From this view...



...to this. Ahh, sweet vacation time.

Butler Sheetmetal estimates an increase in turnover by 35-40% since the inception of its corporate blog (in May 2004?). Sounds like a success to me.

Via A PR Guru's Musings.

Financial Times: "The rise of the corporate blogger GUIDE TO BLOGGING"

"The whole corporate blogging issue is beginning to bubble up," says Peter Hirshberg, vice-president of Technorati, a blogging search engine site. "It gives people in a company the opportunity to be people interacting with other people. Corporations are just big faceless entities right now."

Wall Street Journal: Should Newspapers Sponsor Blogs Written by Reporters?

"Now, more newspapers are warming to the idea of offering official reporter-written blogs. The Boston Globe is considering official blogs following the Mercury News's model. At the Dallas Morning News, more than 20 sports reporters contribute to a blog on the paper's Web site. Their posts must be screened by editors, but a spokesman said that requirement might be dropped."

Link via Tim Porter. [Edit: WSJ, not NY Times - thanks Scott.]

Maybe I just have too vivid imagination, but how do foreign tourists interpret the advertisments from the Swedish Post, currently on display in the Stockholm subway? "Hello, kiss my bra".



'Ola' is a male name ('Hola' is 'hi' in Spanish, pronounced 'ola'), 'bra' means good or well = Ola kisses well.

Or for the more perverted minds who think of something else than 'kiss', the ad might have more gay connotations. I'll leave it up to you to figure that one out by yourself.

I know, I know. I should put energy into something more useful, but my brain has prematurely gone on vacation. The rest of me will follow suit this afternoon.

Dagens Industri, the leading business daily in Sweden, now comes with an RSS feed for headline news. From what I can tell the feed was launched on July 11 (? I can only find the first 100 posts). This is interesting also in another perspective. As I wrote in January, Dagens Industri normally moves articles online after about a week, so any blogger that tries to link to an old DI article will be greeted by this error message:



By introducing an RSS feed maybe DI is moving towards better permanence on the web.

Feed: http://ditrader.di.se/News/rss.aspx

I am trying to learn how to send photos from my cell phone to Flickr (I know, that's sooo 2004). It seems to be working out quite well.

Here is a photo of Nybroviken, Stockholm city, and the ferry to Djurgården. It was taken while I was waiting for the Raphael Saadiq concert earlier this month.

From NY Times (free reg. required): CBS News is turning its eye on itself.

"As part of an ambitious attempt to revive CBSNews.com with a broad array of free video news produced just for its Web site, CBS said yesterday that it would also introduce a Web log to comment on CBS newscasts, whether broadcast or online."

"[...] the Web log, to be called Public Eye, will assemble questions from viewers and criticism from various sources, and immediately bring in reactions from the CBS newsroom."

Here are a few quick links to recent blog related research. A conclusion can be that corporate blogs are good for your brand, but many consumers don't "get blogs", in that they don't understand how they work and much of their usefulness is lost.

Catalyst Group has a new study (pdf) about blogs and usability. It is interesting reading and not all thumbs up for the blogosphere.

Market Sentinel and Weboptimiser have published a white paper (pdf) about the impact of RSS, search and blogging for brands. [Via Marketing Studies.]

"87% of the population use search engines as their primary means of finding sites. Search results are increasingly impacted by commentary from message boards and blogs."

Backbone Media has published a report (pdf) that gives valueable insights into the world of corporate blogging. Some conclusions are:

"Over 83% of bloggers saw a traffic increase, while for 54% of respondents the blog represented less than 35% of their traffic. For 5% of bloggers their blog represented 100% of traffic. Journalists contacted 59% of survey respondents. Less than half of bloggers received a published article from the contact. 18% of bloggers have experienced negative PR." [Via Media Orchard.]

Podcast: citizen reporting about the hurricane Dennis. File under "hilarious". Also see this old favourite.

Spray advertises image search by putting the spotlight on an anonymized girl's panties. The animation is supposed to show a spotlight that lights up her entire body, but the animation gets stuck half-way through (on my computer). If you click on the ad you are sent to a page with Paris Hilton photos (!).

From Expressen on July 7 (a new Spray animation is currently on that page).

Swedish pin-up chic Natacha about her post-model career:

"I framtiden vill jag gärna jobba med att retuschera och bearbeta bilder."

(In the future, I would like to work with retouching and adapting photos.)

Citizen reporters helped traditional media in reporting from the London bombings. Camera phones, photo sharing sites and blogs enable people on the scene to share their experiences immedeately to media consumers thirsting for information, especially valuable on an event like this where traditional media had restricted access to the locations and could take very few pictures of their own.

Another way of describing the event is the "7 July 2005 London bombings" page at Wikipedia, already a massive resource for information about what happened and how things progress. It is further evidence to the growth of open source, collaborative ways of collecting and distributing information, as an addition to traditional sources of information, such as media and governmental/official sources. Flickr, Wikipedia and Technorati are already up there with BBC and for example the offical London site as places we turn to to become informed.

Technorati Tags: London 7/7, London Bombing

The role of citizen journalism has been clear in the horrific London bombings. Media ask citizens to send in photos and videos from recent events, the latest example from CNN, asking for footage of hurricane Dennis (via Tim Porter). Here are some articles about the role of citizen journalism in the London incidents.

- Editor & Publisher: Newspapers Aided By Phone Cameras in London Coverage

"Within minutes of the first blast we had received images from the public and we had 50 images within an hour. Now there are thousands. We had a gallery of still photographs from the public online, and they were incredibly powerful."

- The Guardian: Public provides new dimension to media coverage

"Several U.S. television executives said that as far as they knew, it was the first time video taken from a cellular phone was used during coverage of a major story."

- SR P1 Kulturnytt: Bloggar och privata mobiltelefonfilmer kompletterar nyhetsrapporteringen

"Journalistik och ögonvittnesskildringar smälter samman när bloggar och privatpersoners mobilfotografier blir en del av nyhetsmediernas rapportering om Londonattentaten."

- The Christian Science Monitor: Citizen journalists pass the test in London

"The BBC later reported that its website had received almost 1000 photos taken by cellphone and 20 pieces of amateur video."

- The Boston Globe: Camera phones play major role in coverage

"The London news service ITV News began to periodically display phone numbers to which viewers were invited to send text messages or video phone pictures. It and other networks have since broadcast many viewer-created pictures and video clips."

- The Washington Post: Witnesses to History

"Rather than relying on unfocused, rambling blog entries, the London papers and the Beeb ran pithy postings from the people who were there. They ran alongside the staff reporters' accounts and presumably with the same amount of editing."

- The Washington Post: Eyewitness Journalism: Camera Phones Lend Immediacy to Images of Disaster

"Some of the most intimate images of yesterday's bomb blasts in London came from cell phones equipped with cameras and video recorders, demonstrating how a technology originally marketed as entertainment has come to play a significant role in up-to-the-minute news."

- Tim Porter: London Bombings: The Unread Newspaper

"The first-day story no longer belongs to newspapers - and hasn't for a long time. It isn't even the property of professional journalists any longer."

- The Wall Street Journal: Bloggers and Photographers Chronicle Chaos in London

"As journalists scrambled to cover the London bomb blasts, ordinary citizens went online to share pictures snapped by cameraphones and reports of what they saw. At Technorati.com, a search engine for blogs, eight of the top 10 searches Thursday were related to the blasts."

- The Salt Lake Tribune: Technology is changing how big media cover stories

"Welcome to the world of citizen newsgathering, where technology and the age-old desire to communicate hot information, be it hard news or soft gossip, are converging and forcing traditional news outlets to dramatically change the way they cover big news events."

More: some 10,000+ posts about the London bombings via Technorati.

Some links via Hypergene's linkblog.

Technorati Tags: London 7/7, London Bombing

Internet is growing in importance as advertising medium, according to a survey from the Association of Swedish Advertisers. 89 of its members answered a survey about online advertising and:

- 72% advertise online today. Banners and co-operation are the most common ways, but more than half use search engine advertising.
- Nine out of ten see online advertising as a complement, most often to direct mail.
- Half will increase their online media budget this year, 45% spend as much as lasy tear.
- 80% spend 10% or less of their advertising budget online.

These numbers are surprisingly high, considering media consumers' negative attitudes towards online ads. In a recent survey (pdf), also from the Association of Swedish Advertisers, Swedes say that online advertising is the second most impopular form of advertising, second only to email spam. 52% of the respondents say they dislike online advertising. Similarily, only 8% say they like online ads. Only radio commercials (6%) and spam (1%) get lower figures.

Movie commercials (43%) and sponsoring (39%) are the most popular forms of advertising.

Via Loic LeMeur's Wiki I found some excellent research from last year about the Spanish speaking blogosphere (Spain, Ecuador, Chile, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina and Uruguay). The average Spanish (speaking) blogger seems to be:

- male (77%)
- between 20 and 26 years (graph)
- an experienced internet user (more than 5 years)
(graphs)
- about half have a broadband connection
- rarely shops online, about 80% buys online 1-5 times per year or never
- 33% use Blogger, 24% MovableType (graphs)
- 41% have their own domain name
- 68% have a blogroll with recommendations of other blogs (graph)
- 65% of bloggers have never had to erase a comment
- 89% of bloggers post from home, 37% post from work. (graphs)
- 37% spend half an hour per day on their blog
- 58% launched their blog a year ago, or less
- blogging makes 66% watch less tv and 42% sleep less (graph)
- bloggers think blogs are mainly a form of free expression (graph)
- 28% of bloggers and 19% of blog readers use an RSS reader

Via the IAOCblog I found a new study about the Italian blogosphere. The IULM University in Milan has performed 600 online interviews which shows that Italian bloggers are mainly young:

"40% are students, 20% employees and 15% self-employed. Half of them are "mature" bloggers active for more than 6 months, while 9% are newbies who have just started blogging.

Italian bloggers are frequently online to search for information. The majority of those interviewed updates the blog at least three times per week, and 21% declares of writing on a daily basis. In addition, 65% of bloggers reads the blogs listed on his sidebar, 31% those of his friends, and 55% those of his readers."

The survey also found that the Italian blogosphere grows at a 5% monthly rate.

Disclaimer: The fact that Italian bloggers are mainly young, might be an effect of the survey only interviewed respondents aged 20-35. I am not sure this is the case, but this page suggests that it is.

The respondents have also answered questions about the reasons why they started blogging, but I only found notes about this in Italian (and Babelfish doesn't give a perfect translation). If anyone has more details in English I'd be happy to read it so I can compare with my Swedish survey.

More country specific blog research can be found here: Iran, Poland, Sweden (pdf), USA.

Bloggers are sharing photos today from the horrible events in London. Several photo pools have been set up at Flickr where many photos already have had several thousands of hits: London Bomb Blasts and London Explosions.

This story is actually the first major news story that I found out about on a blog. I read about it first by reading the RSS feed of Davil Hall's Månhus beta.

It was just a matter of time before some medium would add the two major trends blogging and poker together. Expressen now launches a poker blog, written by artist Markoolio. It seems that they announced it a bit too soon though, because the link doesn't work yet.

The Iranian News Agency IRNA reports about a survey of 150 blogs carried out by the Iranian Culture Ministry. When will the Swedish Ministry of Education, Research and Culture become interested in blogs (except when they are forced to by the opposition)?

More info at "so this is mass communication".