Dagens Media and Niclas Rislund seems to be a combination that attracts a lot of interest this week, to put it mildly. Now Gunnar Strömblad, the Managing Director of Schibsted Sweden, tells the competing marketing weekly Resumé that Rislund has fabricated quotes with Schibsted's CEO Kjell Aamodt in an article in today's Dagens Media (not online).

- I have spoken to Kjell Aamot several times this morning and we have made sure that the interview never happened. Niclas Rislund has not done an interview with Kjell Aamot. It is pure fabrication, Gunnar Strömblad tells Resume.se.

- It's word against word, I won't comment more than that at the moment, says Dagens Media's Chief Editor Rolf van den Brink. [my translations]

Tags: media, niclas rislund, dagens media. Ping.

While we are still puzzled over why Dagens Media has closed its blog, we can find another example today of an online publication that deletes an article that didn't turn out the way it was supposed to.

DagensPS made a re-write of an article in Dagens Industri (not online, but reported here by Dagens Nyheter, and no, not all media in Sweden are called something with 'Dagens', only half of them are...). The article in DI talks about the re-branding of FöreningsSparbanken to Swedbank and how the bank had invested 46.5 million kronor (about 5 million euro) in Q4 2006 in advertising. But DagensPS got it wrong and wrote that the bank had invested 46.5 billion kronor, a sum that is 50 percent higher than the total of all advertising spending in Sweden during 2006 (30 billion kronor).

"Swedbanks nya varumärke har kostat banken mångmiljarder
Swedbanks namnbyte har kostat 46,5 miljarder kronor i medieköp."

When the mistake was discovered the article was simply deleted from the site, although a plug for the article was still visible on the front page. When I check back just before lunch a new version of the article is up here.

Tags: media, corrections, dagensps, media. Ping.

The most well-known of the global social networking sites is obviously MySpace with in excess of 100 million registered users. But other sites are also thriving in its shadow, like Facebook for example. Carolyn Abram presents some impressive statistics:

- Facebook grew from 7.5 million users last July to almost 18 million users now. Over half of the users log in daily.
- The site has 30 billion page views monthly, is the 6th most trafficked US site and account for 1% of all time spent on the internet.
- There are more than 1 billion photos on the site.

Shel Israel has a great comment:

" If you are a marketing professional and you continue to ignore stats like these, my urgent advice is pay attention. A whole generation [is] absorbed in the social media and if you overlook them, you may have a future career in the restaurant service industry."

Tags: facebook, social networking, myspace, sociala media. Ping.

You've got to love how entrepreneur and A-list blogger Jason Calacanis describes his career in his LinkedIn profile.

1995 Nobody
2000 Media titan
2003 Nobody
2005 Media titan
2007 ???

My CV could look quite similar, at least for 1995 and 2003...

Tags: jason calacanis, linkedin.

After the article by and about Niclas Rislund in today's Dagens Media, the paper's blog Köksveckan mysteriously has been closed. Two blog posts about the Rislund kerfuffle can no longer be accessed (although Researcher has the screen dumps). If the blog has been closed "for renovation" because several journalists on the photo have left the paper, the timing couldn't have been worse. And if it is an attempt to delete the comments made by the reporters, they haven't done a very good job. The articles can be read in Dagens Media's RSS feed and you can still click on the link at the bottom of each post that says "comments" and it's all available here:

First and second article.

UPDATE: The blog is up and running again. According to a comment on Researcher it was down for technical reasons, something the paper could have been much better at communicating in order to avoid conspiracy theories like my own.

Tags: media, niclas rislund, dagens media. Ping.

Asbjørn writes about a Danish company that offers bloggers between 40 and 400 DKR to blog about its clients. Representatives from Semoblog say that bloggers are encouraged to state their opinion and that there are no demands of positive publicity. According to this article, this practice does not violate the Marketing Practices Act as long as bloggers state that they get paid to write.

But as if that wasn't enough, MediaPost writes about one PayPerPost-company that takes the whole thing one step further by "paying new bloggers for writing items that link to PayPerPost blog items".

Adrants comments:

"Let's see if we can get this straight. PayPerPost is going to pay bloggers to link to other blogger's content, for which the sole reason of its existence was cash changing hands. Is anyone else having a WTF moment about this right now? Have these PayPerPost people lost all sense of reality? There are so many things wrong with this on so many levels."

Tags: payperpost, blogs, bloggar, reklam. Ping.

Sweden's Foreign Minister Carl Bildt has been using his blog very actively to defend himself against the current storm of criticism from media the last few weeks, much to the chagrin of the journalists that are after him. Expressen's Per Svensson can't hide his disappointment and writes in an article full of war metaphors, that Bildt "uses his blog as a weapon against one of the institutions of the liberal democracy - investigative journalism". This is obviously a situation that Svensson is not used to, but if journalism can't compete with the blog of an interviewee, then maybe it's not the blog that is the problem, but journalism in itself.

A fantastic example that journalism doesn't need blogs to destroy itself comes today from Dagens Media. One of its reporters, Niclas Rislund, used to work for Expressen. Last year he was fined for posing as a police man. Today the Supreme Court announced that it denies Rislund a new trial. And when Dagens Media writes about the story, Rislund himself is the author of the article in which he refers to himself as "Expressen's former star reporter Niclas Rislund" (Expressens tidigare stjärnreporter Niclas Rislund).

Martin Jönsson at Svenska Dagbladet calls it "some kind of record in poor judgement". It is hard not to agree.

But it's not all doom and gloom in mainstream media today. The small Swedish company Primelabs today announced that the South African daily Sunday Times will display links from the blogosphere to its articles using Primelabs' service Twingly. The two Swedish dailies Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet just recently added Twingly links to their online articles.

Colin Daniels, New Media Strategy Manager at Sunday Times said in a press release:

"Twingly is the most exciting product to hit the Blogsphere since RSS became an established Web technology and I believe its real potential lies in its ability to gain acceptance and link Bloggers and the mainstream media.

We are very excited about integrating Twingly into our future news site and making it an integral part of our online strategy. We believe that this is a big step forward in engaging with our readers and creating ‘link love’ with the small but growing number of Bloggers in Africa. It’s a win-win strategy!"

Tags: media, niclas rislund, media, twingly. Ping.

Does your MySpace/Friendster/Facebook profile look dull? Only have ugly friends or lack friends all together? Now you can buy good-looking fake friends to your social networking site at FakeYourSpace. The site offers you "hot models" for 99 cents per model and month and will give you 2 comments a week. Here's how the site describes its services:

"FakeYourSpace is an exciting new service that enables normal everyday people like me and you to have Hot friends on popular social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook."

"You can have our Models leave you any type of customized message you may wish. Want to make an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend jealous? No problem. Have one of our Models personally flirt with you on your comment wall."

What people will do to become popular...

FakeYourFriends is currently closed for a few days because it had used photographs of models from iStockPhoto.com without permission.

Tags: myspace, social networking, sociala media, myspace. Ping.

The Swedish furniture giant IKEA is in a bit of a trouble in Norway. IKEA had bought sponsored links for "Stressless", which is a registered trademark for sofas and armchairs owned by the competitor Ekornes. On a search for Stressless on Google, a link to IKEA came up on top, which of course upset Ekornes. IKEA pulled the ads and apologised to the competitor.

When the Norwegian news site E24 asks the Communications Manager of IKEA Norway if they had bought links to other brands owned by competitors, he hasn't got the facts straight and handles the crisis situation very poorly.

- No, I am not aware of any, he says. But E24 does a few searches and finds that IKEA has also bought links for "Tripp Trapp", a brand owned by Stokke.

Now, do you know if someone is mooching off your brand?

[Via Börje.]

Tags: Ikea, advertising, Norge, reklam, Ikea. Ping.

Via BetaAlfa I found this interview with Fredrik Virtanen, journalist, tv-show host and blogger. He calls himself, I guess a bit tounge-in-cheek, "the Blogfather of Sweden". Well, he can call himself whatever he wants, but it made me go to the blog portal Knuff and see how well journalists who blog at MSM sites are really doing. And the conclusion is that they aren't exactly at the epicenter of the Swedish blogosphere.

A few journalist blogs are very popular, like Isobel, Niklas Svensson and Gudmundson. But the blogs who are published under the umbrella of a mainstream media site are almost completely absent from the top lists. Only Linda Skugge (at #30 of the most linked blogs and at #50 using Knuff's own ranking system) and Helle Klein (#49 of most linked blogs).
Nerikes Allehanda is also on the list, but it doesn't count since the URL is for its main site and not their blogs which it is supposed to.

Peronally, there is only one blog in that category that I make sure to read everyday, and that is Martin Jönsson's blog at Svenska Dagbladet. He is on top of things, his comments add value to the stories and he is generous in crediting other bloggers.

Tags: media, journalism, bloggar, Knuff. Ping.

In January, Washington Post invited local D.C. bloggers to participate in a blog advertising network where the Post would share revenues with bloggers from ads sold by the paper's sales staff. Now Mediapost reports that Lufthansa has signed up as a sponsor of the travel category and Lufthansa's ads will run on all 100 travel blogs in the network. This makes the airline the first advertiser to sponsor an entire vertical category.

Tags: Lufthansa, advertising, reklam, resor. Ping.

The last few days, Swedish media have been reporting about brand consultant Simon Anholt who talked at a seminar in Stockholm this week. Mr Anholt called Sweden "a Switzerland with sex appeal" already three months ago. And it turns out you can be both sexy and trustworthy. Edelman, one of the world's largest PR agencies, have just published the 2007 Edelman Trust Barometer and it contains a number of interesting findings. The survey revealed that "companies headquartered in Sweden and Canada are the most trusted globally; Brazilian, Mexican and Russian companies are the least trusted."

We can also see that for the third straight year, American brands operating in Europe continue to receive a trust discount. For example, McDonald’s is trusted by 60% of respondents in the United States and by only 26% across the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.

Furthermore, according to the survey "A person like me" is the most trusted spokesperson across the European Union, North America, and Latin America. In Asia, it is second to physicians. This underlines the importance for businesses to manage relations with channels where "persons like me" meet, like blogs and community sites. And with physicians...

Tags: Sweden, PR, pr, Sverige. Ping.

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.

Tags: communities, media, media, Apberget. Ping.

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?

Tags: Barack Obama, politics, politik, Carl Bildt. Ping.

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.

Tags: video, Bubblare, Eniro. Ping.

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.

Tags: new Blogger, switch, bloggar. Ping.

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.

Tags: new Blogger, switch, bloggar. Ping.