IBM will present a somewhat gloomy report later today about the effects of new media on old media. The report “Navigating the Media Divide” predicts that MSM might lose billions of dollars if they don’t adapt to the changing landscape quickly enough. The Australian has the story.
Month: February 2007
The other guy blinked – how bloggers “won” the news war
Last week I compared three different tools for tracking blog links, Twingly, Technorati and Knuff. Twingly is a new service that for example the daily newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet use to show most blogged articles.
Since Twingly was so new, my last post did not do the service justice. Primelabs, the company behind Twingly, now say that the numbers visible on DN.se should be more accurate. And a new search shows that Twingly tracks as many posts as Knuff.se, and far more than Technorati. The articles listed below are the five most blogged articles at DN.se as of yesterday.
| Article | Twingly | Technorati | Knuff |
|---|---|---|---|
| “V försöker kringgå las” | 30 | 17 | 29 |
| “Lagrådet ger grönt ljus till avlyssning” | 25 | 13 | 27 |
| “Upphovsmän kan få jaga fildelare” | 35 | 28 | 35 |
| “Fortsatta turer kring Anna Nicole Smith” | 23 | 20 | 22 |
| “Arkeologer hittade 6.000 år gammal kram” | 21 | 8 | 11 |
Please note that these numbers only reflect links visible on DN.se. There could be links that Twingly track but are not publicly visible for one reason or another.
It would have been interesting to include Bloggportalen.se in the table above, but I have not found a way to easily calculate how many links there are to a specific article. Maybe Sigge can bring some light on the matter?
The introduction of blog tracking at DN.se and SVD.se has caused quite a stir in the Swedish blogosphere, and most bloggers support the initiative. Some raise concerns that bloggers will increase the number of links to Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet in order to drive traffic to their blogs. I can’t see that this is neither surprising or very negative. Bloggers who’s main goal is to have a lot of visitors and be on top of different top lists will do whatever they can to add a few hundred readers to their stats. Others will manage their brand and build a reputation based on their integrity and link to these papers when they feel a need to do so, while refraining from doing it when it is not in line with the theme of their blog. None of these choices, or variations in between, are wrong in my view. These are just citizens that exercise their newfound rights to speak their mind. So instead of critizising bloggers who pimp for visitors, let’s rejoice at the fact that the leading newspapers of this country voluntarily invite YOU to be a part of the dissemination of news.
Maybe you’ve read Roger Enrico’s book “The Other Guy Blinked: How Pepsi Won the Cola Wars”, about how the invincible cola giant Coca-Cola was pressured into changing the formula to the much disliked new Coke, a gigantic fiasco. Well, I think you can look at the introduction of Twingly and similar services (like Aftonbladet/Bloggportalen) as a historic shift where media as the sole gatekeeper has become a thing of the past. With the introduction of blogs and other social media, resisting to invite readers/bloggers into the conversation in the end was meaningless. This is what we’ve been waiting for all along – the breaking up of MSM’s monopoly of news distribution. MSM blinked, in a positive manner of speaking. Sure, a lot of crap will float to the surface, but readers will learn over time where to go and who to skip (as they do when they read blogs in general), and Twingly’s ranking system might help bring the most relevant links to the top of the lists.
And regarding the supposed increase in links to DN and SVD, among the top blogged articles, a majority are from DN and SVD according to Knuff. But according to Twingly, there does not seem to be a huge increase in links to these two sites. So, no need for panic just yet.
The newspaper is not pushing up the daisies yet
Who killed the newspaper?, the Economist asked last year. This was just one of many death sentences the last few years for the newspaper as we know it. But WAN, World Association of Newspapers, is not ready to throw in the towel. New data from WAN show that newspaper circulation is growing and new newspapers are being launched “at a remarkable rate”.
– Global newspaper circulation up 9.95 percent over five years and 2.36 percent over twelve months
– Daily newspaper titles surpass 10,000 for first time in history
– More than 450 million copies sold daily
– In excess of 1.4 billion paid-newspaper readers
– Total free daily circulation more than doubles in five years
Google fined in Belgian court case
This news just broke: Google lost the Google News copyright suit in Belgium. AP writes:
“A Brussels court ruled in favor of Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing 18 mostly French-language newspapers that complained the search engine’s “cached” links offered free access to archived articles that the papers usually sell on a subscription basis.”
Sydsvenskan buys island in Second Life
Riding on the hype from a potential launch of a Swedish Embassy in Second Life, the first Swedish paper has bought a piece of property in the virtual world. Last Friday, the Swedish daily Sydsvenskan launched its own island in Second Life in co-operation with communications agency Good Old.
Writes Good Old:“The island is called Sydsverige which translates to “Southern Sweden”, which is the area of Sweden that Sydsvenskan covers. The plan is to create a place where Swedish people can meet, and create their own projects if they want to. The planning will take place together with the visitors that are interested.”
Tags: second life, sweden, second life, sydsvenskan. Ping.
Swedish dailies track [some] blog links
Sweden’s leading daily newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet have started to include links to blogs who comment on articles on the papers’ websites, Washington Post-style. Blog posts are tracked via a tool called Twingly and a list of the most blogged articles at DN can be found here. Example at SvD here. Twingly was just recently launched and has currently indexed about 2.8 million blog posts, which of course is a small number compared to the 1.6 million blog posts that the blogosphere spits out daily. The accuracy will of course improve over time as more and more blogs are tracked by Twingly.
Currently, the Swedish blog portal Knuff is far better att tracking blog links than both Twingly and Technorati. Here is a comparison between the three services and how they track the five top blogged articles at Dagens Nyheter.
| Article | Twingly | Technorati | Knuff |
|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | 24 | 19 | 26 |
| #2 | 1 | 10 | 23 |
| #3 | 2 | 2 | 18 |
| #4 | 0 | 6 | 13 |
| #5 | 2 | 4 | 10 |
UPDATE: The comparison above is a bit unfair, as Martin from Primelabs explains in the comments to this post. Apparently DN does not show all the incoming links that Twingly has in its database. In the Help section on the site, DN writes that you can find “a list of all blogs that link to an article on DN.se”. For some reason DN chooses to list only a selection of links. If this process turns out to filter out negative articles, then I expect an uproar in the blogosphere when bloggers find out they are being “censored”. Should DN continue to leave out a large part of the conversation they will most certainly open up for criticism.
Tags: Technorati, tracking, Knuff, Twingly, Dagens Nyheter. Ping.