The smart dutchtub simply has to be the coolest "bathing product" in years. Load it on the roof of your car and bring your tub anywhere. Be sure to check out the photos on the site. [Via Coolhunting.]

It is common knowledge that the advertising industry emphasizes physical perfection in women and turns their bodies into objects. You can open any magazine or paper and see ads with women that have no other connection to the advertised product than to be an eye-catcher. Studies show that women that are exposed to sexist ads rate themselves as fatter than the ideal woman, men on the other hand rate themselves as thinner.

Advertising often portray women with a tight waist, large breasts, red puffing lips and long slender legs. Such ads give women unrealistic notions of what they should look like. So I start thinking when I see Coop's new advertising campaign where they use vegetables to depict body parts, female body parts obviously. No male bodies allowed here.





Maybe I'm just being sensitive. But it can't be easy being a woman. They are competing with photoshopped models with cosmetic surgery, and now - vegetables. The theme of the campaign is "beauty comes from within". That's not the same as saying it's what's inside that counts.

Tags: advertising, women.

A new survey will soon be published by SOM-institutet and it shows that 10 percent of the respondents (aged 15-85) have read a blog during the last 12 months. Some argue that this is a very low number, but that means that about 770,000 Swedes have read a blog. I don't think that's something to sneeze at.

While I was away taking care of more import matters, an incident categorized as the Swedish equivalent of the Trent Lott affair has erupted. The background is this. The Swedish government was heavily critized for how it handled the tsunami disaster in Asia in December 2004 when more than 500 Swedes were killed. The main problem in handling the crisis on Dec 26, 2004 was the lack of a working crisis management in the Goverment Offices, according to the Catastrophy Commission. It was therefor Prime Minister Göran Persson who had the overall responsibility for the flaws.

Lars Danielsson is the State Secretary and often labelled "Göran Persson's right hand". In March 2005, the Catastrophy Commission queried Lars Danielsson who then claimed that he had called the State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Hans Dahlgren, twice on Dec 26 to inform him of the situation. Dahlgren on the other hand testified to the commission that no such talks had taken place and Danielsson then more or less changed his version. When JO, the Parliamentary Ombudsman, investigated the matter, Danielsson insists that he called Dahlgren twice but cannot remember from which phone. Questions remain, was Danielsson in his office on Dec 26 and who did he call. The government refuses to clear the fog with reference to state security.

And as often when a question is left unanswered it leaves the field open for speculations and rumours, and this case was no exception. A rumour among journalists was that Danielsson can't reveal what he did on the 26th because he was actually with a female companion, a certain Assistant Undersecretary. But no journalists were able to get this rumour confirmed and therefore no articles were written about it. Instead the rumour was discussed on the internet forum Flashback in a thread started on Feb 16, 2006. Peter Wennblad at Neo claims he heard the rumour a week earlier. On Feb 17, two liberal bloggers posted the rumours. Johan Ingerö runs the blog Right Online [dead link] and he was the first blogger to write about the story, followed shortly after by Johanna Nylander.

But it wasn't until last week that the story really exploded in media and the two bloggers found themselves in the middle of a major news event. The rumour was not true. Ingerö was now the main target and he made a complete fool out of himself when he was interviewed on the news.

So for the first time in Sweden, bloggers were at the centre of a major crisis, resulting in accusations, spin and counter-spin. Marita Ulvskog, party secretary of the Social Democrats accused bloggers from the Liberal Party of "creating the story", which apparently was a bit far fetched. Resumé claims today that Social Democrats were trying to get media to blame the liberal bloggers as part of the PR strategy.

Ingerö eventually found no other way out of the situation than to pull the plug on his blog (Google cache here). However it didn't take long until someone kidnapped the URL and launched a parody of Right Online on the same address. Nylander did the right thing and apologized for the damage her blog had caused.

Now, what an excellent opportunity for mainstream media to go after the blogosphere. Bloggers posted unconfirmed rumours that later turned out not to be true, while the press held the rumours out of the papers because they couldn't get a credible source to confirm it. At least that's what they want us to believe. In reality the tabloids wrote articles that did almost everything except spell it out in writing. Either way, the requests for ethical rules for bloggers now come pouring in.

– Bloggers have completely different demands for truth than we do, says Aftonbladet's managing editor Niklas Silow.

You thought that hell would freeze over or that Finland would win the Eurovision Song Contest before you heard tabloid Aftonbladet swing the ethics sword at bloggers, but there you go.

In Dagens Nyheter, Nils Öhman suggests ethical rules for bloggers. In Computer Sweden, Anders Lotsson is disappointed at bloggers:

- So I don't believe in blogs as an alternative to established media.

But the call for all bloggers to abide to an ethical standard or in general act the way journalists do, is to look at blogs from the wrong angle. Bloggers helped keep the story about Danielsson's whereabouts alive and it finally last week lead to a decision from Danielsson to take a time out. Had this happened if bloggers hadn't written about the story? Don't know. Has the question been answered? Definitely no. Did some bloggers step over the line? Definitely yes. But that does not mean that blogs as a medium don't work or that we all suddenly are supposed to act as journalists, except without pay.

The traditional publishing model for journalism is to filter then publish. The blogosphere works the other way around - publish, then filter. Johan Ingerö who was the first blogger to publish the rumours got humiliated on national tv, his blog has been shut down and I don't expect to see him running a successful blog in the near future. He got punished for not checking the facts (not my job, he claimed). That's the way blogs filter fact from fiction and we will have to put up with some crap and lies because the pros outweigh the cons.

Naturally there are people who will be hurt by what some bloggers write and there are laws that protect us from the worst cases. I don't see that a blogger code of ethics will save us from stupidity. It's not the morons that will sign up for that code anyway.

This quote (in We Media, pdf) from Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University, and the graph below, give 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."



There will be other cases when bloggers make huge mistakes, and others when they contribute to a story. I just hope that the blogosphere can help keep the kettle burning under Danielsson during his time out so that we eventually will get an answer to what he did on Dec 26, 2004.

PR giant Edelman has signed a deal with Technorati:

"Edelman will have an exclusive right to offer Technorati's analytic tools in Chinese, French, German, Italian and Korean, starting with French in July and continuing into early 2007. That means not only will the user interface be translated into those languages, but the analytic tools themselves will be able to cluster blogs by language."

I can see several benefits for Edelman and its clients, but I can also predict reactions from others who would consider this an act of letting the wolf watch the sheep. I haven't yet been able to read the details about this arrangement but it would be interesting to find out why Technorati chose Edelman for this deal.

Tags: Public Relations, PR, Technorati.

Tony Bradley who is the president of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations in the UK has launched his own blog called PR Voice. Bo Jansson, president of PRECIS, the Association of Public Relations Consultancies in Sweden, should take note.

Tags: Public Relations, PR, advertising. [Via Stuart Bruce.]

Svenska Dagbladet's Martin Jönsson is supposed to launch a new blog about advertising and media tomorrow, but I notice that it is already up and running. The blog allows comments and in an email from SvD they tell me that they will soon allow trackbacks as well. Jönsson is the former editor-in-chief of Journalisten, the publication of the Swedish Union of Journalists.

I am very proud to announce the birth of our third child, a beautiful baby girl. She was born on May 16 and the entire family is doing well.

The good people over at Blogtoppen.se, a list of top blogs in Sweden, are now allowing Swedish blogs that are written in English, so as from today Media Culpa is listed in "Culture".

Dagens Industri today writes about a new poll that claims that the left for the first time in a year and a half has support of a larger percentage of the Swedish population than the right.

It can be a healthy reminder to see that, with the exception of 1991, sympathies for the left are down between elections but manages to climb up during the election year. [Insert conspiracy theory of your own choice here.]



Source: SOM-institutet (pdf). Question: It is sometimes said that political opinions can be placed on a scale from left to right. Where would you place yourself on such a left-right scale?

In Sweden, one corporate blog after another is being shut down. But in the US, patent lawyer Dennis Crouch "blawg" Patently-O brings in some serious business to his law firm.

"The first job came two months into the blog's life, when a small software development company hired Crouch to do patent prosecution."

"Crouch has also landed work for his firm prosecuting business-method patents and was hired by a group of hedge-fund analysts to advise them on the recently settled patent suit against the maker of the BlackBerry. All told, Crouch says blog readers have brought the firm "less than $1 million" worth of business."

Tags: Public Relations, PR, corporate blog, blawg.

File under "to good to be true". Dagens Nyheter's columnist Peter Wolodarski today writes a piece about Swedish banks and their fees for managing funds. He calls it "bank robbery" and that the fees are a "continuing theft".

On the opposite side in the paper is Avanza's much discussed advertising campaign for its new fund savings offer where customers can invest in funds without any charges whatsoever. Is this what is called integrated communication?



Tags: Public Relations, PR, advertising.

Metro launches a weekly entertainment guide with calendars and tips for the weekend. The paper will be distributed on cafés and bars in Stockholm on Fridays and the first issue is due tomorrow. Resumé has a dummy of the front page here.

- The circulation will be significantly lower than Metro's, editor-in-chief Sakari Pitkänen tells Dagens Media.

The paper will cover topics like restaurants, movies, shopping and sex and the planned distribution will be between 12,000 and 15,000 copies. As Vassa Eggen points out, how will this affect Metro's co-operation with Nöjesguiden, the leading free entertainment publication?

The trend towards entertainment and gossip "journalism" continues. Just last week, news agency TT Spektra announced they will start a new section called Bling, that will cover celebrities, fashion and entertainment.

The New York Magazine writes a story on the Kaavya Viswanathan case and plagiarism, that is 99% plagiarized.

"With the endless stories about the Kaavya Viswanathan case, and thinking about the plague of plagiarism, we decided to write a piece about plagiarism that is plagiarized. David Edelstein, our film critic, conceived of this idea and tracked down 20 articles on the subject of plagiarism pegged to various scandals. Then he did a big cut-and-paste job and wrote a denunciation of plagiarism that is roughly 99% plagiarized."

Very meta, indeed. It's like doing a coffee table book about coffee tables (in fact, I saw that Seinfeld episode last night...) [Via Media Orchard.]

PR-agency JKL have decided to shut down their corporate blog. JKL launched what probably was both the first Swedish PR blog and corporate blog back in February 2004, just when I launched this blog. It's sad to see it go, it has been one of very few corporate blogs in the country that have been worth reading. And I don't say that just because I guest blogged there two years ago :)

Tags: Public Relations, PR, corporate blog.

As a follow up to my previous post, Norwegian daily VG now hosts more than 10,000 blogs. Here is #10,000.

Aftonbladet, 5 May: "Aftonbladet's new blog service a success" (1,200 blogs)

Expressen, 7 May: "Expressen Blogg a success" (2,000 blogs)

Congratulations to my friend and former colleague Pia Grahn Brikell who will be the new Managing Director of the Swedish Advertising Federation.

Tags: Advertising, reklam, Sweden.

Only 12 of Sweden's 290 municipalities send tax money to the other 278 in a leveling out-system, also called the "Robin Hood tax". If we compare that list with the ranking of Sweden's most business friendly municipalities we see a striking correlation. Entrepreneurship-friendly cities are the ones that pay the slackers.



Footnote: A high "ranking" in the Robin Hood tax column indicates being a net payer, the cities ranked lowest are the ones that receive the most from the system.