Author: kullin

The fastest giveaway on earth

Think that donating your product will give you publicity? Well if you are Lamborghini, it sure will. From now on the police in Calabria in the south of Italy will be chasing speeders in a 500 horse power, 300 km/h Lamborghini Gallardo, according to a press release (link via Ny Teknik).

The car was donated by the Lamborghini factory in Sant’Agata Bolognese in honor of the state police 152nd anniversary and comes with among other things, a handy on-board satellite navigation and defibrillator equipment.

Rising coverage of blogs

Overstated has an interesting overview of how many times the word blog or weblog has been mentioned in media. There has been a significant increase in coverage since early 2003.

I touched on this in a previous post, when I looked at the situation in Sweden. I performed the same search again (but this time excluded the brand names Weblogic and Weblogistics) for the search terms “blog*” and “weblog*” in Swedish media via Retriever (searches web based sources only). In Sweden, the coverage started to take off in November of 2003. Noteworthy is that in my previous analysis I found that IT and technology trade press almost made up two thirds of all articles, while marketing and journalism press had almost none.

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The first Swedish mention I found was from a two year old unsigned article in Ny Teknik (New Technology) on May 2, 2002, explaining the new acronym “blog”.

Link via Corporate Engagement.

The Ministry of Justice stole articles

The Ministry of Justice in Sweden stole articles from the paper Riksdag & Departement (Parliament & Departement), writes Journalisten, the paper of The Swedish Union of Journalists. The articles were put up on the Ministry of Justice web page by a civil servant who thought the paper was an official organ of the Swedish government and that copyright was not applicable. But R & D is an independent publication and the journalists have their own copyright agreements with the editor.

R & D often is mistaken for a government publication, which upsets the editorial staff.

– It is a label that we are trying to get rid of, says reporter Staffan Thulin.

On R & D’s web page they clearly state that all material is copyright protected, but it seems that the paper is trying to look like an official publication. R & D labels itself ”Political journal from the Parliament, the Government and EU” and all journalists have email addresses with the domain name “riksdagen.se” which is the domain of the Swedish Parliament.

Micro Persuasion most influential PR blog

Welcome to the first, highly non-scientific PR blog World Championships. The number of PR blogs are increasing and some of them are becoming real institutions in PR blogland. I decided to have a look at which PR blog is the most influential (I know wich ones I like to read but what about every body else?) by simply counting the links via Technorati. Yes, I know it is not a very good research method, but it’s fun. File it under blog PR stunts. I thought this was equally as interesting as MarketingSherpa Blog Awards which only lists 6 PR blogs.

And the winner is – [drums please] – Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion, of course. There are a total of 286 links from 61 sources to his blog, and admit it, you read it too. Runner up is Tom Murphy at PR Opinions with 112 links from 78 sources.

The 28 most influential PR blogs (apologies if I have missed some):

1. Micro Persuasion 286

2. PR Opinions 112

3. Corporate Engagement 101

4. Corporate PR 51

5. PR meets WWW 35

6. PR Fuel 33

7. Pop! PR 31

8. PR Machine 29

9. Strategic Public Relations 29

10. Engage 25

11. PR Communications 24

12. PR Studies 22

13. Minnesota PR 22

14. Canuckflack 21

15. Marc Snyder 20

16. B.L. Ochman 20

17. Media Culpa 19

18. A PR guru’s musings 18

19. JKL blog 15

20. Media Guerilla 12

21. Ravabete Omoomi 11

22. Technoflak 9

23. Mark My Words 8

24. Hoi Polloi 7

25. Kitablog 6

26. Mediations 6

27. Media Map blog 3

28. CommLog 2

15 minutes of fame

I was almost Slashdotted (or in my case “Scripted”) the other day. When checking the stats for my blog I noticed three times as many visitors on May 11 (about 180 page visits) than on a normal day, which I found odd, especially since I hadn’t posted anything that day. When going through the referring links I found a post from Scripting News which I later realized is an established blog, even ranked #17 on Technorati Top 100. It’s really silly, but seeing that your blog actually has an audience is quite an ego booster.