An analyst at Redeye published a column on the web edition of Dagens Industri two days ago, but nowhere is he identified as a non-journalist or as a Redeye employee. As a payback, his firm Redeye gets a link after the article, but the link is not identified as an ad. Mixing editorial space with advertising, are we?

Ny Teknik reports that users have downloaded podradio files (mp3) from SR (Swedish Radio) 500,000 times since the service was launched, just before summer. There are currently 7 shows available as podcasts and 5-7 more will be introduced in September. More will follow later on.

Technorati tag: podcast.

Patrick Strang has done a search of Swedish blogs with most inbound sources. I made a similar search in May in which I also included Fredrik Wackå's popular CorporateBlogging.info.

Wal-Mart has decided to advertise in Vogue. Laura Ries doesn't approve.

"Wal-Mart is going to have an eight-page advertising spread in September’s Vogue magazine. The fall issue of America’s premiere fashion magazine is not where Wal-Mart belongs. Wal-Mart and high-fashion? I don’t think so. It’s like mixing orange juice and milk."

1. Slimy wanker flashes himself on the subway
2. Victim has a camera phone and takes a photo of the offender
3. Victim posts photo on Flickr (viewed an impressive 190,000 times)
4. Photo makes it to front page of NY Daily News

or...?

In the latest issue of Pressens Tidning, journalist Hans Månsson writes a column about press ethics in times of citizen journalists equipped with camera phones and what it does to journalism. Månsson asks:

"Does a snaparazzo [snapshot + paparazzo] care anything about the sanctity of private life? How do we handle the snaparazzo's photos?"

These are indeed valid questions that all media need to debate. Chances are of course, that the alleged flasher is a sleazy pervert. But what if the guy on the photos didn't expose himself on the subway and is in fact innocent? Where can he turn to get his version out and get his name cleared? Of course it is absolutely brilliant if camera phones can be used to catch criminals, or even better, prevent them from even committing the crime, but there should be a serious debate concerning the rights of an alleged criminal versus the rights of society to catch him/her.

[More links via BoingBoing]

A contributor on Fox News reads the address of a terrorist, which happens not to be a terrorist, but an innocent family. The Fox contributor John Loftus, once nominated to the Pulitzer Prize, was fired for the negligence, according to BoingBoing. The family has been harassed ever since, without receiving a public correction or apology from Fox News.

The Swedish Wikipedia reached 100,000 articles this weekend, four years after it was launched. It is the fifth largest in the world and has 66,000 visitors per day. [Via Erik Stattin.]

NY Times has a photo of a woman video taping the hurricane Katrina as waves come in next to here. Citizen journalism on acid?

By the way, check out the difference in effect between the first photo of the woman on the beach, and when you click to enlarge the photo. Then you suddenly see her quarter-back boyfriend next to her. Not quite as dramatic is it?

Link via Lost Remote.

There's been a lot of talk the last few days about two articles in Aftonbladet and Internetworld regarding how many Swedish blogs that currently exist. Since I started to do some research in the matter about a week ago, I might as well give you my two cents.

Aftonbladet says 10,000. Internetworld's Urban Lindstedt made some research that suggests there are some 18,000 Swedish blogs, based on the following number of blogs hosted [The numbers have been updated since this post, check the link above to Internetworld for the latest revision]:

Blogsoft 9600
Spaces 3460
Passagen 2700
Bloggi 761
Blogger 718
Blogdrive 182
Wordpress 80
S-info.nu 79
Typepad 75
Movable Type 34

Total: 17 689

I have a few questions about these numbers:

#1: This would give BlogSoft, Passagen and MSN Spaces a market share of 91 per cent which I find completely impossible to believe.

#2: Roland at BlogSoft told me in an email a few days before these articles appeared that BlogSoft has 9,600 registered accounts and that 1,500 to 2,500 can be defined as real bloggers, depending on definition. Henrik Torstensson states that BlogSoft is supposed to host about 3,500 blogs, unclear where this figure comes from. So, a qualified guess is that BlogSoft hosts some 3,000 to 3,500 blogs and has about 6,000 registered users that are in the process of setting up a blog, but haven't yet begun posting.

#3: One of the most popular blog portals is Nyligen.se which tracks recently updated Swedish blogs. To be included in the portal you must actively submit an application. By checking the id numbers of each individual blog at Nyligen.se we can assume that more than 3,500 blogs are members of the portal, so it should be fairly representative of the Swedish blogosphere. I checked about 230 random blogs at Nyligen.se and can conclude that BlogSoft (blogg.se and webblogg.se) is nowhere near half the market, or a third for that matter. What I found was that 8 out of 10 Swedish blogs either use a personal domain name (can also include the address to a personal webpage hosted by their ISP, like Telia) or are hosted by Blogspot. About 1 out of 10 is hosted by BlogSoft.



We can guess that new blogs at Passagen and MSN Spaces (and possibly blogg.se and webblogg.se) are not as accustomed yet to the practice of pinging posts to a portal, and therefore are mis-represented in the stats above. Now assume that the market share for BlogSoft is closer to 10 per cent or let's say 15 per cent due to the mis-representation noted above, and that the number of hosted blogs are in the vicinity of 3,500 to choose an even number (that is also supported by Torstensson). That would give us a suggested total number of Swedish blogs to between 23,000 and 25,000.

This way we can count backwards to get the following approximations about the Swedish blogosphere:

Market share/Host/Number of blogs

25% Blogspot 6000
25% Own domain 6000
15% Blogsoft 3600
15% MSN Spaces 3600
10% Passagen 2400
10% Bloggi + rest 2400

Total 24,000

The relation between BlogSoft, MSN Spaces and Passagen doesn't seem to be that far off the mark, so I needed to assume that the number of blogs at Blogspot and blogs with their own domain name are not 80 per cent, rather closer to 50 per cent.

Of course, this whole arithmetical example is based on a series of half-guesses and wild assumptions, so consume it with a healthy dose of scepticism. And I am well aware of the difference between a blog software like Blogger, Blogsoft or Typepad and the actual domain name of a blog. But I don't think it is more wrong than Internetworld and Aftonbladet. I would love to read other bloggers' thoughts on the matter. Am I a crackpot or are we getting closer to a figure we can agree on?

Footnote: Nyligen.se only lists 1,500 blogs on the website, but I understand that blogs that have not sent a ping in two months are not visible, which further mis-represents "inexperienced bloggers", like bloggers that don't use a personal domain for example.

[Edit: Bad link. Thanks Sebastian.]

Update: Christian Davén has analyzed the blog tools from another Swedish blog portal: Blogwalk. According to his stats, BlogSoft has a market share of only 2 per cent. Blogger dominates with 45 per cent. This supports my feeling that there are more blogs than the 18,000 suggested by Internetworld. (If BlogSoft has a reliable number of hosted blogs, then the total market will be greater if BlogSoft's market share is smaller.)

Aftonbladet is almost choking from self-righteousness from the fact that Fredrik Virtanen's blogg (probably) has the most readers of all Swedish blogs. They also claim to know something about the Swedish blogosphere, like for instance that 2 out of 3 bloggers are female. Sources please? The only reliable survey (pdf) so far about Swedish bloggers was done by, eeh.., me. Yes, and it shows that 60.7% of all Swedish bloggers are male. Perhaps they are making generalizations from some international blog survey?

There is an episode in the fifth Friends' season when everybody finds out about Chandler and Monica. The best part is when Phoebe decides to have a little fun with Chandler by pretending she wants to sleep with him. But Chandler realizes it is because "she knows" and plays along, because "they don't know that we know that they know". Chandler says:

"Ah yes. The messers…become the MESSEES!"

A person who could have said the same, is Marc Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. He was interviewed via email by the New York Times about the sale of Register.com, a company in which Cuban owns a 13.2 per cent stake. When the article was published, Cuban felt he was grossly mis-represented and decided to publish the email conversation on his blog so that others could decide for themselves.

B.L. Ochman has a good comment on the story:

"Interestingly, the publication of the raw material opens the story to different interpretations by bloggers and other journalists. In the long term, that will add to the credibility of reporting in all its forms."

Of course, it doesn't add to the credibility of this particular article, which seems to be a work with a predetermined angle. But in a larger perspective, Ochman is right.

I'm a huge fan of Audioscrobbler, the service that tracks what music you are listening to and then compiles it into different charts. It has a lot of other features and I haven't tried them all out yet. Anyhow, Audioscrobbler recently made a major redesign of the website and can now be found at www.last.fm.

My charts can be found here and the 10 latest tracks can also be found at the bottom of the right column of this blog, courtesy of RSS Digest. Other well known Swedish bloggers with Audioscrobbler is for example Rasmus of Copyriot. His profile can be found here.

Today I'm glad I'm not based in Kentucky, because then I would be walking on very thin ice (because of our blawg). The Kentucky Attorney's Advertising Commission has decided that each blog post is an ad, which in the Kentucky lawyers' code requires a "A filing fee of $50.00 for each advertisement" and for every change in the advertisement. How ironic that the blawg who started it all is Ben Cowgill's Legal Ethics Blog. Hopefully Ben will be able to continue with his blog eventually.

Having spent three weeks in my summer house in July, I had to wade through hundreds of emails when I returned back to civilization. One of them was from one of largest companies in Sweden, I will spare you which one because I am a friend of their head of PR. I believe it is the first time I have been approached by the communications department of a large Swedish company in my role as a blogger. I'm glad that public relations professionals are aware that bloggers are influential and potentially a target for PR pitches. But when it is performed in such a clueless way, I'm baffled.

First of all, the PR person hasn't read my blog. If she had, she would know that I never ever write about stuff from her company's industry. Is it really so hard to figure out that I blog about PR and media? It is in the headline. I do not blog about your products.

Second, if you are in the process of sending out a mass mailing, please make sure that I don't feel like I'm on the receiving end of a spam attack. The email I got had obviously been forwarded at least once, so it had the ">" sign before every line, and the second half of the first sentence had apparently been edited, because it had a different color than all the other lines, at least in my email program. Translated:

> Hello,
>
> You receive this email because you are one of the most frequently read and
noticed blogs in Sweden.
>
> We wonder if you are interested in subscribing to press releases from XYZ?

Now, I am not trying to be mean, rather show that if you are pitching bloggers, you need even more finesse and fingerspitzgefühl than if you are pitching journalists. Not the other way around because bloggers will tell everyone that you're making a mistake. Besides, it would have been smarter to let people sign up to press release subscriptions via the online press room or via RSS, but of course you can't.

Metro, the largest daily in the world outside Japan according to themselves, have decided to launch a daily correction column. Corrections in Swedish papers are normally few and not in a fixed column, rather they are published where the original article was published. This is often explained with a worry about the paper's credibility if corrections were given too much space. The tradition in the US and UK is quite the opposite and Metro in Sweden now welcome feedback from readers so that mistakes can be corrected in "Dagens fel" ("Today's errors").

Editor-in-chief, Sakari Pitkänen about the previous practice:

"It is an oldfashioned way of reasoning. It was probably ok before the internet. Today the correct information is spread on blogs, mailing lists and media watchdogs on the web. There is a risk that the reader might find the correction to a mistake everywhere but in the paper that published it. That would really undermine the credibility of the paper."

Want a helping hand to come up with a marketing stunt that doesn't cost you an arm and a leg? How about this one from BBDO, promoting the last season of the Sopranos on HBO? [Via The Hidden Persuader.]



Bonus link: Playboy cake (worksafe).

There has been quite a few articles the last few days in Swedish press about graffiti artist Banksy and his latest "work" on the Israeli wall. The photos can be hard to find on Banksy's site, but Protein has a series of photos online here. [Via Cool Hunting.]

Update: There are more than 900 photos at Flickr tagged "Banksy".

In an unsigned article in Expressen, the signature "Ankan" (the duck) takes pole vault athlete Patrik Kristiansson in defense after overhearing some political editor gloating over his misfortunes. Couldn't agree more, but why blame this act of schadenfreude on blogs? The journalist writes "Reality shows and blogs are mental viruses that are morally corrupting the brains of Sweden's intellectual elite."

"Nej, det är dokusåporna och bloggarna som är de mentala virus som håller på att moraliskt fördärva landets intellektuella elit. De är alla smittade, deras hjärnor blir allt ruttnare, deras samveten är bara svagt tynande lågor."

Perhaps it's a joke, but I don't get it. It's a bit ridiculous to come from a tabloid that has made it into an art form to exploit reality shows.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder they say, but taking four weeks off from my blog has just made my mind go blank. I have just returned from a month of non-blogging only to find myself with a severe case of writer's block. Nothing seems important enough to make it into the first post after summer vacation. All the stuff that has been going on in the blogosphere since I last posted here has already been covered by somebody else. So I'll just take this advice from 43 Folders and have the first new post out of the way: "Write crap - Accept that your first draft will suck, and just go with it. Finish something."

Update: Jennifer Rice points to a booklet about 'blog depression'. Maybe that's what it is.