Sweden yesterday opened an embassy in the virtual world Second Life. The initiative to open a virtual embassy, first announced in January, has resulted in massive positive publicity around the world, although quite a few news outlets noticed that Sweden was beaten by the Maldives by one week. A quick search results in 130+ international articles the last week, so the 400,000 kronor that it cost to build the digital mansion was money well spent.

The Second House of Sweden, is a copy of the embassy building, House of Sweden, located in Washington, D.C. It was inaugurated yesterday by Sweden’s blogging Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, who's avatar had some trouble navigating during the ceremony.

"There's a question of finding the place," Bildt said, as he crashed the online version of himself into a tree.

Bildt also sent a friendly greeting to Sweden's neighbours:

"I expect to be invited to the opening of the Norwegian embassy in a couple of decades."

Footnote: Photos and more at Sweden.se.

Tags: sweden, second life, virtual embassy, sverige, carl bildt, second life. Ping.

Media Culpa is once again climbing up the Technorati links chart. Thanks, spam blogs.

Tags: splogs, spam, spambloggar, bloggar. Ping.

Just when you thought the blog hype couldn't reach any higher, Aftonbladet reveals how you can "blog your way to the perfect body". Gunnar has the photo evidence.

Via Beta Alfa. Tags: blogging, aftonbladet. Ping.

Quite ironic. Swedish free daily Metro illustrates an article about integrity on the web with a photo the paper did not have permission to use. Citronmuffin has the original here.

Tags: metro, foto. Ping.

Employees from the TV production company Strix attacked the Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt on Tuesday night at the premiere of the film "Pirates of the Caribbean". Reinfeldt was attending the event with two of his children when a reporter approached him with a fake microphone (branded with SVT's logo) and splashed water over him. The "practical joke" was part of a new show, "Balls of steel", that is supposed to be broadcast on SVT (the Swedish public service tv). In the show, famous people are ridiculed and then interviewed about how it felt (yes kids, this is high quality, public service entertainment).

With other fatal attacks on leading Swedish politicians fresh in memory (the murders of Anna Lindh and Olof Palme), few saw any humor in the so called joke. The Swedish security police SÄPO have reported the incident to the police and Eva Hamilton, the managing director of SVT, has been forced to apologize for the attack.

Robert Aschberg, managing director of Strix, pooh-poohs the whole kerfuffle in an interview in Resumé where he says that it "has taken ridiculous proportions" and that "it interferes with our production". Really?

Journalists are now afraid that their access to leading policitians will be restriced due to this incident.

Sidenote: This was probably not the kind of PR that the film company was aiming for with the movie premiere.

Update: Artist Per Gessle of Roxette fame was another "victim" for the show. The reporter tried to get Gessle to push a button on a pen that would have given him an electric shock. When Gessle refused the reporter shouted "sucker, fucking sucker" after him and his son. Aschberg comments: "...I think he should have taken the pen, it would have made the show funnier."

Tags: sweden, strix, fredrik reinfeldt, svt, per gessle. Ping.

There is currently a big debate in Sweden regarding hateful comments and behaviour in the blogosphere. And since there's a lot of guessing going on I thought that I would re-post this graph from my most recent blog survey BlogSweden2. One in four bloggers say thay they have felt harassed by comments in the blogosphere.



The same graph in Swedish:



Tags: blogs, hat, näthat, bloggar, näthatet. Ping.

Maria Grafström and Karolina Windell of Uppsala University have prepared an interesting paper for the 5th International Conference on Communication and Mass Media, Athens, Greece, today and tomorrow. The paper is called “Blogging and Business Journalism: News Production in Transformation” and tries to explore if and how blogs influence the production of business news.

Apart from interviews with bloggers (for example me) and a content analysis of articles about blogs, the authors also made a quantitative survey among Swedish business journalists (79 responded).

While blogs are indeed used as references in articles in the business press, many of the business journalists are reluctant to use blogs as news sources.

Only 14% agree with the statement "I reference blogs in my work" while 86% disagree (63% disagree strongly). The low figure is partially a result of the fact that most of the business journalists do not perceive blogs as an important element in their everyday work.

Only 25% agree with the statement "I read blogs in my daily work" while 75% disagree (42% disagree strongly).

The authors conclude that one explanation to the relatively scarce use of blogs among business journalists, is the degree of specialization.

"It is likely to assume that more specialized business journalists have greater use of blogs in comparison with non-specialized."

Another reason could be the fact that there are few blogs specializing in business and economic issues in Sweden. I agree with this assumption although I would think that since Swedish business is highly international, business journalists should find useful information on international business blogs too.

What is probably the most surprising result of the survey is the gap between what journalists think and how they act. 38% agree with the statement "In my work, it is an advantage to know what is discussed in the blogsphere" and only 18% strongly disagree. In other words, more business journalists have a positive attitude to the value of reading blogs, than are actually reading them.

Tags: journalism, business, ekonomi, journalistik, bloggar, media. Ping.

May 14, DaimlerChrysler sells a majority of the struggling Chrysler Group for $7.4 billion.

May 16, job ad in Dagens Industri as Swedish brand manager at DaimlerChrysler for the "strong lifestyle brands Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep".

"Din uppgift blir att ansvara för marknadsföringen av DaimlerChryslers starka livsstils-brands, Chrysler, Dodge och Jeep, på den svenska marknaden."



Disclosure: I drive a Chrysler Voyager.

Tags: advertising, chrysler, brands, bilar, reklam. Ping.

Last night I attended an interesting debate hosted by the Swedish Union of Journalists on the topic of citizen journalism – threat or opportunity. Maja Aase, chief editor of Journalisten, was moderating a panel consisting of Lotta Holmström, Aftonbladet; Thomas Mattsson, Expressen Nya Medier; Pnina Yavari Molin, Göteborgs-Posten and Rino Rotevatn, SVT.

The initial question was about whether user generated content (UGC) is a threat or not.

LH responded by asking ’threat – to whom’?

LH and TM were, not very suprisingly, more positive towards involving readers in the production of news and LH argued that UGC produces new topics to cover and make it possible for more voices to be heard. All in all it will make journalism better because "if we do something wrong we get to hear it immediately".

PYM welcomed content from readers but wanted journalists to sort the good from the bad. She was worried that journalists are losing their "monopoly" as opinion leaders and told of an example from Göteborgs-Posten where Sweden's foreign minister Carl Bidlt refused to answer questions from a journalist and instead wrote a comment to the article on the site. TM thought that it was great that journalists' monopoly disappeared. He argued that ten years ago Bildt would probably have used a press release instead and his refusal to answer questions should not be blamed on the fact that there now are blogs. TM also thought it was a mistake to call it citizen journalism (medborgarjournalistik) because it isn't journalism, something that the others agreed with.

MA: Why is there such a huge interest in UGC right now?

RR said it was because it is cheap and money is the driving force behind this trend. He also meant that we should not forget about the positive effects this trend has for freedom of speech, but that it becomes a problem when UGC pushes out traditional journalism.

He also said that media risk running into problems with trust when they ask readers to send in their own photos. He gave an example from Karlstad where a person had to be moved off the scene of an accident by force because he stood in the way for the resuce personnel. The person said he had the right to be there to take photos and claimed to be working for a local newspaper, which he of course wasn't.

LH said that there is also a debate about people who put themselves in danger to take such pictures, but it is still just a tiny part of UGC. And people would still use their camera phones even if media didn't ask for photos.

RR gave another example of what people are willing to do to get attention online and/or by the media. A couple of people made a bomb that they detonated in a public place. They video taped the whole thing and put it up on YouTube and eventually got some publicity in the local paper.

MA: How do you control [the authenticity of] photos?

TM said that the problem of authenticity is bigger with the established distributors than with UGC (referring to AP for example) but that Expressen checks this material like everything else. He said that Expressen spend a significant amount on managing and monitoring UGC and that the motives are not to save money. PYM then made the reflection that "imagine how much ’good’ journalism these people could create". TM commented that you’re "damned if you do, damned if you don't".

Then the discussion focused around blogs for a while and LH explained how she can determine if a blog i trustworthy or not. Blogs are most of the time not trying to be objective, so after a while a reader can make their own opinion of the writer and his or her credibility and bias. And this way of looking at a writer spills over to traditional media because readers will like to know who this journalist is, what are his preferences and so on. Traditional media will be exposed to an audience that has learned to be very critical.

RR agreed that the blogosphere can be a good source of material for media and that transparency and critisism is generally an area where media today are rather closed.

PYM said that media is lending its credibility to bloggers when for example bloggers are included on media sites.

MA: What kind of material from readers to you reject?

LH: Much of it is traditional op-eds because they have another place in the paper.

Then there was an interesting discussion regarding how to monitor comments and material online from readers. It is clear that most media sites moderate comments after publishing and that they are published on separate servers (databaser) that are not in the jurisdiction of the legally responsible person. In other words, comments are published on a server that is located in another country which would mean that they are not subject to Swedish freedom of speech laws (YGL).

All four panelists seemed to argue that the question whether citizen journalism is a threat or not boils down to one thing – credibility. But they approached the topic from two different angles. RR and PYM argued that the trust that readers have in traditional media is at stake and may be hurt if readers are too much involved in the production of news, especially if the different types of content is not clearly marked. It is important that journalists are still the gatekeepers that sort good from bad.

LH and TM on the other hand opined that if media didn't open up for user content and transparency, then they will lose its credibility. And since the audience is getting used to being involved, this is simply a question of survival. If media fail to adjust to this new reality then readers will have no trust in journalism.

Journalism probably benefits from both these standpoints – one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas. However, parts of the debate seemed to circle around the opinion that if media do not include reader photos and other types of user content, then readers will never find it. In reality, of course, this is far from true. And this may be one of the bigger challenges for journalism. Citizens today have a number of alternative channels to find information, that are a complement to traditional media. If media hadn’t published user photos from the Asian tsunami, then we would have found them via Flickr sets, via blogs, via communities etc. So the question is probably more about how to include UGC, not if it should be.

Update: Andreas Aspegren comments too, in his very first blog post.

Tags: citizen journalism, medborgarjournalistik, media. Ping.

Blogs are often used to provide a better picture of how people work and Torbjörn Ek who blogs for Aftonbladet and TV7 about the Eurovision Song Contest in Finland does just that. He gives us a "behind the scenes" report and tells us about all the problems he has encountered while working at the event. For example he writes that YLE, the Finnish Broadcasting Company, didn't allow their own blogger to enter the late night party yesterday "because he had worked too long" and that other participants were stopped too.

But the ESC fans don't want to listen to that tune. Although they weren't at the scene, most of the comments to his blog post think that Ek is wrong and that he should stop complaining. Maybe there are times when we are not interested in transparency.

Tags: esc, finland, melodifestivalen, finland, esc. Ping.

Lotta at Citizen Media Watch writes that she will participate in a debate on Monday in Stockholm about "citizen journalism - threat or opportunity". The debate is hosted by the Swedish Union of Journalists and with a little bit of luck I will be able to attend the meeting.

Tags: citizen journalism, medborgarjournalistik, media. Ping.

Now there's a recruitment to write home about. JKL, one of the larger PR agencies in Sweden, has signed former Prime Minister Göran Persson as Senior Advisor.

Tags: pr, public relations, pr, jkl. Ping.

Now that Nicolas Sarkozy is the new French president, he might be spared being called "that man Sarkozy" by the editors of Financial Times.

FT accidentally published a dummy page, 12 Sept 2005:



Originally posted here.

Tags: sarkozy, france, frankrike, sarkozy. Ping.

Swedish blog readers have killed one high profile blog this week and rescued another from being buried. Right wing veteran Dick Erixon came to the point where he couldn't justify blogging for free any longer so he published an ultimatum - help me collect 100,000 kronor (about 11,000 euro) or the blog dies. In just five days his readers contributed 90,741 kronor via SMS and Erixon has now decided to keep blogging.

At the other end of the spectrum, journalist and Sweden's self-proclaimed "blog queen" (eh...?) Linda Skugge has decided to quit blogging due to threats, negative comments and emails from her readers. As much as I hate seeing any voice being silenced by hatemongers, it is hard not to think that what goes around comes around. Skugge has built a brand by being provocative and she can stir up a debate with a blog post that is shorter than this sentence.

Thomas Mattsson, editor in chief at Expressen Nya Medier comments (my translation):
- Interactivity pushes media companies to open up for the possibility to criticize journalists. I think it that journalism will benefit from it. There will be a period when journalists will need to get used to it.

Tags: blogging, media, bloggar, linda skugge, dick erixon. Ping.

Starting today, I will be managing a project for six months, which is not so different from what I am used to. It requires diplomatic skills, leadership, attention to details and an ability to make a group of strong individuals develop and work together despite having different priorities. It will be challenging, rewarding and great fun.

In other words, I will be on paternity leave with my three kids for six months. Hopefully I will manage to find some time to blog now and then too.

Tags: paternity leave, kids, barn, pappaledig. Ping.