...check back later.

A guy takes a photo of a photographer taking a photo. Guy posts photo of photographer on Flickr. A friend of the photographer finds the photo and the photographer then joins Flickr and posts the photo she took while being photographed. Phew... You'd better read the story at FlickrBlog instead. It's quite amazing.

New York Times Link Generator: Creating weblog-safe links to NY Times articles.

Hardly anyone reading PR blogs could have escaped last week's hoopla about Jay Rosen's attack on PR bloggers accusing PR bloggers of ignoring the Armstrong Williams-Ketchum affair. For those of you who missed the whole thing, I list some links at the bottom of this post.

Now it seems that yet another journalist got paid to promote an initiative from the Bush administration. Maggie Gallagher had a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to help promote the president’s initiative encouraging marriage as a way of strengthening families. But she failed to disclose it. In her syndicated column she dismissed the arguments against "President Bush's modest marriage initiative" as "nonsense".

“Did I violate journalistic ethics by not disclosing it?” Gallagher said yesterday. “I don’t know. You tell me.” She said she would have “been happy to tell anyone who called me” about the contract but that “frankly, it never occurred to me” to disclose it.

Duh, yes, that would be pretty obviuos.

Later in the day, Gallagher filed a column in which she said that “I should have disclosed a government contract when I later wrote about the Bush marriage initiative. I would have, if I had remembered it. My apologies to my readers.”

It never occured to her, and she didn't remember. How lame is that?

Considering Jay Rosen's response, it is important for both PR professionals and journalists to clearly state that the practice of payola is not acceptable.

Footnote: Links about the Armstrong Williams debacle:

Jan 7: USA Today reveals that PR agency Ketchum paid Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote the No Child Left Behind initiative.

Jan 7: Richard Edelman responds.

Jan 9: Jeremy Pepper responds.

Jan 11: Half-hearted response from PRSA.

Jan 14: Shel Holz comments.

Jan 19: Jay Rosen blasts the PR blogosphere for not commenting enough about the incident. PR bloggers try (and succeed to some extent) to prove him wrong and that his research is shallow.

Jan 20: Lisa Stone at PressThink does a follow up.

Jan 20: NY Times (reg required) about Ketchum's apology.

The aftermath:

Jan 21: Shel Holz again.

Jan 21: Elizabeth Albrycht

The new prime minister of Ukraine Viktor Yushenko has a blog-like personal site which is enabled with an RSS feed. (English version here, and RSS). Yet again we see that the former proud IT nation Sweden is beaten back to the stone age by less developed but more clever nations. Sigh.

OK Sweden, let's pull our act together. Things that should be RSS enabled in 2005:

From the parliament/Riksdag:
* Minutes from debates in the parliament - It would increase the transparency and the interest from ordinary citizens in different political topics.
* Press releases
* Calendar of the parliament

From the Swedish National Labour Market Administration (AMV)
* Platsbanken - the web site with vacant jobs

Movies:
* SF.se - movie premieres based on my choice of location

E-commerce stuff:
* Tradera.com - RSS for different categories
* Hemnet.se - houses for sale based on my preferences

Businesses:
* Press rooms (like this one) [disclosure: this is my employer]

I'm sure I can think of a hundred more, but that's about enough of free lunches.

Swedish blogger Sara thought that an ad from L'Oréal could be interpreted as being pedophile-like. She reported it to ERK (The Trade Council Against Sexist Advertising) and sent out a press release. A TV station commented on the story and it didn't take long before L'Oréal had responded and promised not to use the ad again. The reason the photo looked like a man holding a child was that the breasts of the woman had been retouched (read removed). Well done Sarah and a swift and correct response from the advertiser.

Before and after retouching the photo:

The end of the first year of blogging is approaching and I thought I'd post some stats from my blog.

I have two RSS feeds:
http://www.kullin.net/feed/atom.xml
http://feeds.feedburner.com/MediaCulpa

The first feed currently has 88 subscribers in Bloglines. The second feed has 70 subscribers, according to my Feedburner stats, of which about a fourth are from Bloglines. I'm guessing (dreaming?) that the Atom feed in total has between 250 and 350 subscribers based on current research that indicate Bloglines market share to be between 25% and 33%. That would mean a total of 320-420 subscribers, which isn't that bad actually. But that might be too optimistic considering that many readers don't read Atom feeds. My reader stats from Feedburner:


A further analysis of the most popular posts, clearly showed that information related to the tsumani tragedy drew considerably more attention than other posts, the top post more than 12,000 click-throughs. Stats for the Feedburner feed:

Rank/Click-Throughs/Content Item

1/12388/Ministry for Foreign Affairs finds missing Swedes with SMS
2/75/Swedes: "What is a blog?"
3/61/Newsweek about participatory journalism
4/59/Check out Global PR Blog Week 1.0 next week
5/58/Timbro in the blogosphere #4
6/55/PR blogging in Iran
7/54/BitTorrent video files from the tsunami
8/48/RSS to be included in Apple's browser Safari
9/42/Accusations of plagiarism at Dagens Nyheter
10/42/Mother in photos survived tsunami

Unique visitors/page views on the web page (stats from April 2004 and onwards:

April: 274/299
May: 1,696/2,221
June: 1,829/2,410
July: 1,653/2,028
August: 3,021/3,737
September: 3,602/4,675
October: 2,952/3,847
November: 6,389/8,955
December: 12,194/14,919
January: 9,797/11,586 (Jan 1 - Jan 25)

Total: 43,483/54,780
Average per day: 119/150

Top referrers:
PR Opinions 113
Technorati 79
Micro Persuasion 59

Giovanni Rodriguez, vice president at Eastwick Communications predicts that lawyers will be the focal point of 2005 due to the unknown territory that new media constitutes.

With the rapid emergence of new media (blogs, wikis and other tools), marketers are now confronting an unprecedented number of questions about the law, technology and marketing reform. [...] More than anyone, the American lawyer will take center stage in 2005, sweating and vetting the biggest questions of the year -- and taking and receiving the biggest rewards and punishments.

His top 10 predictions for 2005 include The rise of citizen journalism, Marketing gets transparent and Open-source marketing. I second that.

Commuter reading: more on the tyranny of choice.

"Maximizers," people whose goal is to get the best possible result when they make decisions and "satisficers," people who seek only "good enough" results from their choices, are the ones that are most troubled by an abundance of choice. [From Feb, 2004]

MotherJones.com writes about George W. Bush's inaugural address and apart from the political comments, the article is a ruthless dressing-down of the American press.

"In a world where Gaia -- the Earth as a single throbbing organism -- is already a cliché; where "globalization" remains a buzzword; and where we happen to be ruled by the greatest geopolitical dreamers and gamblers in our history, our demobilized media treats the world, if at all, as a set of hopeless fragments and just doesn't consider puzzling them together part of the job description. If you want to grasp our world as it is, you might actually have to click off that TV, use your local paper to wrap the fish, and head for the Internet."

The Swedish Language Council call themselves "the official language cultivation body of Sweden" and it has "no legal powers but fulfil their task through recommendations". That means that whatever use of the Swedish language the Council recommends, most official bodies and media will conform to it. However, one of the Council's recommendations on how to use the Swedish language is very unlucky, namely the translation of SUV to Swedish, which is translated to stadsjeep, or "city jeep".

One could argue that it infringes on a company's immaterial assets, in a way that might degenerate the Jeep brand name. I've been posting about this before, without much reaction.

On the Council's website there is a FAQ section which contain the very question on how to translate SUV.

In Swedish:

Fråga:
Hur skriver man biltypen SUV så att alla förstår vad som menas?

Svar:
Skriv stadsjeep.
SUV av eng. Sport Utility Vehicle är onödigt att införa.

In English:

Question:
How do you write the type of car called SUV so that everyone will understand what you mean?

Answer:
Write stadsjeep/city jeep.
SUV from English Sport Utility Vehicle is unnecessary to introduce.

I think they are wrong for two reasons. First, regarding the word "stad" (city). A survey by Bil Sweden showed that SUV's are predominantly not bought by people in the city, so the term city jeep makes little sense. Second, Jeep is a registered trademark by DaimlerChrysler and it can't simultaneously be a registered trademark, and a generic term in the same product category.

Recently some Swedish media have started to use the term suv (pl. suvar) which is more appropriate. I could learn to use that term and hopefully the Swedish Language Council could reconsider before SUV Expo in Täby in april when a lot of media will report about "suvar".

I'm so not going to start with this, because I know I wouldn't be able to stop. Blogshares is a "fantasy stock market where weblogs are the companies. Players invest fictional dollars on shares in blogs. Blogs are valued by their incoming links and add value to other blogs by linking to them. Prices can go up or down based on trading and the underlying value of the blog."

Here's how my blog is doing, currently valued at $71 (is that good or bad?). A bunch of other Swedish blogs are in the game, like Patrick Strang, Stefan Geens and Erik Stattin. And you need to picht in $160 to get a share of Annica Tiger.

Reporters Without Borders are accepting nominations for "outstanding examples of blogs defending free expression". The organisation will compile a shortlist from which online users vote to choose the best. The motive behind the awards:

"We want to draw attention to the importance of weblogs in countries where the traditional press is under the control of the authorities. Throughout the world, Internet users are adopting this new tool to combat censorship and circulate independent news and information."

Nominees should have been up and running for at least six months and not belong to a governmental or non-governmental organisation.

Link via Yelah.

Free papers in metropolitan areas increase their circulation at the expense of their paid colleagues. Stockholm City increased circulation 32% to 531,000 readers last fall compared to the same period in 2003 and at this pace will be larger than Göteborgs-Posten in the next survey. Metro Stockholm gained 8% to 681,000.

Traditional (paid) dailies like Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet drop in circulation, DN down 2% to 897,000 and SvD down 2% to 468,000. Malmö-based Sydsvenskan drops 1% to 198,000 while Gotheburg’s Göteborgs-Posten increases 3% to 577,000 readers.

The tabloid Expressen is closing in on rival Aftonbladet. Expressen is up 2% to 1,207,000 readers while Aftonbladet is more or less stable at 1,425,000 readers.

All according to Orvesto research published in Dagens Media.

If your car breaks down, cross your fingers it won't do it on a Sunday. I came to think of this as I read Chris Anderson's blog The Long Tail. He writes about the long tail concept as something that emerged in two steps, the first being "the abundance boom of the 1990s that arrived with an explosion of variety on supermarket shelves". The exploding supply of a wide range of consumer products even made it difficult for consumers - how could you choose between 150 kinds of toothpaste or 273 versions of cereal? It even introduced the concept of the "tyranny of choice" .

In many ways that's true in most industrialized nations, but in other cases the interaction between the market forces supply and demand are not working properly. Last week my car wouldn't start because the battery had gone to meet the battery maker, and it was time to buy a new one. Problem was that it was Sunday and the retailers I knew about that sell auto parts were closed. Idiot that I am, I borrowed a car from a friend and went to the nearest gas station thinking that I could easily get one there, but gas stations today hardly sell any products with a connection to vehicles. Instead, antifreeze fluids and wiper blades are hidden behind racks of the latest DVD's, freshly baked cinnamon rolls and four isles of groceries.

At my first stop, they had batteries but they didn't carry one that fit my Saab 9-5, Sweden's third most common car brand. At my second stop they only had a few different batteries left, none which fit my car. At my third stop I struck gold, i.e. they could offer me the choice of one battery at the reasonable price of 800 SEK (about 90 euro).

And it's not like I live in the middle of nowhere, I live in a suburb to Stockholm, in a city with the third highest average income in Sweden so if I want to spend my money on a product I expect that I would have a few choices on where to spend them. Not so in Sweden. The same goes for clothing and several other consumer products. Have you ever tried to buy winter overalls for your kids in December? Impossible, all the good ones are taken. Another example, I am tall and skinny and tried to buy a pair of black corduroy pants in January, which I guess is pretty late in the season and had to go to a bunch of stores to find a pair that fit. And if you wanted the best Christmas presents, don't wait until the last week to buy that cool Spider Man game, or you might be stuck with a geeky animal puzzle. I could go on and on.

One could argue that gas stations get a higher revenue from selling DVD's than from selling batteries, but if they won't do it, consumer demand should allow someone else to. After all, there are 4 million cars in use in Sweden and they all need new batteries once every few years. Question is why there is no "tyranny of choice" in the Swedish market for so many products. One answer could be that there are so few of us in this country that companies can't satisfy all our needs. If someone wants to buy a new iPod on Sunday night, tough, stores are closed.

Another answer would be that there isn't enough competition. A few companies become so dominant that they own their niche and create a niche monopoly in which they don't have to serve all the needs of the consumers. Consumers will have to suffice with what's being served, and to a higher price. In the latest issue of Swedish business weekly Veckans Affärer, there's an article about price levels in Europe, and according to Eurostat Sweden has the third highest prices in Europe. A portion of this can be explained with a lack of competition. Writes Veckans Affärer: "Increased competition would result in lower prices". Hopefully increased competition would also give consumers more choices or the long tail will only be something we read about in Wired.

If a certain practice increased with 29 per cent in a month, you'd be a fool to ignore it. Recent research from Pew Internet indicates that an increasing percentage of the online population is using RSS readers. So I thought I'd take a closer look at the adoption rate for Swedish media with RSS feeds by studying the increase in subscribers in Bloglines (who has about a third of the aggregator market, so the numbers could indicate where the market is heading).

During a one month period (Dec 9, 2004 and Jan 11, 2005) we see that the average increase in number of subscribers in Bloglines is 29 per cent. Some RSS feeds have seen a much higher increase, like IT publication Computer Sweden, while others haven't gotten any new fans. Sure, this is from very low numbers (Hockeymagasinet has 2 subscribers) and I wouldn't read too much into it, but the trend is indeed very positive. Imagine how it will look in a year from now, at the end of 2005 which I predict will be the year of RSS.

Maybe this will end the discussion about the left lagging in the blogosphere. Margot Wallström, vice-president of the European Commission and commissioner for communication and institutional relations, started a blog yesterday, according to the EUobserver.

Via Micro Persuasion.

Britain introduced a Freedom of Information Act on January 1 and BBC recalls how they went to Sweden to be able to get their hands on Tony Blair's letter to Göran Persson. The letter was sent after England beat Germany 5-1 under new coach Sven-Göran Eriksson.

With all the current fuzz about podcasting and vlogging (video blogging), this discussion about copyright issues in regards to tsunami video footage is indeed well worth reading.

Via JD Lasica.

Nothing short of brilliant. Color Scheme Generator and a bunch of other helpful web design tools here.

Swedish free daily Metro today gives new meaning to "yellow journalism" as all editorial content of the Stockholm edition is printed on a yellow background. The colour change has been made possible in order to advertise Eniro's yellow pages "Gula Sidorna".

BoingBoing writes that Ken Lay of Enron shame is paying search engines 5-12 cents per click to tell his side of the story.

As reported yesterday, the RSS feed of Spinwatch had been hacked. Apparently it has been hacked once again.

According to stats from FeedBurner's official blog Burning Questions, Bloglines is the client that has the highest RSS aggregator market share, almost a third of the market or 32.86%. The statistics comes with a series of disclaimers and may be skewed in different directions, but could still serve as a useful illustration over what RSS readers are most frequently used.

Aggregator Name (Market Share Percentage)
1. Bloglines (32.86%)
2. NetNewsWire (16.95%)
3. Firefox Live Bookmarks (7.78%)
4. Pluck (7.20%)
5. NewsGator Online(4.45%)

The Canadian student who auctioned the domain tsunamirelief.com on eBay intended to do it for charity but pulled the auction due to negative press. Now the domain has been purchased for USD 10,000 by Universal Spheres Inc, an Antigua-based company that runs online casinos at www.goldenpalace.com and previously known for installing adware and other software on users computers without their knowledge. The International Center for Applied Studies in Information Technology writes this about Golden Palace:

Golden Palace Casino is an e-gambling program, which constantly appears on your computer screen every time you restart your computer system.

Internet Security Systems has this to say about the casino:

Golden Palace Casino loads whenever Internet Explorer starts and bypasses most security software because it acts as a part of the Web browser. Golden Palace Casino is adware (advertising oriented spyware) that opens advertisements during a user's Internet Explorer browsing session. Golden Palace Casino could allow a remote attacker to execute malicious code on the victim's computer.

There is a link to Golden Palace from the tsunami web site which probably will attract a significant amount of visitors to their online casino. Sure even online casinos must be able to help by donating money, but a critical approach to this reporting wouldn't hurt, but many bloggers and big media like Reuters and Svenska Dagbladet, are spreading the word without a second thought.

What if in five years from now, millions of blogs are alive and kicking, producing sometimes great ideas and original content, often rubbish, but always with permanent links that in time creates an archive of great wealth, an archive of our culture, of the important events of our time? What if most of our search for information starts on Google or other search engines? What if traditional media continue to move old articles around, changing URL's and locking them in closed archives, will that not be to their disadvantage? Search engines like Google like information on blogs and rank them high. Traditional media are in many ways losing ground in the search engine rankings and one reason is that articles often don't have a permanent link.

Blogs have in some ways already changed the media landscape and turned what often is seen as a media monopoply on interpreting the world into a conversation. Bloggers comment on news articles and link to them, but when these links become dead ends simply because traditional media are moving stuff around in cyberspace, leaving resarchers and readers in the dark - the article can't be found. Then the "media part" of the conversation is lost, and not much of a conversation is saved to the afterworld. Articles should be given a unique address that is there for infinity.

Of course, this has to do with business models that don't include giving away something for nothing. But as stated in this Wired article about the New York Times, its lack of permanent links and closed archives:

When you think about it, the Times may have it backward. It charges $1 for the latest news in print, and offers it free over the Web, but for old material demands $3, which is three times the price of an entire newspaper.

A similar case in Sweden is the leading Swedish business daily Dagens Industri. Links to articles on its web site di.se, disappear soon after they have been published. A search on Google for a random word like "Tallinn" on di.se gives us only 11 hits, and the first article in the list (hit #5 in Google) is from April 2004, and it's a dead link. This message is a common greating on di.se ("the page has changed address"):



Another example, searching for "riskkapitalister" (venture capitalists) on Google doesn't show any articles from di.se among the top 200 hits, even though there are at least 28 articles on di.se during 2004 that contain that word. Dagens Industri, the premium source of business information, gets beaten by all other major media outlets and a bunch of blogs.

Simon Waldman, Director of Digital Publishing at the Guardian has written a brilliant article over at Jay Rosen's PressThink about permanence. He writes:

All that reporting effort, all that insight and expertise, all those contacts: now completely invisible to the millions who decide to use Google as their first and final tool for researching.

He continues:

Without permanence you slip off the search engines. Without permanence, bold ideas like "news as conversation" fall away, because you're shutting down the conversation before it has barely started. Without permanence, you might be on the web, but you're certainly not part of it.

Here's another example. Think of all the millions of words written by news organizations around the world about Abu Ghraib during 2004. Now go to Google and search (as suggested in the Wired article above) for Abu Ghraib, and you will find only a handful of traditional media outlets mentioned in the first few pages (fortunately, the Guardian is one). This isn't just a quirk in Google's search algorithm; this is about traditional media ceding responsibility for providing the definitive, permanent record of major events.

Surely there must be a business model that supports the idea of giving articles a permanent space on internet.

Pew Internet has a new study out that predicts the future of internet. Among the research findings, the experts in the survey predict that news organisations and publishing will be the area which will see most radical change due to the internet.

One expert wrote, “The most obvious effects on news media are the rise of weblogs supplanting the public's attentions to traditional news media, and the slow death of newspapers due to erosion of mindshare by online influences such as news Web sites, chat rooms, message boards and online gaming.”

The study contains lots of valuable reading, including this prediction-come-true from Bob Metcalfe, inventor of ethernet and founder of 3Com:

“Governments will tend toward democracy. Transportation will be refined through massive substitution of communication. The current flight to cities will be reversed. The Internet won't be in schools, it will replace schools. Television channels will be replaced by video blogs and Dan Rather will be dragged off the set.” [written before Rather resigned]

CTV.ca reports that Toyota Canada is abandoning plans to name one of its most popular models of sports cars, the "Celica Tsunami." Doesn't seem like a brilliant brand name even without the recent disaster in Asia.

The car will now be called the Celica Sports Package. Link via Researcher.

The RSS feed of Spinwatch has been hacked. The title of the feed shown in Bloglines has been replaced by "Hacked by ..." and the individual posts are not accessible via the feed. Hope they straighten things out soon. In fact, I remember seeing a note at the bottom of Spinwatch's site a few weeks back that claimed it had been hacked, so obviously someone is keen to obstruct their news distribution.

Spinwatch is a web site researching "the PR industry, corporate PR and lobbying, front groups, government spin, propaganda and other tactics used by powerful groups to manipulate media, public policy debate and public opinion".

UPDATE: The problem has been solved and the RSS feed is working properly again. The four most recent posts are accessible, but older posts have not been restored.

While Swedish media just recently learned about blogging and now podcasting, US media are already exploring vlogging, or video blogging. Here's the story of an 11-year old, supposedly the world's youngest video blogger, who even got on ABC World News Tonight.

A new word has started popping up everywhere on blogs; folksonomy - a practice of collaborative categorization using simple tags. Flickr and del.icio.us are popular examples of this practice. Adam Mathes, Louis Rosenfeld and Corante are discussing the concept in great detail. And I've mentioned Ideant's "A del.icio.us study" before.

PR Watch has produced a list of "people and players responsible for polluting our information environment". At the summit of the "Falsies Awards" we find PR practitioner turned fake TV journalist Karen Ryan. The list also includes some guerilla marketing techniques and astroturfing.

About guerilla marketing, Shawn Prez of the marketing agency Power Moves is attributed with meaning that stealth techniques are especially effective with teens. "By the time the message gets out, they don't even know they've been hit; they don't know that they've been marketed to. All they know is that their interest has been piqued," Prez said. Umm, I thought that teens were the most critical consumers and the hardest to fool. Ever thought about honesty and transparency in PR?

Angry consumers empowered with new technology that allows them to be mini-publishers of their own, causes a severe threat to brands and companies' reputation. PR agencies and research companies like BuzzMetrics are studying these "determined detractors" to advice clients on how to respond and avoid a serious PR crisis.

"The technology puts the power of the press into the hands of the everyman," says Paul Rand, managing director at Ketchum Midwest.

But the increased interest in negative online buzz should not just be seen as a means for corporates to nip consumer response in the bud. "If it's just to better their product or avoid a P.R. disaster, the bottom line is that that benefits the customer," according to artist and filmmaker Casey Neistat.

New York Times has the story (reg. required). Link via PR Watch.

The least interesting story of 2004 is also the most widely covered, namely the Knutby murder story where a pastor from the Pentecostal movement convinced a nanny to shoot his wife and trying to kill the man next door. Swedish media have written an astonishing amount of articles about this non-story which has all the ingredients that make up the perfect news; sex, religion, murder, infidelity and new technology. The murder took place in early January of 2004 and during the year Swedish media published incomprehensible 11,977 articles (online articles from Retriever search).

Top 20 media in terms of number of articles published:

Aftonbladet 653
Upsala Nya Tidning 630
Expressen 530
Nya Dagen 518
Sveriges Radio 507
GT 467
Helsingborgs Dagblad 338
Svenska Dagbladet 311
Hallands Nyheter 292
Dagens Nyheter 285
Länstidningen Östersund 265
SVT Nyheter 265
Eskilstuna Kuriren 253
Gefle Dagblad 253
Nyhet.nu 245
Östersunds-Posten 233
Tidningen Ångermanland 223
Norrländska socialdemokraten 223
Sydöstran 218

Some creative mind has put up water from the tsunami for sale on eBay. I wouldn't bet my last buck that the proceeds really goes to charity.

Dan Gillmor, one of the leading thinkers in blogging and journalism, has moved to a new blog called Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism - A conversation about the future of journalism "by the people, for the people." RSS feed here.

Predictions always come back to haunt you, but that doesn't stop bloggers and journalists from predicting what the next 12 months will bring. My own predictions? I'll just go for one. 2005 will be the year of RSS. Companies will explore RSS in corporate communication, like I have introduced RSS as a means of distributing press releases and corporate information for Linklaters, the global law firm I am working at. It is still very much an experiment so far and we are using the services by Nooked. More info here. (Main RSS feed: http://www.nooked.com/news/feed/linklaters)

Here's a collection of 2005 predictions.

Adam Polselli's color predictions.

Andy Lark - Ten Ways Communications Will Change In 2005.

Business 2.0, Owen Thomas:
The PC becomes passé.
64-bit computing arrives.
Multicore becomes real.
Data centers heat up.
Open-source moves up the stack.
Grids begin to form inside companies.

Business 2.0, Erick Schonfeld:
1. The year of the DVR.
2. Apple introduces the iPhone.
3. Google searches everything.
4. Blogs go mainstream, and podcasting catches on.
5. Tech consolidation continues, to no avail.
6. Nanotech makes fuel cells feasible.
7. Chinese IPOs party like it's 1999.
8. The word 'passion' is barred from all business meetings (please).

ClickZ - Buzz-informed predictions for 2005:
Blogs absorb flak, yet stay on track.
"I'll watch the ads... for a price!"
All media become product-placement vehicles.
Wireless goes free (brought to you by Unilever).
There'll be more integrated-branding misfires.
We'll see a backlash to "sight, sound, and motion."

ComputerWorld:
1. Longhorn is no longer the answer (or even the question).
2. PDAs will become passe. Disconnected ones, that is.
3. More people will lose their jobs over their weblogs.
4. But more corporations will create official blogs.
5. Security FUD will drive IT policy.
6. Wi-Fi will be ubiquitous, but not in the workplace.
7. VoIP will be a mainstream technology for business users.
8. Wireless VoIP will still be niche.
9. Linux will be adopted in greater numbers by IT, but desktop Linux will not.
10. Moore's Law will still be irrelevant.

Dave Winer:
1. We'll all give something up.
2. We'll all take something on.
3. If I make it to May 2, I'll turn 50. Praise Murphy!
4. Identity will remain a mess.
5. RSS will remain a success.
6. A major on-air radio talk show host from the left or right will realize that he or she can build a new market for his or her work by allowing people to download it in MP3 format linked into an RSS feed and listened to on an iPod.
7. A political leader, a candidate for some office, will emerge from the blogosphere. People will call this open source candidacy.
8. The term open source will come to mean nothing.
9. Cory Doctorow will sue Adam Curry for saying "Boing" when he's happy. (Postscript: Mark F at BB asks if Curry cures Alzheimers. Does that mean they aren't suing?)
10. New tools for blogging will emerge allowing more complex structures of ideas to flow publicly through the Internet.
11. More people will call the Internet the Inkernet.
12. There will be a wifi signal at the top of the Empire State Building and in every truck stop in the US. Also in every Best Buy. McDonald's won't embrace the Internet.

e-Agency:
China. (It will be obvious.)
“Branding” will be the corporate buzz word of 2005, and for good reason.
Mainstream business will finally “get” blogs.
The home network will be controlled from the home entertainment center.
We will (almost) all download a movie this year – most for the first time.
Even more of the routine functions we do every day, like finding a parking space, will be done online.
Wireless networks will be everywhere, at work, in public and in many homes.
Good photography will lead the way in making Web sites more attractive.
We’ll be watching “TV” commercials on major Web sites by next Christmas.
More Web sites will add search tools, as they become more complex.

Fimoculous.com - Digital media predictions:
1) Content will continue to unbundle itself.
2) The line between communication and publishing will continue to be less distinct.
3) Media will continue to be manipulated.

Fortune - 10 tech trends to watch in 2005.

Forty Media - web design in 2005.

iMediaConnection - e-Marketing.

Media Guerilla - Blogging predictions.

Neville Hobson - Year of the corporate blog.

OnlineSpin - The Coming Year of Hyperfragmentation:
Clients Get Smart About Fragmentation.
The Big DVR Backlash.
Satellite Radio and Digital Audio Players Converge.
Self-Service Drives Growth.
Internet Radio Goes Mainstream.
Internet Upfronts Are Formally Established.
Consumer Content Creation Cacophony.
The FCC Exceeds Its Mandate.
Consolidation Mania 2005.

PaidContent.org - readers' predictions and hopes for digital media.

Red Herring - Top 6 technology trends for 2005.

Scoble's predictions.

TechWeb

The Blog Herald - about blogging.

TNL.net

Trendwatching.com - "Masters of the Youniverse"

Some links from Henrik Torstensson, Read/Write the web, Alex Barnett, PR Opinions and LostRemote.

A Swedish tourist who was pictured running into the Asian tsunami to save her family survived the catastrophe, as did her children, it has been revealed.

A recent blog survey by Perseus revealed that the majority of bloggers are women (56%) but a new survey by Pew Internet shows that 57% of all US blog creators are men. The two studies were performed quite differently. Pew made two telephone surveys with in total 1,861 internet users in the US, while Perseus surveyed 3,634 blogs on eight leading blog-hosting services. Perseus analysis "does not cover nonhosted blogs - blogs that individuals maintain on their own servers using their own tools".

I am not an expert on statistics but it seems that Pew's survey draws conclusions from a very small number of respondents. If they surveyed 1,861 internet users and 7 per cent of them had created a blog, that is only 130 people (74 male, 56 female).

Swedish media monitoring company Observer owns Bacon's Information who monitors media sources for clients in the US. In November, Observer decided to start monitoring 10 influential Swedish blogs and now Bacon's have announced they will start monitoring "the most reputable online news blogs" in America. According to the press release:

"Initially, these will be blogs of active journalists, but as our in-house researchers scrutinize and approve additional news-related blogs, we will add to the scope of our coverage."

According to bloggers, Bacon's will be monitoring just 250 blogs. Darren Barefoot has a post on why this is a crappy idea. Jeremy Pepper thinks it's not. Personally I think that the quality approach (vs quantity) is ok for the non-tech savvy PR people, but any PR practitioner with a little more knowledge about the blogosphere would obviously add services like Feedster, PubSub and Technorati.

Purple is the new pink. Redesigning your blog? Check out Adam Polselli's color forecast for 2005, with inspiration from "Gap's sparkly scarves and Banana Republic's metallic thread coats and skirts". Polselli predicts what colors will be popular during the year.

Update: Polselli and Spectacle also have a nice bunch of color schemes for the web.

The New York Times writes (reg. Required) about how blogs are complementary to traditional media and have become a vital source of information in the aftermath of the earthquake in southern Asia. Another example is Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet which is continously updating a web page with external links to tsunami information from non-traditional media like blogs, wikis and personal homepages.

British web designer Andy Budd has started a blog called BlogAid to encourage bloggers to donate their advertising revenue to help support the earthquake and tsunami victims.

Link via NevOn.

The P2P file distribution tool BitTorrent has been under serious attack during the last month from the digital rights movement, but the method can also be used in less dubious ways than sharing illegal copies of music, film or games. For example sharing video footage of the tsunami disaster. The web site Waves of destruction collects photos and videos from the catastrophe and many video files are distributed in BitTorrent format. The site has had thousands of BitTorrent users the last days.

If you need any additional motivation to donate money to the victims of the tsunami, these satellite photos of the disaster area show the horrific differences before and after the waves hit land. For example Banda Aceh shore. More here.