Month: February 2007

Monkey business at Västerbottens-Kuriren

Yesterday Eniro bought Bubblare.se, today local Swedish daily Västerbottens-Kuriren announced that it had acquired 51 percent of Apberget.se (“Monkey Mountain”) for 10 MSEK. Apberget, which was launched in 2003, is a local community site with presence in four northern Swedish cities. It is aimed at the 12–25 age group and is currently one of the ten most visited sites in Sweden with 33 million page views per week.

Carl Bildt’s blog a success

In my latest Swedish blog survey (pdf), the favourite type of blog among male readers was blogs about politics and society (69.9% like to read about this topic). So it is not surpising that Carl Bildt, Sweden’s Foreign Minister, has had a lot of visitors to his blog. During the last two weeks he claims to have had 100,000 visitors , a number few other Swedish blogs can match, if any.

And speaking of politicians who blog, this comparison between the websites of Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton is quite interesting. Obama’s site is the only one that is equipped with connections to Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. Something for Bildt to consider?

Eniro buys Swedish video community

Dagens Media yesterday revealed that Eniro, a leading Nordic search company, has bought 48.1% of the shares in Netclips AB, which owns the video community Bubblare.se.

Bubblare started on September 1, 2006 and was one of the first sites in Sweden with user-generated video content. Since then several other video sites have been launched by Aftonbladet, ZTV and TV4’s FejmTV. As a result of the increased competition and costs, Bubblare was probably in need of more capital to expand.

Eniro has an option to acquire the remaining 51.9 percent.

UPDATED: Dagens Industri reports that Eniro pays 1 million euro for the minority stake.

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Permalinks problem fixed

The conversion to new Blogger has caused me a lot of problems. As you may have read in my last post, the permalinks stopped working, so for example clicking on an item in the RSS feed didn’t work. That problem has now been fixed. Archives are no longer put in a separate folder so all permanent links on this blog have been stripped off the /arkiv/ part. Compare:

Old URL:

http://www.kullin.net/arkiv/2007_02_01_mc.html#654503616037586102

New URL:

http://www.kullin.net/2007_02_01_mc.html#654503616037586102

It seems that the old links are still working which would mean that I won’t lose any Page Rank after all. What a relief. And if you find some bugs please let me know.

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Forced swith to new Blogger creates havoc

Blogger users have had the option to convert to new Blogger for a while, but about three weeks ago Blogger started to force some users to switch to the new version. So although I had resisted as long as I could, I had to take the plunge this weekend.

I have been afraid to switch because many bloggers have experienced major problems with new Blogger. At the Blogger Help Group you can find hundreds and hundreds of posts where people ask for advice because they are unable to publish or something isn’t working properly. This blogger even compares new Blogger with new Coke.

And unfortunately my worries were well-founded. After the conversion my permalinks don’t work anymore, either in the Atom feed or on the blog. Posts used to be archived in a folder called ‘arkiv’ and the permalinks to each post previously looked like this:

http://www.kullin.net/arkiv/2007_02_01_mc.html#654503616037586102

But now the /arkiv/ part is missing and I don’t know how to change it. The new URLs (that don’t work) look like this:

http://www.kullin.net/2007_02_01_mc.html#654503616037586102

I really hope I can solve this, but at the moment I don’t know how. The only solution I’ve found so far is to give all the 1,000 blog posts a new unique URL. That will mean that any incoming links to one of my blog posts will stop working and I will lose my Google Page Rank (PR6), Technorati rank and any other blog rank worth its salt.

Any help with this issue is much appreciated.

When I looked for solutions to the permalink problem, I noticed that several bloggers have found themselves, at least temporarily, thrown out of Google after upgrading. Apparently Blogger had inserted a “NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW” tag to every page of this blog. Check this and this.

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