Fredrik Reinfeldt, the leader of the Swedish Moderate party, has been the target of a dirty email campaign containing false accusations. The person behind the emails turned out to be a senior employee in the Social Democratic Party and one of Prime Minister Göran Persson's closest men. According to media reports he was responsible for analyzing opinion polls.

But he did more than that. He was one of eight people in a committee that analyzed (pdf) the latest election - the 2004 election to the EU Parliament. The group came up with suggestions for future elections based on the analysis. He was in other words a central figure in the party's campaign strategy planning.

"Valresultatet i EU-parlamentsvalet den 13 juni 2004 blev mycket sämre än vad vi hade förväntat oss och långt under de mål vi ställt upp, både när det gäller valdeltagandet och vårt eget resultat. Det låga valdeltagandet är något vi delar med många länder runt om i unionen, det är också fler partier i vårt land som har anledning att fundera över resultatet.

Men trots det finns det skäl för oss socialdemokrater att göra en egen noggrann analys av valresultatet. Inte minst för att systematisera våra erfarenheter, både organisatoriska och politiska, till nästa riksdagsval 2006."

Expressen follows in the footsteps of Norwegian daily VG and launches a blog feature. Readers can start their own free blog which will be hosted on Expressen.se. The service seems to be so new that I can't even find where to register.

Via Urban.

Dear Bosse,

Your competitor Aftonbladet yesterday acquired the blog portal Bloggportalen.se for an undisclosed sum. This is great news for Expressen. Among all the Swedish blog portals, Sigge Eklund's Bloggportalen is probably the last one I would have invested in, had I been in your shoes (sorry Sigge, I'm a regular reader of your blog though). It is a register of 3,500 blogs with little functionality other than presenting a number of blogs in different categories. As the blogosphere evolves, many blogs on the site will become inactive and the time spent on putting in new ones will be overwhelming. Of course, Aftonbladet will probably develop some way of updating the register automatically (note: beware of spam blogs). A library of blogs is just not that interesting, and here's why - the blogosphere isn't really about blogs, it is about the content in blogs. And Bloggportalen is not about blog content.

A central feature of the blogosphere is connectivity and the core of that connectivity is the "ping". Johan who runs a number of brilliant blog portals has done something extremely smart. He has created a site (Nyligen.se) that most Swedish bloggers ping when they have a new blog post. He has another called Intressant.se that sorts content into different categories. From this information he has been able to build other cool sites like Knuff.se which analyzes and sorts the information on Swedish blogs, letting readers follow how different topics or articles gets discussed in the blogosphere. It's a bit of Technorati mixed with PubSub, all RSS enabled of course.

Now, Bosse, you start to get my point. Expressen should buy Nyligen, Intressant and Knuff and hire Johan Larsson for an embarrassingly high salary. Around these different portals I'm sure Expressen could build some really nice features that Aftonbladet would envy.

Best regards,

Hans

Footnote: Bosse Andersson is Head of Expressen.se

Update: Podradio and Urban Lindstedt comment too.

Aftonbladet today launched an initiative where all the input from readers will be collected in one main page, Läsarbladet ("Readers' paper"). Aftonbladet also launched a co-operation with [Edited] one of the larger Swedish blog portals Bloggportalen.se that contains links to and presentations of 3,500 Swedish blogs.

Kalle Jungkvist, editor-in-chief of aftonbladet.se uses the D-word, not very common in Swedish media - dialogue.

- [...]previously journalists have been a megaphone to the public. I believe that in the future journalism will shift towards more of a dialogue with readers.

On Läsarbladet readers will be able to discuss and influence the content by writing articles, vote and participate. Readers will get to vote on what stories a Readers' Reporter will write.

Technorati tags: Aftonbladet, citizen journalism, media, journalism, blogs.

Update 3: Journalist Mustafa Can published an article this morning in Dagens Nyheter about an exclusive mailing list called "Elit" (Elite). A number of journalists are members of the list and one DN journalist has been suspended for having revealed the upcoming article for the list members, although she says it is not true.

Here is the original article (all articles below in Swedish).
Übermobbning på nätet

Interesting to see that DN also points to Knuff.se for blogs that comment on the topic.
http://knuff.se/q/elit/

Aftonbladet:
New 23 Feb: 93 kändisar på hemliga mejllistan
Kändisarnas hemliga skvallermejl avslöjade
Fanns på lista - fick sparken från DN

Dagen:
New 23 Feb: I marginalen

Dagens Media:
Neos chefredaktör om Söderqvists angrepp på Hanne Kjöller på Elit

Dagens Nyheter:
New 23 Feb: Elitlistan korrumperar
New 23 Feb: De virtuella frimurarna
New: "Skilj på offentligt och privat"
DN-skribent avstängd efter listkommentar
"Deltagande handlar om att känna sig utvald"
Mejlstorm efter DN:s artikel
SvD-journalist kritiserar DN

Expressen:
New 23 Feb: Min elit
New 23 Feb: Cecilia Hagen: Får jag vara med och mobba?
Mustafa Can tvångs-rekryterad till listan
Mustafa Can hotad efter avslöjandet
Kändisklubb avslöjar stjärnornas sexliv
Martin Timell: "Det är kriminellt"
"Vad är det för olämpligt att vara med i ett samtal"
Reporter fick sparken av DN:s kulturchef
Stig-Björn Ljunggren: "Det är som en middagsbjudning"
Utdrag ur mejllistan
Vi i "hemliga klubben" gör rätt som skrattar åt DN

Journalisten:
Flera journalister på Bards lista

Metro:
New 23 Feb: Bards Elitlista har utlöst moralpanik

Resumé:
Jan Wifstrand: "Ovanligt med granskning av mediefolket"
DN sparkar Elitmedlem
DN:s Mustafa Can hotad i natt
Bard tvångsrekryterar Wifstrand
PO om Elit: "Fruktansvärt pinsamt"
Dagens Medias krönikör medlem i Elit
DN:s kulturchef: "Alexander Bard är en sektmästare"
Men hallå...

Svenska Dagbladet:
New 23 Feb: Skvaller i mejl vållar debatt
New: Punschskvaller i frimurarlogen

Östersunds-Posten:
New 23 Feb: Nätverket i den unkna källarvåningen

Suburbia lists the blogs on Swedish media monitoring company Observer's revised list (pdf) of blogs they track. There are some surprises on the list: PR agency JKL, PJ Anders Linder of Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet and Sven Otto Littorin of the Moderate Party are all taken off the list. To be included a blog is supposed to be able to influence traditional media and/or public opinion. Media Culpa is still on the list though.

Farm trade publication (is that a proper label?) ATL went on a search for Sweden's blogging farmers and after several weeks they had found - none!

Happy two year anniversary to my blog. I started goofing around with this blog on 17 Feb, 2004 and I never expected to get any readers, nor did I expect to put this much time and effort into it. But it has been a rewarding experience, although not in monetary terms.

Edelman PR has hired the master of the PR blogosphere, Steve Rubel. His blog Micro Persuasion is one of the most linked-to blogs on the planet and I coined him the most influential PR blogger already back in May 2004.

A big congrats to Steve who will continue to blog on Micro Persuasion for Edelman.

I have been praising Swedish daily Norra Västerbotten before for their way of initiating a dialogue with readers via a (proper) blog. They have also invited readers to blog on the web site. Today I read that the blog of editor-in-chief, Sofia Olsson Olsén, has 640 subscribers. That may not sound a lot, it's just above 2 per cent of the paper's total circulation of 29,400, but I think it is quite impressive. Not many Swedish blogs can compete with 640 subscribers. Well done.

I'm interviewed in the latest issue of science magazine Forskning & Framsteg about online behaviour. A summary can be found here, but if you desperately need to read my quotes you have to buy the magazine.

A few very influential inbound links was just what my blog needed in order to race up to the summit of PubSub's list of PR blogs. Yep, I'm enjoying my fifteen pixels of fame, as long as it now may last.

Stowe Boyd offers 10 useful tips for getting on the A-list of blogs.

1. True Voice
2. Throw Yourself Into Dialog
3. Draw The Line, Over And Over Again
4. The Big Idea
5. Sharpen Your Pencil, And Then Write.
6. Courage
7. Technology
8. Timing Matters
9. Human Sized Pieces
10. Respond to comments

Via PR Communications.

It's not every day that the world's most linked-to blog gives you a link back, but that happened yesterday when Boing Boing published my "world exclusive scoop" about Flickr passing 100 million photos.

Maybe I should start to collect inbound links from the Technorati Top 100. I have six so far:

1. Boing Boing
2. Engadget
30. Joystiq
72. Micro Persuasion
97. we make money not art
100. Scripting News by Dave Winer

So, let's think. What do I need to do to get noticed by Daily Kos and the Huffington Post...?

Technorati tags: Technorati, Boing Boing, Engadet, Daily Kos, Scripting News.

From Dagens Nyheter (dead-tree version) this morning. The headline reads "Woman might be new Managing Director of the Swedish Shareholders' Association". You would never ever see the same headline starting with the word "Man". Promise.

Metro International loses 5.2 million dollar in 2005, reports Dagens Media. This is an improvement compared to 2004 when the group lost 9.5 million dollar. Turnover increased by 19 per cent to about 360 million dollar.

And today Orvesto published their latest newspaper statistics for Sweden, which show that Dagens Nyheter is the only of the major paid dailies that increased its reach in 2005. DN is up 10,000 readers to 917,000 readers while Göteborgs-Posten (-3,000 to 574,000 readers), Svenska Dagbladet (-3,000 to 468,000), Dagens Industri (-17,000 to 417,000) and Sydsvenskan (-13,000 to 393,000) are all down compared to 2004.

The two tabloids Aftonbladet and Expressen are also seing declined reach. AB is down 32,000 to 1,412,000 readers and Expressen -3,000 to 1,184,000.

Free dailies Metro and City are up: Metro +276,000 to 1,380,000 and City is up 89,000 to 581,000 readers.

Technorati tags: Metro, newspapers, media.

As I was posting my previous post, I noticed that my photo had an ID number close to 100 million (to be exact, 99,999,468) so I checked the Flickr site's most recent photos and they all had numbers just above 100 million. In other words Flickr this morning passed 100 million photos.

Here is number 100,000,000:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mzan71/100000000/

UPDATE: Here are a few more milestone numbers at Flickr:
#10,000
#100,000 not available
#1,000,000
#10,000,000

Technorati tags: flickr, 100 million.

The Swedish celebrity/gossip magazine Hänt Bild sent its latest issue to our home as part of a direct marketing campaign. The envelope seemed to have been opened and resealed because the mailman couldn't keep his hands off it.

The text on the envelope reads "Sorry, I couldn't restrain myself. / The mailman"

Below, the real mailman clarified: "Not written by the mailman, Täby".



Technorati tags: advertising, marketing, media.

I got tagged by Chris and Scott, so here goes:

Four jobs I've had

Product Quality Engineer
Product Inspector
PR Consultant
PR Manager

Four movies I can watch over and over

Being John Malkovich
Le Grand bleu
Life of Brian
Star Wars: Episode IV

Four TV shows I love to watch

Seinfeld
Friends
Prison Break
Extreme Makeover - home edition

Four places I've been on vacation

Italy
Thailand
Greece
New York

Four favorite dishes

Tom Kha Gai
Yakiniku
Salmon
Anything Italian

Four Web sites I visit daily

CyberJournalist
Mymarkup.net
Dagens Media
Vassa Eggen

Four places I'd rather be

Koh Tao, Thailand
In my summer house
Barcelona
In the slalom slope

Four bloggers I am tagging

Fredrik Wackå
John Cass
Andy Lark
Colin McKay