Michael O'Leary, CEO of low-cost airline Ryanair, has a reputation for speaking his mind in a way that is great if you belong to the school that believes all publicity is good publicity. If you on the other hand think that a CEO that, among other things, calls journalists "wankers" is a walking PR nightmare, then O'Leary is it. And now he is at it again. In a press conference in Düsseldorf, Germany he recently joked that "in economy it will be very cheap fares, say 10 Euros, and in business class it will be bed and blowjobs".



I don't think that there is one single female flight attendant at Ryanair that finds that comment helpful in their daily jobs. Last week I flew to London and in the row behind me some "senior" business men apparently felt they had the right to get better seats so that the three of them could sit together, instead of divided on each side of the aisle. The flight attendant was a pretty, young woman who they addressed as "my little friend" and "be a good girl now", basically talking to her like she was a twelve year-old. Typical male suppression techniques in other words. Now, the plane was full so there was no chance for these passengers to move and they made it clear to the flight attendant that she let them down, these superior men that she should serve.

It's not difficult to guess that this is the daily routine for female flight attendants and so many other women in service professions. And O'Leary is adding insult to injury. So, O'Leary, that joke isn't funny anymore, to make another reference to the Smiths. But what really surpised me was that Ryanair apparently is trying to spin this in a positive way. On their website the company has issued a news release that claims the video is the most viewed video on YouTube's travel section. While that in itself probably is a bit of a stretch, instead I would be worried about the company's reputation that so many people have watched the video.

The news release continues with quotes like "Since then it is rumoured that the ‘Beds and Blowjobs’ debate comes up at most management meetings and everyone is cock sure, it would grow from strength to strength." They also make a big deal out of the fact that the poor translator did not find any German word for blowjobs.

Remind me to stay clear of Ryanair next time I need a cheap airline ticket. It's not worth it.

Note to Dagens Media: this is not what any sane person would call good PR.

Tags: chauvinism, public relations, ryanair, pr, ryanair, flyg. Ping.

NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, follows in the footsteps of BBC and today decided to become an OpenID provider. The reason behind the decision is that:

"The growth in user generated material, interaction with users and increased flow across NRK’s various content platforms raises the issue of a single sign-on system and the OpenID framework -which is an open, decentralised free framework for user-centric digital identity (quoting openID)- is considered to fulfill most of NRK’s needs."

Tags: nrk, openid, nrk, openid. Ping.

Update 27 June: Maybe we can put conspiracy theories aside? The post is now back up again, as critical as before.

Update 2: Urban explains why he pulled the post and why he decided to put it back up again. (Request came from a member of the board of Polar, but he put it back up in the name of free speech. This guy is my new hero!]

Yesterday I blogged about how the stock of C2SAT dropped 16% after a negative blog post on the Fiskebåten Polar blog. Now it seems that the blog post has been deleted. It will be very interesting to see where this leads. At the moment we don't know if the company is pressuring the blogger or if he just feels that he stepped over the line. Should this be due to demands from C2SAT it may very well be a bad idea because the thing doesn't go away (I have the entire post saved in my RSS reader for example), but again, we don't know that right now. However, since the company is listed, the discussion will continue on forums and other blogs.

An interesting aspect to the story is that the blogger Urban Bryngeld already in March 2008 wrote that he was threatened with legal sanctions by Furuno, a marine electronics manufacturer, due to comments he made on his blog regarding Furuno products and employees.

Tags: blogs, threats, bloggar, hot, furuno. Ping.

You've heard the arguments against blogs. They have no influence. No-one reads them. And should a blog have influence it is only the few really big ones. Yeah, tell that to the people that own stock in C2SAT, which manufactures antennas for satellite communication. Their stock plummeted 16% today after a Swedish blogger posted a critical blog post last night.

Urban Bryngeld writes a blog, "Fiskebåten Polar", about the fishing boat Polar GG 505 which is equipped with an antenna from C2SAT. Last night he posted a lengthy post about a series of problems with the antenna and the lack of support from the company. This morning when the stock market opened, the C2SAT stock traded at 1.42 SEK. At about 2.30 PM it was down 30% to 1.00 SEK, but then managed to climb up to 1.19 SEK at the end of the day, at total drop by 16%.

The Fiskebåten Polar blog has no (0) subscribers in Bloglines. C2SAT got whipped by the long tail.

Tags: blogs, long tail, bloggar, fiske, antenner. Ping.

Swedish blogs are buzzing about a controversial proposal that will allow wire-tapping by FRA, the National Defence Radio Establishment, of phone and email traffic that crosses Swedish borders. The Swedish Riksdag will vote on the proposal on June 18, so the law is a hot topic also in mainstream media. But I did not expect that it would be so hot that Dagens Nyheter would actually use a 12 month old story as their top story this morning. The headline in the printed paper is "IT company (or companies) in attack on new law" or "IT-bolag till attack mot ny lag" in Swedish. In the blurb below, readers are given the impression that Google just lashed out against the law, saying they won't place any servers in Sweden, should the law become reality. But inside the paper we find that this is a quote by Peter Fleischer, Google's spokesperson on integrity issues, made in an interview for InternetWorld in May 2007.

The second IT company to "go to attack" is TeliaSonera, which already back in June last year moved e-mail servers for their Finnish customers from Sweden to Finland in order to avoid wire-tapping. One would expect a lot more news value in the lead story in Sweden's leading daily.

It was also interesting to see how DN used the quotes from InternetWorld, in Swedish below. DN has not used the quotes word-by-word, but instead re-arranged the quotes with different words (my bold).

IW: Vi har kontaktat svenska myndigheter för att ge vår syn på förslaget och vi har gjort det klart att vi aldrig kommer att placera några servrar innanför Sveriges gränser om förslaget går igenom.

DN: Vi har gjort klart för svenska myndigheter att vi aldrig tänker placera några Googleservrar inom Sveriges gränser om det här förslaget går igenom.

IW: Vi kan helt enkelt inte kompromissa med våra användares integritet och låta svenska myndigheter ta del av data som kanske inte ens rör svensk aktivitet.

DN: Vi kan helt enkelt inte kompromettera våra användares integritet genom att ge svenska myndigheter tillgång till data som kanske inte ens har med svensk aktivitet att göra.

IW: Förslaget är sprunget ur en tradition inledd av Saudiarabien och Kina och hör helt enkelt inte hemma i en västerländsk demokrati.

DN: Det här förslaget liknar något som hittats på av Saudiarabien och Kina. Sådant bör helt enkelt inte ha någon plats i en västerländsk demokrati.

It is worth noting that quotes are also protected by copyright, according to professor Jan Rosén at Stockholm University, and that newspapers in the past have criticized each other for exaggerated or improper use of quotes.

Tags: media, google, övervakning, google, fra. Ping.

Swedish media recently proclaimed that Facebook's days of glory were over (although that particular article misinterpreted some facts from an article in the Guardian). Now it seems that those assumptions might have been a bit premature. TechCrunch writes that Facebook has caught up with the leading social networking site MySpace in terms of unique monthly worldwide visitors, according to data by Comscore. Both sites now have about 115 million visitors each per month.

In February, Adam Erlandsson at Svenska Dagbladet, wrote: "who knows, in six months me might be looking back at the beginning of 2008 as the start of the death of Facebook. But at the moment there are absolutely no proof that that is the case." Well put. And four months later the signs point in the opposite direction.

Tags: facebook, facebook. Ping.

What's a UK newspaper to do during the Euro 2008 when neither England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland have qualified for the football tournament of the year? Had the home teams participated it would have meant a significant increase in circulation for the UK papers. Well, the Sun have come up with a creative solution - tap into the UK's 600,000-strong Polish community with the launch of The Polski Sun, a Polish language version of the Sun. The paper is predicted to attract 200,000 readers according to Sky News and will be produced by Polish journalists and columnists, and also include a Polish page 3 girl (no progress there, folks).

Six editions will be produced with an estimated circulation of 70,000 copies.

Hat tip to Nick Burcher who also has some photos.

Tags: euro2008, football, poland, euro2008, fotbolls-em, fotboll. Ping.

Newspapers today face many challenges. At WAN Göteborg 2008 I listened to a presentation about the new 2008 Global Report on Innovations in Newspapers. One of the more interesting comments came from Juan Antonio Giner, founder and Director of the Innovation International Media Consulting Group, who talked about some challenges and opportunities for newspapers.

How to kill a newspaper in 20 easy ways:

1. Be dull and boring
2. Change slowly
3. Publish yesterday's news
4. Take not risks
5. Expect different results by doing things in the same way
6. Insult your readers
7. Lie to advertisers
8. Please politicians
9. Cover buildings
10. Don’t interact with your audience
11. Print badly
12. Print poor color
13. Write long
14. Don’t care about design
15. Don’t hire talent
16. Don’t fire bad editors and managers
17. Pay badly
18. Don’t innovate
19. Milk the cash cow
20. Expect miracles

How to reinvent newspapers:

- Try wild ideas
- Be different
- Shake up things
- “Raise hell and sell newspapers”
- Make readers smile
- Great stories
- Be hyper-local
- Integrate or die
- Show, don’t dell
- Graphics, graphics, graphics
- Talent, talent, talent
- Journalism, journalism, journalism

Footnote: More great reports about WAN 2008 at the Editors Weblog.

Tags: wan, newspapers, wan2008, media, tidningar. Ping.

Some good news for bloggers that have few visitors but many subscribers. RSS advertising is showing signs of slowly becoming a source of revenue. Gawker Media says it grew its revenue from RSS-driven traffic by 300 percent in Q1 2008. And RSS use is apparently growing worldwide. According to a global (29 countries) social media survey from Universal McCann in March, 34 percent said they had "ever" subscribed to an RSS feed, which is up from just 15 percent the previous year.

In the article on ClickZ, it was interesting to see how different RSS adoption is in different countries. Top users (had ever subscribed to an RSS feed) are blog readers in Russia (57 percent adoption), Brazil (55 percent) and China (54 percent), while Hungary is in the bottom among the surveyed countries with just 15 percent. [Via Uppkopplat]

Also, FeedBurner will start to include Adsense ads in RSS feeds starting next week. Bloggers already in their advertising programme will see a combination of the previously offered premium ads with AdSense ads filling up the remaining space.

"Starting next week, we'll be rolling out AdSense for feeds to a small group of publishers, in anticipation of a full launch to all FeedBurner and AdSense publishers "coming soon". If you start seeing "Ads by Google" on an ad in a feed somewhere, that'd be us."

[Via Text 100]

Tags: rss, adsense, advertising, reklam, rss, adsense. Ping.

On May 17, 2008, the 2,500,000,000th photo was uploaded to Flickr (photo here). If we look at previous milestones, it appears that the growth of Flickr could be slowing down. In November last year I wrote that the first billion photos took three and a half years while the second billion took three months. Now we can assume that it took six months to get the next half a billion photos.

I have compiled the graph below out of data directly from Flickr by checking a series of photos to find the date they were uploaded and hopefully they are correct. Regarding the growth, we know that much of the explosive increase during mid 2007 (from June and three months forward) was due to the migration of photos from Yahoo Photos. But despite the fact that Yahoo Photos supposedly had 2 billion photos, the figures suggest that far less than 1 billion were migrated into Flickr.

So, while I don't have any official figures from Flickr, it does not seem that the organic growth is keeping the same pace as it did in the fall last year. It will be interesting to keep an eye on the development the coming six months for Flickr.



Footnote: The series of data I used was the following:

22-okt-04 1000000
20-apr-05 10000000
15-feb-06 100000000
22-sep-06 250000000
15-maj-07 500000000
19-jul-07 850000000
20-aug-07 1180000000
06-okt-07 1500000000
13-nov-07 2000000000
17-may-08 2500000000

Tags: flickr, photos, foto, flickr, bilder. Ping.

The Swedish Institute will host a party in Second Life on June 6 to celebrate Sweden's National Day. The celebrations will take place on the roof of Second House of Sweden, Sweden’s virtual embassy in Second Life. Swedish Institute’s General Director Olle Wästberg (Olle Ivory) will kick off the party and will be followed by performance artists, clowns and DJs. The event has been organized by Second Life enthusiast Tina Dahl who has more information on her blog.

Tags: sweden, second life, sverige, second life, nationaldag. Ping.

Right after lunch at the World Editors Forum, Timothy Balding, Chief Executive Officer of WAN gave us an update of the trends in the newspaper industry. His message was clear, the printed newspaper is far from dead. Global paid circulation for newspapers is up by 2.57% in one year and up 9.39% in five years. The total number of paid printed daily newspapers is up by 2.98% and there is now a total of 11,684 paid titles. About the common statement that the printed newspaper is dead, Balding concluded that "the figures don’t match it."

But like Roy Greenslade of the Guardian noted, the following session painted a somewhat different picture. “We are living on borrowed time”, said Christof Pleitgen, Reuters. The session included an international consumer study by the Associated Press (pdf here). The AP studied how 18-34 year olds around the globe consume news and found that news publishers need a new model. Some conclusions:

- News is connected to email. “I get my news when I check my e-mail,” was the most often heard response in reference to when people get their news.
- Constant checking is linked to boredom. After e-mail, participants in the study said they checked updates and headlines as a way to pass time and break boredom.
- Contemporary lifestyles impact news consumption. People are sharing information within the home and outside. People sitting with their laptop at home may look antisocial, but they are sharing.
- Consumers want depth but aren’t getting it.- News is multitasked. As part of other activities. News is secondary, not prioritized.
- Consumers are experiencing news fatigue.
- Television impacts consumers expectations. You cant get away from tv. Tv represents a certain delivery of news that people are used to.
- Story resolution is key. Sports and entertainment deliver on that (these stories have a beginning and an end). News do not do that.
- News takes work today. But it creates social currency. Young media consumers have to work to get their news. They are the ones that need to create the value.

Jim Kennedy, Associated Press and Robbie Blinkoff, Context-Based Research Group talked about how the old media model - the inverted pyramid - has been undone. Now people are consuming news across platforms and brands. So media need to deliver appealing content, designed to satisfy all four news needs in the consumption model (Facts, Updates, Back Story, Future Story) and then deliver it across all the channels.

Anthropologist's (Blinkoff) recommendations to media:
- Deliver depth.
- Address news fatigue and balance. Need to reduce the repetition. Don't serve us headlines, we have already read that.
- Create social currency. Which piece of what I am about the produce is easy to share? News you can use by sharing.

The new model:



Tags: wan, wef, wan2008, media, nyheter. Ping.

[Correction: Oterhals writes in his blog that Göteborg-Posten, and therefore also Media Culpa, got the figures wrong. The Lypsyl ad was shown 35 million times, not clicked on.]

I just arrived at the World Association of Newspapers and the 61th World Newspaper Congress/15th World Editors Forum in Göteborg, Sweden. While waiting for the next session to begin I am reading a few summaries of things that I missed earlier during the congress. Yesterday there was a Digital Round Table seminar which included Jo Christian Oterhals, Chairman of the board at Nettby community AS in Norway. Nettby, with more than 700,000 registered users, is widely popular, and profitable. Each member pays 35 Norwegian kroner for a 20 day long membership and the site made 13.2 million kroner in profits (unclear during which period).

Oterhals revealed some impressive numbers during a recent collaboration with lip balm company Lypsyl, where members could send kisses to other Nettby users. The first two weeks user sent more than 2 million kisses and the ad got more than 35 million clicks in total.

During the round table, Martha Stone, Director, SFN project, World Association of Newspapers presented some interesting facts from the World Digital Media Trends report. She said that about 25 percent of the total revenue online goes to media companies and the rest goes to Google. She also said that Scandinavia is the region which is leading the trend that online editions one day will produce higher revenues that the printed papers, with Swedish daily Aftonbladet as an example where this has already happened (when it comes to ad revenue).

Footnote: Check Editors Weblog for more.

Tags: wan, wef, wan2008, lypsyl, kyssar. Ping.