Five of the top ten most visited Swedish blogs on the portal Bloggtoppen.se are about fashion (marked in red in the graph below). Svenska Dagbladet interviewed several of these young bloggers today and discussed their growing influence on purchase decisions. Some of them say they have to buy the items themselves before they blog about them, because they sell out. The other five top blogs are part of the Feber ("Fever") network.

A thing that interested me was if I could find any correlation between the number of visits to a blog and the number of subscribers. After all, the fact that you can subscribe to news is one of the big benefits of blogs. So I checked Bloggtoppen which measures the number of weekly visits to member blogs (and the accuracy of these figures are constantly up for debate) and as far as I understand, the current numbers are visits so far this week. A blog like Tjuvlyssnat, with almost 50,000 visits this week, has only got 149 subscribers in Bloglines, which is probably the most popular RSS reader around. In fact, all of the top ten blogs have very few subscribers (in Bloglines) as you can see below.



Of course you shouldn't put too much importance on the ratio figure, it's just a number I calculated in order to compare the top blogs. If we look at my blog, I have in total 210 Bloglines subscribers (two feeds) and 261 visits so far this week according to Bloggtoppen. That is a ratio of 80.46%. Quite a difference from the blogs above, don't you think? I have no explanation to this big difference. At first I thought it could have something to do with the way different blogs publish feeds, but all top ten blogs do like I do, which is publish the full RSS feed. So in theory you wouldn't actually need to visit the website to read the posts (apart from Videofeber where I think you need to visit the site to check out the videos).

Maybe it's just me...

Tags: blogs, fashion, Sweden, bloggar, Sverige. Ping.

The blog portal Knuff.se lists the 50 Swedish blogs with most incoming links (from Swedish blogs), during the last few months. Media Culpa is at #23 and there are a few other media and marketing related sites on the list, like Beta Alfa 2.0 (#16), NMI at #38 and Martin Jönsson at #40.

Tags: blogs, Sweden, bloggar, Sverige. Ping.

Fashion retailer La Redoute has made an impression in the blogosphere. Fashion blogs are very popular and the company is a partner with the advertising network Tradedoubler which many fashion bloggers use to generate revenue for themselves. In a new drive, the company ran a promotion on its site where all products were sold at a 50% discount for only half an hour. Between 19.00 and 19.30 last night - shoppers' heaven! Just the kind of campaign that will drive blogging shopaholics nuts. The word "redoute" is now one of the top words among blog posts, according to the blog portal Knuff.se:



So does this translate to "success"? Not necessarily. The people who managed to actually buy something were really happy, but many others were only left angry and disappointed.

Emilee: "Okej, La Redoute's fenomenala 30-minuters rea var ju väldigt lyckad. Eller inte. Snarare det sämsta jag varit med om." ["The worst I've ever seen"]

One comment to this blog post by Sandra: "jag lyckades men med deras leveranser vet man ju inte. en klänning jag köpte ska komma om 5-10 veckor. Brukar ju sluta med aldrig och sedan när den kommer in i lager så säljer den slut...hehe :-p"

Engla's Showroom: "Läste bland alla kommentarerna i inlägget under att det var många som ej lyckades handla till halva priset hos La Redoute igår. Jag var en av dem. Blev insläppt kl 19.25 till slut. Men när jag sedan kom till kassan så tog det ca 30 minuter innan sidan laddat färdigt och när den gjort det. Tekniskt fel! Ja sedan kostade allt som vanligt såklart. Jag tycker La Redoute borde tänkt på att haft det under en längre tid så att alla verkligen kunde handla." ["When I got to the check-out it took 30 minutes for the page to load and then. Technical error!"]

One comment to this blog post by Therese: "tja.... jag hängde på låset kl 19, kom in direkt. Försökte komma till kassan mellan 19.20 och 20.10 - MEN bara felmeddelanden. SURT! ILLA!" ["Tried to get to the check-out between 19.20 and 20.10. But only technical errors!"]

When you surf around these blogs you find more of these comments from shoppers who drew a blank. So, if La Redoute is monitoring what is said about their brand in the blogosphere they might be able to repair the damage they caused. If they are "guillouing", i.e. ignoring the blogosphere, they might make the same mistake again.

Rick Murray, executive vice president of Edelman, said it well:
"We look at the blogosphere as a focus group with 15 million people going on 24/7 that you can tap into without going behind a one-way mirror."

Worth noting is that none of the referenced blogs above are included in media monitoring company Observer's list of monitored blogs.

UPDATE: La Reduote makes an effort to reach out to affected bloggers. But they are apparently not offering any concrete solution yet, as would be desired.

Footnote: Att guilloua = ignorera bloggar. Från Jan Guillou.

Tags: fashion, fashion blogs, mode, modeblogg. Ping.

To get a better picture of the Swedish blogger and blog reader, I conducted an online survey between June 28 and July 4, 2006 where 700 blog readers answered a number of questions. BlogSweden 2 is the second annual blog survey that I have conducted and here are some key results:

Bloggers: The typical Swedish blogger in the survey is:

• Female
• 26-30 years old
• has a college/university degree
• would vote for the Social Democratic Party if there was an election today (read: between June 28 and July 4, 2006)
• has a broadband connection
• blogs because she likes to write
• updates her blog every day
• has nothing against being contacted by companies in her role as a blogger
• is anonymous
• reads 6-10 blogs daily
• spends 6-10 hours per week reading blogs
• never uses an RSS reader to read blogs
• likes to read blogs about everyday life experiences
• reads blogs to read “ordinary” people’s views
• has never clicked on an advertisement on a blog

Blog readers: The typical blog reader in the survey has a similar profile, but:

• would vote for the Moderate Party if there was an election today (read: between June 28 and July 4, 2006)
• reads 1-5 blogs daily

Other interesting results from the survey:

• Half of all Swedish blog readers in the survey spend 5 or more hours per week reading blogs (43 minutes or more per day) which is more than the Swede generally spends on reading daily newspapers.
• Most female blog readers don’t use an RSS reader to read blogs, (25.5% use RSS at least sometimes), but male blog readers do (59.6%)

Male blog readers prefer reading blogs about:
• Politics and society (69.9%)
• Journalism and media (59.3%)
• IT and blogging (54.7%)
• Everyday life experiences (35.6%)
• Literature and writing (24.9%)
• Economy and entrepreneurship (24.6%)
• Advertising and PR (23.4%)

Female blog readers prefer reading blogs about:
• Everyday life experiences (74.7%)
• Fashion and design (39.9%)
• Journalism and media (38.8%)
• Literature and writing (38.5%)
• Politics and society (32.2%)
• Parenthood and children (31.3%)
• Food and beverages (31.3%)

• Women blog anonymously (68.2%), but men don’t (29.6%)
• Nearly four out of ten bloggers have at least once regretted something they posted on their blog.
• One in four bloggers have at least once felt harassed by comments in the blogosphere.
• Male bloggers blog to a higher extent than female bloggers to influence others, strengthen their brand, to create an archive of information and because there is a need for more voices in the public debate.
• Nine out of ten bloggers update their blog every week. Female bloggers update their blogs more often than male bloggers (68.9% at least once a day, compared to 46.6% of male bloggers).
• Male bloggers more often than female bloggers have ads on their blogs (18.2% compared to 3.9%).
• More male bloggers say they have clicked on an advertisement on a blog (40.8% compared to 28.4% of female bloggers).

I will upload as many graphs as possible to Flickr, tagged with "blogsweden2".

The entire report (pdf) can be found here in English or in Swedish. Last year's survey, BlogSweden 1.0 is here in English and in Swedish. I'm sorry that it took so long to translate the report and if I will do a third survey I need to find a less time-consuming solution in order to produce a report in both languages.

Footnote: Respondents were chosen through a convenience sample.

Tags: Sweden, surveys, blog research, blogsweden, bloggsverige, bloggar. Ping.

Swedish blogger Oscar Swartz gets 150,000 kronor from IIS, the public trust that manages the Swedish top domain .se. He gets the grant in order to expand his blog with a wiki to make it a centre for citizen journalism.

Swartz writes:

"Med inspiration från exempelvis Wikipedia och det som kallas "citizen journalism" kommer jag att starta ett projekt för att försöka kanalisera den här aktiviteten till någonting som jag kallar Medborgarjournalistik. Man kanske kan se idén som en "journalistisk tankesmedja som arbetar med Open Source-tänkandet som grund" och som har ämnet fri kommunikation som grundläggande tema och intresse. Tanken är att dra igång en Wiki-baserad sajt där kunskapen skall kunna växa fram och ackumuleras med hjälp av många användares insatser."

In short, he hopes to build a wiki based site for open-source collective reporting, perhaps similar to what Jay Rosen is working on with his project NewAssignment.net.

Tags: citizen journalism, wiki, Oscar Swartz, medborgarjournalistik. Ping.

The Swedish Institute runs Sweden.se, "the official gateway to Sweden". Today the site also includes links to 9 Swedish blogs and podcasts written in English, and Media Culpa is one of them.

The other 8 are:

456 Berea St
andreasviklund.com
Annes Food
How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons
Karin's Style Blog
Letters to Marc Jacobs
NoisedFisk
Polarbear Podcast

Tags: Sweden, blogs, Sverige, bloggar. Ping.

Stationsvakt writes about Coop and its out-dated linking policy in which the company wants to control the style and typeface of any incoming links to its website. I can't even manage to write something sarcastic about this attitude. Unfortunately, it wasn't very hard to find other examples of silly linking policies (In Swedish, sorry) where companies demand that you seek their written consent prior to any linking.

ACNielsen:
Länkar kan endast ha formen av text och får endast ha beteckningen "ACNielsen."

Meca, a retailer in automotive parts:
Länkning till Meca.se får endast ske efter Meca Scandinavia AB:s föregående skriftliga medgivande.

TT-Line, the ferry-service company:
Länkning till dessa sidor får endast göras efter godkännande från TT-Line.

(TT-Line should consider tidying up their website. The Dutch, French and German versions all link to the German domain, but in English.)

Update 31 Oct: Coop have now updated their link policy. Via Fyra nyanser av brunt.

Tags: policies, links, internet, webben. Ping.

If you have an idea for a blog post, don't sit on it for a month because if it's a good idea, some other blogger will post before you do. A month ago I planned to do a similar study that Steve Rubel did regarding the largest advertisers and how high Wikipedia entries rank in the Google search results. I did the search but I just haven't come around to publish it.

So instead I suggest that you have a look at Richard Gatarski's very thorough investigation and report (in Swedish) that he published yesterday. He has done a good job and checked the 60 largest advertisers in Sweden and on average, Wikipedia entries came up before the company website. The average Google rank for Wikipedia articles was 9, which means they are in the important top ten results. For Coca-Cola, Hennes & Mauritz och Biersdorf, Wikipedia articles are as high as #1.

My results pointed in the same direction. I checked Sweden's ten largest advertisers during Jan-June 2006 and 6 out of 10 are in the top ten results [search performed on Sept 17].

Unilever 7
Telia 14
KF 8
Ica 8
Volkswagen 16 (Volkswagen Beetle 14)
Volvo 7
Cosmetique France - (L'Oréal 7)
Viasat 14 (Viasat Sport 10)
Föreningssparbanken 11
Tre 28

[Found via Mymarkup.]

Tags: wikipedia, brands, Google, Coca-Cola, reklam, wiki. Ping.

PR agency Edelman has been under intense fire the last few days for being involved in a pro-Wal-Mart blog, but not being open about who the sponsor is. MediaPost writes about the blog called "Wal-Marting Across America":

"The blog, launched Sept. 27, was profiled in this week's issue of BusinessWeek, which exposed the site as a promotional tactic engineered by Working Families for Wal-Mart (WFWM), an organization launched by Wal-Mart's public relations firm Edelman. WFWM paid for the RV [Recreational Vehicle ]and all travel expenses, rerouted the trip's original plan, and plastered a logo on the RV's side. Though a banner ad announced WFWM sponsored the site, it did not divulge Wal-Mart paid for the couple's RV, gas, food and other expenses."



It took a few days until Richard Edelman responded with an apology.

"I want to acknowledge our error in failing to be transparent about the identity of the two bloggers from the outset. This is 100% our responsibility and our error; not the client's."

Constantin Basturea has a good set of comments from the PR blogosphere. See also Kevin O'Keefe.

[Cartoon: courtesy of Gaping Void.]

Tags: Edelman, Wal-Mart, PR, public+relations. Ping.

Gotlands Allehanda asks five locals if they read blogs.

Yes.
Seldom.
No.
No.
No.

What a fantastic potential for growth!

Footnote: The woman from Solna is disqualified :)

Tags: blogs, Sweden, Gotland, bloggar. Ping.

Swedish business magazine Att:ention will be integrated with Veckans Affärer and only be published twice a year. But Attention, the member magazine for the association of people with neurophysiological functional disorders, is still alive and kicking.

Tags: media, magazines, attention, media. Ping.

"Den dagen bloggar fäller en riksdagsledamot eller minister är bloggen etablerad". Johan Norberg, Bloggforum 2004.

"The day blogs bring down a member of the parliament (Riksdag) or a Minister, then the blog has become established". Johan Norberg, Bloggforum 2004.

That day is today. Sweden's new Minister for Trade, Maria Borelius, today resigned, after a series of negative articles that took off after a blogger, Magnus Ljungkvist, revealed some startling facts about her and her husband's income during the 90's. Borelius only lasted a record short period of 8 days as Minister.

Background to the story here and for example here.

Update: Aftonbladet gives Magnus the recognition he deserves. Expressen still pretend it's their gig.



Tags: blogosphere, grassroots journalism, Magnus Ljungkvist, Maria Borelius, bloggosfären. Ping.

I reacted to the new tv commercial from Siba, a Swedish retailer of electronics equipment. It sounded like a complete rip-off from Avis' classic pay-off "We try harder". Siba's new pay-off is "Är man inte störst så får man anstränga sig mer" or in English, "If you're not the biggest, you need to try harder".

After a bit of search on the net, I see that others have commented about this too, here and in the comments to this article at Resumé. Apparently Siba has been criticized before for plagiarising Apple's "Switch" commercials.

Tags: advertising, Avis, reklam, Siba. Ping.

Done that, been there, etc. Blogger Beta Alfa 2.0 yesterday illustrated his blog post about the new ministers that didn't pay their tv licenses, with a reference to a classic tv commercial. In the commercial, people who didn't pay their license get a snail on their eye.

Today, Metro (large pdf) does the same.

Tags: bloggers, media, beta alfa, nyheter. Ping.

There is a story online today about the "Lesotho Promise", the biggest diamond to be found in 13 years, which was sold on Monday for about $12 million. Many of the articles are illustrated with photos of the mega-diamond and if you check Yahoo News, you find at least 11 photos that the editors could choose from. The interesting thing is that you can get a feel of whether the papers chose the "best" photo or not, since users have voted for their favourite pics. The 11 photos got this many votes so far:

Pic 1: 1587 votes
Pic 2: 69 votes
Pic 3: 116 votes
Pic 4: 105 votes
Pic 5: 88 votes
Pic 6: 67 votes
Pic 7: 130 votes
Pic 8: 100 votes
Pic 9: 91 votes
Pic 10: 202 votes
Pic 11: 150 votes

Dagens Nyheter and Ekonominyheterna chose photo no 9 with only 91 votes while Dagens Industri (photo on front page, not in the article) used a photo that is similar (but not identical) to photo no 1, the most popular photo by far. Should that indicate that Dagens Industri picked the best photo? Well, maybe you shouldn't always give people what they want, but admit that it is a fun test. And I wonder if Yahoo News have illustrated their article with photo no 1 because it got the most votes? If so, it's a nice example of how you can include readers in the production of news.

Oh, and by the way. BBC got their (web tv) reports from no other than - Jonny Dymond:

"The diamond, about the size of a golf ball, is the 15th largest ever discovered. Jonny Dymond reports from Belgium."

Tags: diamonds, photography, foto, nyheter. Ping.

On 4 October, Dagens Nyheter started podcasting. Johan Åkesson at DN På Stan talks every Thursday about music and entertainment. The first podcast is a 12 minute piece about for example Japanese music and Swedish band Koop. Marit Bergman is interviewed as well. The sound quality is not quite up to top radio standard yet, but apart from that I think it worked out nicely.

RSS feed here.

Tags: podcasting, music, musik, poddradio, Koop. Ping.

Oooooh how hard it is for mainstream media to credit bloggers with a scoop. Aftonbladet's Helle Klein posts about blogger Magnus Ljungkvist's scoop on her blog at Aftonbladet.se:

"(En av de första som påpekade detta var bloggaren Magnus Ljungkvist)"

"(One of the first to point this out was blogger Magnus Ljungkvist)"

Well, that's the closest we've seen so far to giving the right credit to Magnus (I understand that Aftonbladet would not want to credit competitor Expressen, unless they really really had to). But he wasn't one of the first. He was the first. The first. And not by minutes but by