The use of social media among US teens
Pew Internet has just published the results of a new survey called Teens and Social Media. It shows that US online teens increasingly are using the internet as a means to collaborate and to engage in conversations. Among the findings:
- 39% of online teens share their own artistic creations online, such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos, up from 33% in 2004.
- 33% create or work on webpages or blogs for others, including those for groups they belong to, friends, or school assignments, basically unchanged from 2004 (32%).
- 28% have created their own online journal or blog, up from 19% in 2004.
- 27% maintain their own personal webpage, up from 22% in 2004.
- 26% remix content they find online into their own creations, up from 19% in 2004.
Overall, girls seem to dominate the teen blogosphere in the US.
Tags: pew, social media, sociala medier, bloggar. Ping.
- 39% of online teens share their own artistic creations online, such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos, up from 33% in 2004.
- 33% create or work on webpages or blogs for others, including those for groups they belong to, friends, or school assignments, basically unchanged from 2004 (32%).
- 28% have created their own online journal or blog, up from 19% in 2004.
- 27% maintain their own personal webpage, up from 22% in 2004.
- 26% remix content they find online into their own creations, up from 19% in 2004.
Overall, girls seem to dominate the teen blogosphere in the US.
"35% of all online teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online teen boys. This gender gap for blogging has grown larger over time."Another interesting finding was that "Only 14% of all teens report sending emails to their friends every day, making it the least popular form of daily social communication on the list we queried." Talk to friends on landline telephones is still the top channel.
Tags: pew, social media, sociala medier, bloggar. Ping.
Estonia opens embassy in Second Life
Perhaps you think that Second Life is yesterday's news, but it's not. It's actually the news of Dec 4, because that's when Estonia launched their embassy in Second Life. Sweden opened the Second House of Sweden in Second Life in May 2007.
"We expect people interested in Estonia, as well as people interested in foreign relations and foreign policy, to participate in events at the embassy," said Secretary General of the Foreign Ministry, Matti Maasikas who also claims that more countries are planning to follow the same route.
Interestingly, in relation to the debate that PR firms supposedly don't know how to handle social media, the project is being implemented by PR firm Hill & Knowlton.
Via Olle Wästberg's newsletter.
Tags: secondlife, estonia, second life, estland. Ping.
"We expect people interested in Estonia, as well as people interested in foreign relations and foreign policy, to participate in events at the embassy," said Secretary General of the Foreign Ministry, Matti Maasikas who also claims that more countries are planning to follow the same route.
Interestingly, in relation to the debate that PR firms supposedly don't know how to handle social media, the project is being implemented by PR firm Hill & Knowlton.
Via Olle Wästberg's newsletter.
Tags: secondlife, estonia, second life, estland. Ping.
What's up with Bloglines?
Is there something fuzzy going on at Bloglines? My two RSS feeds just dropped from 203 to 175, and 56 to 42 subscribers respectively in a matter of hours. Anyone else that noticed this effect today?
Tags: bloglines, rss, rss, bloggar. Ping.
Tags: bloglines, rss, rss, bloggar. Ping.
HP invite scrapbooking bloggers to contest
I often feel that there is a shortage of real life examples when we talk about social media. Therefore I thought it would be appropriate to write a short post about a blogger outreach by HP. Earlier this fall, HP reached out to scrapbooking bloggers with a challenge to create the most creative Christmas card. HP has now announced that the winner is Theresa Lundström and photos of the entries can be found here. Perhaps not rocket science, but the contest seems to have been very much in line with HP's products, and not just some blog PR stunt. Well done.
Tags: hp, scrapbooking, scrapbooking, julen, hp. Ping.
Tags: hp, scrapbooking, scrapbooking, julen, hp. Ping.
Facebook replaces Expressen as Aftonbladet's main enemy
Joakim at Mindpark ponders over who Aftonbladet's main enemy today is. The Swedish daily successfully beat its prime competitor Expressen a decade or so ago, and Aftonbladet has remained the leader ever since. Expressen is no longer seen as a huge threat.
UPDATE 2: Jeff Jarvis also comments over at BuzzMachine.
Tags: aftonbladet, facebook, facebook, expressen, mindpark, aftonbladet. Ping.
"Who is aftonbladet.se fighting against, what threats does TV4 picture, who is the morning press going to beat into humiliation? Who is friend and who is foe?" [My translation]And maybe the answer is very close at hand. Henrik Torstensson writes about an inteview with Kalle Jungkvist, editor-in-chief of Aftonbladet Nya Medier.
"When Aftonbladet.se recently did a focus group with twentysomethings, the main competitor in terms of time to Aftonbladet.se was said to be Facebook. The choice for young Internet users was to, more or less, aimlessly surf Aftonbladet or Facebook for a while."UPDATE 1: Sure enough, there is a difference between Aftonbladet and Aftonbladet.se, and today Jan Helin, the brand new editor-in-chief of Aftonbladet, tells Medievärlden that "We have a distinct competitor, the tabloid Expressen". He continues to say "Then the picture is more complex in reality, we compete about people's time and with what you do online. But now the tabloid is in focus and every day we face Expressen on the starting line". [My translation]
UPDATE 2: Jeff Jarvis also comments over at BuzzMachine.
Tags: aftonbladet, facebook, facebook, expressen, mindpark, aftonbladet. Ping.
Major increase in traffic from Aftonbladet to blogs
Two weeks ago I wrote about how aftonbladet.se noticed a 12% increase in incoming links after the news site started showing blog links to articles. Then I got an email from Roland Karlsson, the person behind the popular Swedish blog networks blogg.se and webblogg.se. Roland told me that the incoming traffic from aftonbladet.se to the blog network quadrupled since the introduction of blog links.
Number of visitors sent to blogg.se and webblogg.se from aftonbladet.se:
week 41: 5,005
week 42: 5,438
week 43: Aftonbladet introduces blog links
week 46: 15,084
week 47: 24,854
Aftonbladet leapfrogged into 10th place of sites that sends most traffic to the blog network, and #6 if you exclude Google, according to Roland Karlsson.
1. google.se 407,526
2. images.google.se 356,596
3. google.com 126,878
4. bloggtoppen.se 50,028
5. englasshowroom.com 38,928
6. lunarstorm.se 37,067
7. images.google.com 31,492
8. playahead.se 31,144
9. bloggkoll.com 26,341
10.aftonbladet.se 24,854
At first sight it might look like a no-brainer that Aftonbladet would send loads of traffic to anything it links to. But a recent example shows the opposite. When 7 bloggers, including myself, participated in blog panel at aftonbladet.se, none of us recieved more than about 20-30 visitors per day from the panel. So the question is whether our topic was too narrow for Aftonbladet's readers or if it is more beneficial to piggyback on news articles than actually contributing your own original content. I'm leaning towards the former.
Footnote: During week 47 blogg.se/webblogg.se had 58,000 active bloggers.
Tags: aftonbladet, newspapers, statistik, bloggportalen, bloggar, aftonbladet. Ping.
Number of visitors sent to blogg.se and webblogg.se from aftonbladet.se:
week 41: 5,005
week 42: 5,438
week 43: Aftonbladet introduces blog links
week 46: 15,084
week 47: 24,854
Aftonbladet leapfrogged into 10th place of sites that sends most traffic to the blog network, and #6 if you exclude Google, according to Roland Karlsson.
1. google.se 407,526
2. images.google.se 356,596
3. google.com 126,878
4. bloggtoppen.se 50,028
5. englasshowroom.com 38,928
6. lunarstorm.se 37,067
7. images.google.com 31,492
8. playahead.se 31,144
9. bloggkoll.com 26,341
10.aftonbladet.se 24,854
At first sight it might look like a no-brainer that Aftonbladet would send loads of traffic to anything it links to. But a recent example shows the opposite. When 7 bloggers, including myself, participated in blog panel at aftonbladet.se, none of us recieved more than about 20-30 visitors per day from the panel. So the question is whether our topic was too narrow for Aftonbladet's readers or if it is more beneficial to piggyback on news articles than actually contributing your own original content. I'm leaning towards the former.
Footnote: During week 47 blogg.se/webblogg.se had 58,000 active bloggers.
Tags: aftonbladet, newspapers, statistik, bloggportalen, bloggar, aftonbladet. Ping.
8 out of 10 Swedish dailies lack social bookmarks
[Updated: 74% of Swedish dailies lack social bookmarks. Previous version of this blog post said 79%]
On Monday morning this week I attended a breakfast seminar at SNS where writer Bengt Wahlström presented his new book, a guide to the virtual society. During a panel discussion, Internetworld's Fredik Wass mentioned that social objects will become more and more important and if you are going to build a site then the content needs to be in a format that can be shared and commented upon.
A very easy way to let readers share your content with others is to add social bookmarks, which is basically just a link that allows a reader to export and add the article to sites like Digg or Facebook.
I ran a check late last week (hopefully this is still accurate) of 66 webpages of Swedish dailies, taken from a list at TU, the Swedish Newspaper Publishers' Association, with the addition of a few others.
We can see that out of the 66 sites, only 12 (18%) have added a feature where readers can add content to Facebook.
Only 9 sites (13%) show incoming links from blogs, 8 via Twingly, 1 via Bloggportalen. [UPDATED: new graph]
4 sites (6%) let readers add content to Swedish bookmarking site Pusha.
3 sites (5%) have a Digg social bookmarking link.
3 (5%) have a del.icio.us social bookmarking link.
1 site (2%) has a Stumbleupon social bookmarking link.
1 site (2%) has a Ma.gnolia social bookmarking link.
Out of the 66 sites, 49 (74%) did not have any of the above mentioned features. [UPDATED]
The only site in my little survey that had all the features above was Svenska Dagbladet's site Svd.se and is therefore dubbed the most social bookmarking friendly site by a Swedish daily. Svd.se was also awarded Sweden's best media site by Internetworld this week.
Footnote: Background data here. Please feel free to build on this data if you wish. In retrospect, I should probably have excluded www.ingress.se which is the joint site for Sala Allehanda, Fagersta-Posten, Bärgslagsbladet/Arboga Tidning and Avesta Tidning since the site does not have any other news than the front page as an image file.
Tags: social media, digg, social bookmarks, sociala medier, pusha, svd. Ping.
On Monday morning this week I attended a breakfast seminar at SNS where writer Bengt Wahlström presented his new book, a guide to the virtual society. During a panel discussion, Internetworld's Fredik Wass mentioned that social objects will become more and more important and if you are going to build a site then the content needs to be in a format that can be shared and commented upon.
A very easy way to let readers share your content with others is to add social bookmarks, which is basically just a link that allows a reader to export and add the article to sites like Digg or Facebook.
I ran a check late last week (hopefully this is still accurate) of 66 webpages of Swedish dailies, taken from a list at TU, the Swedish Newspaper Publishers' Association, with the addition of a few others.
We can see that out of the 66 sites, only 12 (18%) have added a feature where readers can add content to Facebook.
Only 9 sites (13%) show incoming links from blogs, 8 via Twingly, 1 via Bloggportalen. [UPDATED: new graph]
4 sites (6%) let readers add content to Swedish bookmarking site Pusha.
3 sites (5%) have a Digg social bookmarking link.
3 (5%) have a del.icio.us social bookmarking link.
1 site (2%) has a Stumbleupon social bookmarking link.
1 site (2%) has a Ma.gnolia social bookmarking link.
Out of the 66 sites, 49 (74%) did not have any of the above mentioned features. [UPDATED]
The only site in my little survey that had all the features above was Svenska Dagbladet's site Svd.se and is therefore dubbed the most social bookmarking friendly site by a Swedish daily. Svd.se was also awarded Sweden's best media site by Internetworld this week.
Footnote: Background data here. Please feel free to build on this data if you wish. In retrospect, I should probably have excluded www.ingress.se which is the joint site for Sala Allehanda, Fagersta-Posten, Bärgslagsbladet/Arboga Tidning and Avesta Tidning since the site does not have any other news than the front page as an image file.
Tags: social media, digg, social bookmarks, sociala medier, pusha, svd. Ping.
Skånska Dagbladet's new site, not exactly web 4.0
Medievärlden writes that the Swedish daily Skånska Dagbladet just launched a new site, produced by Acne Creative and Acne Digital. Although the new site has a nice and pleasant feel to it, I have to wonder why a newspaper puts so much work into a new site without implementing almost any web 2.0-esque features. I mean come on, it's almost 2008.
Forgive me for focusing on the negative sides here, but a few quick comments could be made:
- Readers can't comment on articles
- The site has several blogs (positive) but you can't comment on the blog posts
- The site does not show links to blogs that comment (via for example Twingly)
- RSS feeds not available for main content or for blogs
- No social bookmarking features (like "add to del.icio.us")
And I wouldn't be surprised if SEO pros have more suggestions for improvement (on URL's for example).
Instead the site has a brand new sports feature with live scores in 26 languages, including mandarin (!). The irony of it all is that the interactive agency, Acne Digital, which is behind the new site, has "web 4.0" in the heading of their own site.
Tags: web2.0, tidningar, media, seo, acne. Ping.
Forgive me for focusing on the negative sides here, but a few quick comments could be made:
- Readers can't comment on articles
- The site has several blogs (positive) but you can't comment on the blog posts
- The site does not show links to blogs that comment (via for example Twingly)
- RSS feeds not available for main content or for blogs
- No social bookmarking features (like "add to del.icio.us")
And I wouldn't be surprised if SEO pros have more suggestions for improvement (on URL's for example).
Instead the site has a brand new sports feature with live scores in 26 languages, including mandarin (!). The irony of it all is that the interactive agency, Acne Digital, which is behind the new site, has "web 4.0" in the heading of their own site.
Tags: web2.0, tidningar, media, seo, acne. Ping.
