter got the ball rolling with a post titled "Blogs have become the trash can for the middle class". He wrote that this new medium is mostly occupied by people who already have a platform for opinion building, like journalists.

Men vilka är det nu som ockuperar och kommersialiserar den här ytan också? Jo, chef- och nöjesredaktörer, journalister och krönikörer som redan har plats i stora, etablerade, bredkäftade medier, med spaltkilometer till sitt förfogande.

His point seems to be that the only texts these columnist are able to publish on their blogs are the trash that does not fit in the regular paper, the unsorted rambling thoughts about diapers, daughters and daily life. Unsorted, without any reflections, just published from the top of your head.

Den nyfrälsta medieklassens blogg betyder att man inte längre behöver tänka något nytt, inget alls faktiskt, inga eftertankar, inga reflektioner, man tänker bara lite högt med varandra, pratar tankspritt för sig själv.

This article sparked a lively debate among journalist bloggers and bloggers in general. Viggo Cavling at Resumé, Linna Johansson at Expressen, Fredrik Virtanen and Helle Klein at Aftonbladet are just a few examples. And although I encourage media to start blogging, I don't believe that these blogs are the perfect examples of the future of journalism.

What fascinates me, and some other bloggers, is the fact that the debate among these journalists primarily covers the thoughts of, that's right, other journalists. They leave out the rest of blogosphere which is quite revealing as to who they think should be allowed to shape the debate. My response to this is, you're up for an unpleasant surprise. Media consumers today are not only listening to journalists anymore. We have other sources of opinion and information, like non-journalist bloggers. Your gatekeeper role is changing for good. To quote Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis: "Media futurists have predicted that by 2021, "citizens will produce 50 percent of the news peer-to-peer." However, mainstream news media have yet to meaningfully adopt or experiment with these new forms."

OK, there has been an incredible hype the last months about blogs, but while Swedish journalists are experimenting with personal blogs the debate about the future of journalism in the US seems to be on a completely different level. I haven't read many articles in Swedish media about for example participatory journalism. Sure, there is a Swedish site called Sourze where readers can publish articles but it costs them 100 SEK to do so and I think the web site has had a minor impact on the market.

Swedish media must start discussing on a higher level how blogs, wikis and other personal media affect their core business and how media can include citizens in the journalistic process. From my survey of Swedish blog readers I found that half of all blog readers spend more time reading blogs per week than Swedes in general spend on the daily newspaper. What does that mean? Well, today the number of media consumers in Sweden that consume blogs on a regular basis is just a few per cent of the total population. But what happens to our media consumption when a third of all media consumers spend time reading blogs? When half of them do? When they all do? Are media prepared to deal with a situation where their readers spend more time on blogs than on newspapers? I don't think so, and although we have seen a growing interest from the management of leading media corporations, there is very little open debate regarding the future of journalism. I might be wrong in this assumption, so please prove me wrong.

Dale Peskin, Co-Director of The Media Center asks in the introduction to We Media (pdf 3.1 MB): How does the world look when news and information are part of a shared experience? My advice would be to at least start reading this report.

Another example of how hard it is for media to accept that their exclusive role as gatekeeper is a thing of the past is this article in Nerikes Allehanda a few days ago: "Bloggfebern grasserar - då kommer sanningen i kläm" (something like "Blog fever hurts the truth").

Det allra värsta är dock den betydelse och värde man tillmäter bloggen. Som om den var sanningen därför att den antas ligga nära den "sanna" privata personen som skriver den. Medialt är det ett mycket större och allvarligare problem eftersom det i förlängningen egentligen hotar medias hela trovärdighet. [...]

Ju större blogg-fenomenet blir och ju mer det tillmäts vikt, desto mer undergrävs den traditionella nyhetsförmedlingen. [...]

Det är inte oviktigt vem som anser sig ha rätten att definiera vår världsbild. Alldeles för många tror sig kunna skaffa en egen på nåtet. Men det kräver mycket av brukaren i form av breda kunskaper - något de flesta tyvärr saknar. Istället stirrar vi alla in i ett färggrannt kalejdoskop vars uttydbarhet inte bara är begränsande, det förvränger och ger olika svar varje gång vi skådar in i det.

These three quotes all point in the direction that blogs are a threat to the truth, because only journalists can sort of what is true and not in society. I think that is a dangerous assumption and it's insulting to conclude that readers do not have the ability to sort out good information from bad.

Why do journalists have the exclusive talent to interpret and filter events in society? Is it due to a couple of years at j-school, or due to the journalistic process. Peer-reviewing? If that is the case, then how come only 36% of respondents in a US poll in 2003 believe the news media generally "get the facts straight"? Or why do only 31% of Swedes have high or relatively high confidence in journalists at daily newspapers (trailing behind 15 other professions like doctors (81%) and policemen (65%)?

Of course there are other ways for media consumers to become well informed than relying exclusively on journalists. In the new era of journalism, media consumers will be used to another type of publishing of news, something like the bottom-up news model below.



The article in Nerikes Allehanda illustrates a medium stuck in an old publishing model where blogs are merely seen as chaotic biased rants that only confuse readers and threaten "real media" with its lies. But what if the new journalism where readers participate in the journalistic process, is also able to filter out good from bad, truth from lies, but it is done in the opposite way? Maybe each citizen isn't smart enough to filter the information on the net by himself, but the network is.

This quote (in We Media) from Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University, gives us an idea of what we might expect from future publishing models:

"The order of things in broadcast is 'filter, then publish'. The order in communities is 'publish, then filter'. If you go to a dinner party, you don't submit your potential comments to the hosts, so that they can tell you which ones are good enough to air before the group, but this is how broadcast works everyday. Writers submit their stories in advance, to be edited or rejected before the public ever sees them. Participants in a community, by contrast, say what they have to say, and the good is sorted from the mediocre after the fact."

My point is that Swedish media should invite readers to participate even more in the news making process. We all know that media have limited resources to do investigative journalism. So what will happen when media start to use the power of ordinary citizens, networked via blogs and other online tools? You cannot quote Dan Gillmor often enough when he says "my readers know more than I do". Use that resource creatively. And those media strategists that are only looking for the future of journalism in the center might find themselves outsmarted - by the edges of the net.

I confess, this is plain silly. But I was rather amused to find my blog come up second in a Google search on best blog on net. Found via referrers in my blog stats.

A Goodyear blimp crashes in stormy weather in Florida. Try painting over this logo if you can (like Scandinavian Airlines did in the Gottröra crash)



Link via Adrants.

Olof Lundh at Expressen writes that the pseudonymous blogger "Mats Hård" in reality is the two Aftonbladet journalists Magnus Herbertsson and Fredrik Ihse. They previously ran a website at www.avspark.net, which now coincidentally is redirected to Mats Hård's blog. Resumé also writes about the story today.

Update: Herbertsson denies any involvment (surprise).

Mille Millnert, President of Linköping University has started his own blog.

...and Hanna Flodr of Dagens Nyheter "blogs" from the music festival in Hultsfred.