Author: kullin

Things that should be RSS enabled in 2005

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.

Blogger made L’Oréal pull ad

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:

First year statistics

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

2005: The Year of the Lawyer

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.

The tyranny of choice

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]

MoJo: the press aren’t connecting the dots

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.”