A new Swedish "online tabloid" called Nyheter24 (News24) was launched today. It is promoted as a challenger to Aftonbladet.se (*yawn*) with high tempo and heavy usage of images. The British paper The Sun seems to have been an inspiration. The site will focus on news, sports and entertainment. One of the founders is Douglas Roos, previously CEO of gambling company Ladbrokes, and Vassa Eggen notices that Ladbrokes has banners all over the site and are also mentioned four (!) times in this article.

There doesn't seem to be any RSS feeds on the entire site, which you would expect from a new news site in 2008, especially since it includes a number of blogs.

Tags: thesun, news, ladbrokes, rss, nyheter24. Ping.

The most popular YouTube video of all time has been viewed more than 103 million times. It's got almost 302,000 comments and 267,000 ratings (average rating 4.5 out of 5). Those are amazing numbers especially considering that the video has embedding disabled, so the file can't easily spread across the web like most other YouTube videos. The video is the hit song Girfriend by Canadian pop princess Avril Lavigne and it was uploaded on February 27, 2007.

ReadWriteWeb writes that among the 10 most popular YouTube videos ever, 6 are music videos by professional musicians, 2 are comedy (professional comedians), 1 is a Spanish love story, and 1 is a Swedish amateur video with the baby William who just can't stop laughing. That video has to date been viewed 62 million times and has 84,000 comments (average rating 5 out of 5).



Top 10 (million views):

1. Avril Lavigne - Girlfriend (103m)
2. Evolution of Dance (100m)
3. Lo que tú Quieras Oír (76m)
4. Leona Lewis - Bleeding Love (70m)
5. Rihanna - Don't Stop The Music (n/a, video not available in Sweden so no link love for you)
6. Chris Brown - With You (70m)
7. Timbaland - Apologize (feat. One Republic) (68m)
8. Jeff Dunham - Achmed the Dead Terrorist (66m)
9. Alicia Keys - No One (65m)
10. Hahaha (Swedish baby) (62m)

Update: Apparently Avril Lavigne fans have inflated the number of views of the Girlfriend video by gaming the system. Wired has the details.

Tags: video, avril lavigne, youtube, musik, youtube, video. Ping.

Aftonbladet today has an interview with me and Hanna Fridén about how to build a successful blog.

Update: Just noticed that there was a second article published here.

Tags: blogging, blogosphere, bloggar. Ping.

The team behind the Swedish RSS reader Blogkoll today launched an English version of the site, called Bloglovin'. The Swedish version was launched in October 2007 and today has 37,000 members. The easy to use reader has become especially popular among the local fashionistas, 84% of the members are women who mainly follow fashion blogs.

The reader now also comes with a new feature called Muffin, which is a thin frame at the bottom of the page which lets readers go to the next unread blog post with just a click. An illustration of how that looks can be found here.

Tags: rss, blogosphere, bloglovin, modebloggar, mode. Ping.

Interbrand has released its annual ranking of the world's best global brands 2008. Coca-Cola is still the number one brand with a brand value of 66,667 $m. Finland is leading the Nordic league with Nokia parked in fifth place, but the number of Swedish brands on the list have doubled from one to two. Apparel giant H&M is one of 8 new brands on the top 100 list and is ranked in 22nd place with a brand value of 13,840 $m. IKEA also climbs from 38 to 35th place. Apart from the new brands on the list, Google is the strongest climber with an increase of 43% in brand value.

Tags: brands, branding, hm, ikea. Ping.

Bilddagboken is Sweden's largest youth community where members can upload and share photos. The site has now reached 1.3 million unique visitors per week (unique web browsers), which is a 50% increase in one year (862,000 per week a year ago). The growth is good news for the owner Wyatt Media Group, which also owns the previous darling among Swedish youth communities - Lunarstorm. Lunarstorm has lost more than half of its visitors during the last 12 months, down from 673,000 weekly unique web browsers to 303,000 last week, a drop by 55%. According to Ekonominyheterna, visits to Lunarstorm peaked in March 2006 with 1.6 million visitors.

Stats from KIAindex.

Tags: bilddagboken, communities, foto, bilddagboken. Ping.

Technorati has just released its latest State of the Blogosphere 2008 report. Technorati now tracks 133 million blogs, but only 1.5 million of those blogs were updated during the last 7 days.



Here are some of the findings, with comments about the Swedish blogosphere as a comparison (from the BlogSweden 3 survey).

- 66% of the bloggers are male. 73% of European bloggers are male. (Swe: 76% are female)
- 50% are 18-34 years (Swe: 55% are 16-25 years)
- Female bloggers: only 9% are 18-24 years (Swe: a large portion, don't have exact figures right now, are 16-20 years)
- Female bloggers: topics are more likely to be personal. 66% blog about personal musings (Swe: female blog readers like to read blogs about fasion and design (53%) and everyday life experiences (52%)).
- Women blog to stay connected and to make connections. (Swe: Female bloggers blog to a higher extent than male bloggers to get in touch with others and to stay in touch with friends and family)

Personal/lifestyle most popular blog topic.



Sweden: the most popular blog topics to read is "everyday life experiences".



Self expression and sharing expertise are the top reasons for blogging.


Sweden: self expression (I like to write) most popular reason to blog.


Tags: technorati, blogosphere, statistics, bloggar, technorati. Ping.

Here is the first video footage of the T-mobile G1 Google Android phone that was launched today in New York. The video shows the touch-based interface with its innovative solution for locking the phone through a gesture based code instead of a pin code.



The G1 will be available in the U.S. on 22 October 2008 for $179. Via Cool Hunting.

Tags: google, android, g1, google, android. Ping.

A few weeks ago, BBC journalist Rory Cellan-Jones blogged about the Scrabulous vs Scrabble hoopla on Facebook, in a light-hearted way, as he describes it. Not long after he had published the post he got a message from a follower on Twitter asking him "Why did you not mention Wordscraper?", referring to another game. Cellan-Jones writes:

"I was a little irritated by this, as my piece was intended as a bit of fun rather than an exhaustive inquiry into the Scrabulous affair - which, after all, is hardly Watergate. So I Tweeted back: "cos I couldn't be bothered", and thought no more about it."

The remark didn't sit well with the Twitter 'friend' who wrote a lenghty blog post saying things like "Years from now, when British journalism has finally breathed its last, this phrase will be engraved on its tombstone."

A few days later Cellan-Jones tweeted about a press release and described it as the "new leader in rubbish PR stunt of 08". Apparently the PR person behind the release noticed the tweet and emailed Cellan-Jones with the comment "Got your feedback via Twitter. You cut me deep!!!".

Social media services allow us to have more personal conversations with friends, or 'friends', but the personal nature doesn't mean that conversations are private. The majority of our actions are in fact out in the public, open to anyone to view and respond to, and it might be wise to keep that in mind.

Better Business Blogging has a tongue-in-cheek post about how to avoid negative reactions in the blogosphere:

- Avoid expressing an opinion - there is nothing worse than opinions to get people’s backs up and there’s also a high risk that someone, somewhere will disagree with them. You may find that sharing information carries these same risks as it opens the door for dialogue and discussion.
- Make your posts as bland as possible - by reporting little of relevance or interest in your blog, you will successfully be reducing the number of people reading it. An added bonus is that nobody is likely to make the effort to engage in conversation by posting comments, positive or negative. Longer-term strategy but still very effective.
- Hide your blog - let’s face it, if people can’t find your blog then they are unlikely to react negatively to anything in it. This can either be done actively or passively: actively should involve regularly changing permalinks to break those unwanted inbound links, while passively you can simply sit back and steadfastly refuse to admit that the blog exists.

Via Journalism.co.uk.

Tags: twitter, journalism, microblogging, twitter, journalistik. Ping.

I got a very nice email the other day from Guy Kawasaki telling me that Media Culpa has been included in the Social Media section of Alltop. Alltop is a site that aggregates feeds from selected sites within different categories and then displays the headlines of the latest stories from these news sites and blogs.

Other sites filed under "social media" are great blogs such as Readwriteweb, Mashable and Problogger. Thanks Guy.

Tags: alltop, rss, social media, sociala medier, rss. Ping.

Social media tools like for example microblogging platforms have a lot of advantages. News organizations like CNN use it to engage viewers in conversation and big brands like GM and Jetblue also communicate via Twitter. But there are of course occasions when these channels are not appropriate to use and Berny Morson, a reporter at The Rocky Mountain News, demonstrated poor judgement on Wednesday this week when he decided to tweet the funeral of a 3-year old boy that was killed by a pickup truck the week before.

Covering a tragic indicent like the loss of a small child, and in particular the very emotional setting during a funeral, requires a great deal of respect for the privacy of the people involved.

"We're at this emotional service and there was this reporter non-stop text messaging," Mike McPhee, a Denver Post reporter said. "How would you not notice?"

With tweets like "the father is sobbing over the casket", Morson in my view clearly crosses the line for what is ethical. Just because you can, doesn't mean that you should.

Tags: twitter, funeral, microblogging, twitter, begravning. Ping.

The feed aggregation site Lifestream.fm has now come out of beta and is open to the public. It has also added some new features, such as a "beam-it-up-scotty" service, that lets users send links to a mobile phone, and a few other enhancements to make sharing easier.

Footnote: You will find me here on Lifestream.fm.

Tags: lifestreaming, bloggar, rss. Ping.

I love this. Ben Walker: "you're no-one if you aren't on Twitter".





"If you havent' been bookmarked, retweeted and blogged, you might as well not have existed."

[Via Neville]

Tags: twitter, humour, microblogging, twitter, humor. Ping.

In the paper version of today's Dagens Nyheter, a headline reads "Woman new political editor at DN". It would be unthinkable to publish the headline "Man new political editor at DN", but when it's a woman, for some reason it seems to be perfectly valid. A similar case appeared in February 2006 when the paper version of DN had the headline "Woman might be new Managing Director of the Swedish Shareholders' Association".

The online version reads "Heidi Avellan new political editor at DN".

Tags: media, dn, media, kvinnor. Ping.

Google's new web browser Chrome has quickly made an impact on the market. After just three days it has already grabbed a 2.6% market share, at least according to statistics by Get Clicky. The statistics say that Chrome on Sept 3 was up to 3.1 percent and it will be interesting to see how much of this traffic comes from users that test Chrome and then go back to their previous browser.



Tags: chrome, google, chrome, google, webben. Ping.