Aftonbladet today started to link to blog posts that link to online articles (example here). But unlike all the other Swedish dailies which show blog links via the Twingly service, Aftonbladet chose to use its own blog portal Bloggportalen.se. On the site it says that the five most relevant comments are shown and to see all comments you need to go to Bloggportalen.se. It would be interesting to find out what factors that decide this relevance. [UPDATE: I didn't read properly. Lotta Holmström writes that it is decided after how many incoming links a blog has.]

And since Aftonbladet.se is Sweden's second largest website (MSN.se is no 1 according to KIA index) with close to 4 million visitors (unique web browsers) per week, prepare to see a major increase in blog links to Aftonbladet the coming weeks.

Tags: aftonbladet, twingly, bloggportalen, bloggar, aftonbladet. Ping.

I wrote last month about how the blog of Sweden's Foreign Minster Carl Bildt was subject to an investigation by the prosecutor because Bildt did not remove hateful comments to some of his blog posts earlier this year. The prosecutor has now decided to close the preliminary investigation, because Bildt did not have the intent to let the comments stay on the blog and he has not shown "gross negligence" in the way he managed the blog.

Tags: carl bildt, sweden, blogg, carld bildt, bloggar. Ping.

The Swedish Digg clone Digga.se was urged by Digg to change its name. Digga decided not to contest the demands. The site has now merged with another similar site called Sovrat.se and is re-launched at Pusha.se.

Bloggers and online media can add a "Pusha" button to articles so users can push for interesting stuff. Tomorrow the application will make its debute on all articles on Svenska Dagbladet's site svd.se.

Update: I noticed that Sydsvenskan.se already has a Pusha icon at the bottom of all articles.

Tags: digg, digga, pusha, sovrat, bloggar. Ping.

Out of the 76 entries that were submitted to the Swedish PR award Spinn 2007, the following have been nominated:

B2B (Årets business-to-businesskampanj):
Svensk Mjölk - Guldmedaljen 2007
Prime PR/Allers förlag - Allers kan kvinnor
Prime PR/TelisaSonera - Sommarens kioskvältare
Andréasson Public Relations /Netstar - Communityn, från lekstuga till
marknadsföringsverktyg

Consumer (Årets konsumentkampanj):
Prime PR/Svenska McDonald's - Nya Happy Meal
Prime PR/TeliaSonera - Julhälsningar via SMS
Prime PR/adidas - "Kom ombytt"
Mahir PR/Universal Records - Martin Stenmarck
Goody Bag/Swiss Masai Sverige - MBT (Världens minsta gym)
Edelman/Microsoft XBox - Lanseringen av Halo 3

Integrated campaign (Årets integrerade kampanj):
Sargasso/Twentieth Century Fox - Simpsons The Movie
Full Tank/Linné 2007 - Mr. Flower Power Linné 2007
Edelman/Naturvårdsverket - Batteriinsamlingen
Prime PR/adidas - "Kom ombytt"

Spokesperson of the year (Årets talesperson):
Edelman/Naturvårdsverket - Batteriinsamlingen
Text 100/Symantec - Per Hellqvist tar IT-säkerhet till folkhemmet
Spotlight PR/Telge Kraft - Ekundernas vän mot eljättarna

Event of the year (Årets event):
Edelman/Microsoft XBox - Lanseringen av Halo 3
Sargasso/Enosvezia - Hemmafester med Ramon Bilbao
Progress PR/BMW Sweden - "Vi har planer för framtiden, har du?"
JMW Kommunikation /Cycleurope Crescent - North Pole Bike Extreme by Crescent

Digital campaign (Årets digitala kampanj):
Re:Public Relations och Mikaela & Helena Reklambyrå/Sveriges Mediebyårer - Floskeltoppen, Stockholm Media Week
Prime PR/Nokia Multimedia - Nokia N73: "Grymma stövlar"
Prime PR/Libresse - Libresse, Let's Design!

Winners will be announced on Nov 21 in Stockholm.

Updated: One nominee was missing in the press release from the Association of Public Relations Consultancies in Sweden (!) and it has been added to the Integrated Category making it 24 in total.

Tags: awards, public relations, spinn, pr, public relations, precis. Ping.

Media blog Vassa Eggen about the typeface in Business Week's new design:

"It looks like an underground station in Utrecht."

Tags: business week, quotes, typeface, media, typsnitt, design. Ping.

At Widgetbox.com it is pretty easy to turn your blog into a widget that readers can install on their MySpace/Facebook profile or to their own blog. Media Culpa's widget can be seen above. To add it to your profile or blog, just visit Widgetbox to get the code.

Tags: facebook, widgets, widgetbox, facebook, widgets, applikationer. Ping.

Do you think that Facebook and MySpace are a load of crap? That so-called "online friendship" is absurd? Then maybe anti-social networking is the thing for you. Wired writes about the two Facebook parodies Enemybook and Snubster.

"For some people, Enemybook is about expressing their distaste for political figures or celebrities. And for other people, it actually is about spreading hatred for their despised co-workers and exes," MIT doctoral student and creator of Enemybook Kevin Matulet said.

Tags: facebook, enemybook, facebook, humor, parodi. Ping.

Pew Internet has a published a new report about online contacts. It says that "32% of online teens have been contacted by someone with no connection to them or any of their friends, and 7% of online teens say they have felt scared or uncomfortable as a result of contact by an online stranger. Several behaviors are associated with high levels of online stranger contact, including social networking profile ownership, posting photos online and using social networking sites to flirt. Although several factors are linked with increased levels of stranger contact in general, gender is the only variable with a consistent association with contact that is scary or uncomfortable--girls are much more likely to report scary or uncomfortable contact than boys."

I haven't had time to read the report but will try to as soon as possible.

Tags: social networking, teens, ungdomar. Ping.

It seems like I was right after all. Swedbank arena is the name of the new Swedish national arena for football. The bank pays 153 million SEK for a contract that lasts until 2023. A peculiar thing is that the football stadium will have the same name as the Swedish hockey team Modo's home arena in Örnsköldsvik.

Tags: football, soccer, nationalarenan, fotboll, swedbank. Ping.

The name of the new Swedish national arena for football will be presented tomorrow at 11.15 in Solna. Anyone who can guess which sponsor who has bought the right to name the stadium? Swedbank maybe...?

The stadium will cost 1.8 billion SEK to build and shall be finished by 2011 at the latest. Photos and info here.

Tags: football, soccer, nationalarenan, fotboll, solna. Ping.

Chris Willis has posted a presentation on the Hypergene media blog, that lists why some social media sites like Facebook are instant hits while others are not. He says that those who are successful have at least these 7 things in common:

They start with a compelling idea & simple solution.

They let people make their stuff better, more findable or entertaining.

They live by the Golden Rule - be nice to others.

They encourage lots of feedback.

They create “usable exhaust” - new things are created just by people doing stuff they want to do.

They let many groups form easily and quickly.

They recognize and encourage the good people in the network.

Further explanation can be found in this pdf, "We Media: How Audiences Are Changing The Future of News and Information".

Tags: social media, facebook, sociala medier, facebook, sociala media. Ping.

Editors Weblog writes that the Washington Post and the Guardian have added sponsored blog rolls to their sites.

"Although the Post hasn't – yet – made a significant amount of money from its blog roll, Adify (which supplies the ad network technology) claims the blog roll has increased the site's audience by more than 50%."

Tags: washington post, blogs, bloggar, media. Ping.

Mickes Car Rental in Visby hits the jackpot in the New York Times in an article about Ingmar Bergman's beloved island Fårö.

"Faro is not easy to reach. From New York, fly to Stockholm; Continental (from $570 in early November ) and SAS (from about $720) fly from Newark. From Stockholm, take a 40-minute flight (http://www.skyways.se or http://www.gotlandsflyg.se) or three-hour ferry (http://www.destinationgotland.com/) to Visby, Gotland. (To go by ferry, take a train from Stockholm Central Station to the nearby port town of Nynashamn or the bus from Stockholm City terminal, timed to match the ferry schedule). In Visby, rent a car at Mickes Car Rental (http://www.mickesbiluthyrning.se/), Avis or Europcar, and drive to Farosund on the northern tip of Gotland, about an hour. There, you can board the free ferry that crosses to Faro."

And the readers of NYT will be offered fancy cars like this one :)

Via Per Westberg.

Tags: ingmar bergman, public relations, ingmar bergman, pr, gotland. Ping.

In a column in Dagens Nyheter yesterday, Hanne Kjöller writes about her worries regarding integrity online, a hot topic these days when we spend so much time on the web. And I agree, we should devote more time and effort to discuss who can do what with the digital traces of our online activities. Pär Ström is the guiding star in this debate.

Kjöller chooses Facebook, MySpace and Gmail as her "axis of evil" and suggests that consumers should consider to boycott these services because we can't control how our personal information is used. And obviously we need to be careful what kind of information we share online. Kjöller writes "Too old? Probably. I don't see the point with the website Facebook. But there are others who do. Business men and American terrorist hunters for example."

By the way, isn't that a strange phenomenon? Leading journalists that write negative articles about new media technologies that they don't understand, but understand well enough to bash on a prime location in the paper. I suggest that you either get a better understanding of the technology/service/website first, or refrain from writing about it all together.

Anyway, I think that the age factor might, unintentionally, be where she hits the nail. According to a study by Pew Internet "two-thirds of teens with profiles on blogs or social-networking sites have restricted access to their profiles in some fashion, such as by requiring passwords or making them available only to friends on an approved list." In other words, young people who are savvy online networkers are aware of the risks with being too open and act accordingly. Not that I'm entirely conviced that it's enough to protect their integrity, but still.

Kjöller continues to discuss integrity issues and says that she doesn't like that "the information on Facebook is used for commercial purposes". Well, we probably need to accept that companies use information about their members to tailor marketing efforts, I'm sure that Dagens Nyheter does too. About a month ago, Resumé claimed that DN bought a community system from a company called Josh, with the purpose of building a community of their own. I don't think that the paper will do that with any other purpose than a commercial one.

Either way, integrity issues are important and I welcome Kjöller's suggestion about a Minister for Integrity, or some other political solution that helps protect us from "Big Brother". But I don't think the solution is to stay clear of all these services, but take the positive sides and deal with the negative. Just look at the number of Facebook users who signed up for Anton Abele's group against violence, currently more than 52,000.

Note: I should probably reveal, before someone asks, that I am a frequent Facebook user, rarely visit my MySpace page, and I don't have a Gmail account (don't feel that I need one).

Tags: facebook, integrity, facebook, våld, integritet. Ping.

Google today acquired the micro-blogging service Jaiku. Some more details here.

Via Fyra nyanser av brunt.

Tags: jaiku, google, jaiku, google. Ping.

Both Expressen and Helsingborgs Dagblad have added Facebook functionality to their websites, writes Medievärlden. Users can now easily add content from the two papers to their Facebook profiles.

Update: Sydsvenskan too, says Pelle.

Update 2: And Nerikes Allehanda. Thanks Nicclas.

Update 3 (Oct 29): And Eskilstuna-Kuriren and Norrköpings Tidningar.

Tags: facebook, sweden, facebook, expressen. Ping.

Maud Olofsson, the Swedish Minister for Enterprise and Energy, was scheduled to chat with readers at Aftonbladet.se yesterday. The problem was that she was in an interview with the local daily Västerbottens-Kuriren at that time. So instead of calling the thing off, her press secretary Lisa Wärn chatted in Olofsson's name without revealing that readers weren't atually chatting with the Minister.

When Resumé asks Wärn about how clever it was to let Maud Olofsson sit with another reporter during the "fake chat", she replied:
- That was the mistake.

But it wasn't the risk of being caught that was the mistake, of course, but instead the decision to decive the readers with a ghost writer.

Update: The entire chat is still up on aftonbladet.se, and knowing that "Maud" is not Maud, makes reading it extremely funny. Via Sydsvenskan and Vassa Eggen.

Tags: chat, sweden, chatta, maud olofsson, regeringen. Ping.

Steve Outing, formerly at Poynter Institute for Media Studies and now founder of the Enthusiast Group, has posted a white paper titled "Talk, Why Don’t You" about increasing online user engagement.

In the paper there are 9 tips on how to get your website users to be more engaged and participative.

Tip No. 1: Support and encourage user comments
Tip No. 2: Use alerts to keep comment threads going
Tip No. 3: Get your key people involved in comment threads
Tip No. 4: Have a human leader -- preferably a celebrity
Tip No. 5: Develop a user points system
Tip No. 6: Cultivate and promote volunteer site editors or moderators
Tip No. 7: Everybody loves contests
Tip No. 8: Showcase the best from your users
Tip No. 9: Produce a newsletter featuring the best from users

Several of the tips above are based on the wise view that one should not just take users’ content on a social media-based website and not give anything back, in some form.

Tags: social media, blogs, sociala medier, media, sociala media. Ping.

I've had the feeling for quite some time that Swedish companies are extremely slow to adopt social media in corporate communications compared to companies in other countries. Today, Dagens Industri reports (not online) that the PR agency Hallvarsson & Halvarsson has compared listed European companies' investor relations services online. The conclusion is that no Swedish companies are ranked on the top ten list , the first one to appear is Atlas Copco at #11.

Swedish companies have still not started to use new technologies such as corporate blogs, RSS or audio/video services to inform investors or media, is the conclusion in the article.

Tags: social media, sweden, sociala medier, pr, sociala media. Ping.

Today's Aftonbladet had one of those frontpages that PR professionals have nightmares about: "Rotten garbage transported with [supermarket chain] Lidl's fresh food". And since I happened to visit my local Lidl store today, for about the third time ever, I had to check if they had the paper on display or if it was sold out (as in "thrown in the dumpster"). But there it was, right next to the check-out, screaming out its unfriendly message. Probably not an ideal situation for the poor cashier, but it earned Lidl a tiny bit of kudos in my eyes.

Tags: lidl, public relations, lidl, pr, public relations, krishantering. Ping.

People who know this stuff (source unclear), say that we remember:

10% of what we read
20% of what we hear
30% of what we see
50% of what we see and hear
70% of what we say
90% of what we say and do

That is one reason why participation is so important in today's marketing communications. But it also means that images have more impact than plain text. So when a newspaper illustrates a news story with a chart, it needs to be especially careful not to doctor the statistics in a way that the chart gives a different impression than the text. In today's Dagens Industri, the paper illustrates an article about its own increase in circulation. The increase is only one percent but it looks like the number of subscribers is skyrocketing because the baseline of the chart is 115,500 instead of 0, a common trick to make small increases look big. See my manipulated chart to the right and tell me which is closer to the truth.



See also Blind Höna (in Swedish) about the same phenomenon.

Tags: statistics, newspapers, media, tidningar, statistik. Ping.

Alex Schulman has become a poster boy for online harassment. His blog at Aftonbladet has become Sweden's most visited professional blog (there are other blogs with more visitors) through his provocative style which culminated with the recent criticsim of his Aftonbladet colleague Jan-Olov Andersson.

Today Schulman writes that he will no longer continue to update this blog becuase the "blog has grown into a monster" which makes him feel bad.

"I read what I have written about celebrities and I feel disgusted by myself," he writes.

Perhaps it was the row with his colleague, or the criticism from the Press Ombudsman Yrsa Stenius in Svenska Dagbladet yesterday. Or the article by his mother in Expressen yesterday:

"The blog phenomenon Alex is not my boy, the Alexander I know," she wrote.

Either way, there is still hope for the blogosphere...

Update: I forgot to add, that this should serve as a reminder to those who are quick to put a price tag on blogs. About a month ago, it was estimated that Schulman's blog could generate as much as 28.7 million kronor in ad revenue per year. And now it's going to shut down. Blogs can be instant hits, but also disappear in a split second.

Tags: online hate, sweden, alex schulman, hat, bloggar. Ping.