Category: Blogging

Some great reward for bloggers

Swedish blog readers have killed one high profile blog this week and rescued another from being buried. Right wing veteran Dick Erixon came to the point where he couldn’t justify blogging for free any longer so he published an ultimatum – help me collect 100,000 kronor (about 11,000 euro) or the blog dies. In just five days his readers contributed 90,741 kronor via SMS and Erixon has now decided to keep blogging.

At the other end of the spectrum, journalist and Sweden’s self-proclaimed “blog queen” (eh…?) Linda Skugge has decided to quit blogging due to threats, negative comments and emails from her readers. As much as I hate seeing any voice being silenced by hatemongers, it is hard not to think that what goes around comes around. Skugge has built a brand by being provocative and she can stir up a debate with a blog post that is shorter than this sentence.

Thomas Mattsson, editor in chief at Expressen Nya Medier comments (my translation):
– Interactivity pushes media companies to open up for the possibility to criticize journalists. I think it that journalism will benefit from it. There will be a period when journalists will need to get used to it.

The fine art of blogger relations

Microsoft today communicates a report from European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA) about how social networks, blogs and video sites are the driving forces behind the next generation of internet usage. How is this promoted? Through an old fashioned press release. It is of course possible that this story is also communicated through other channels, but no blogs are linking to this press release yet (search via Technorati and Knuff). Stories like this one should of course be given to bloggers like me (and not via a press release please). Instead, I have to settle for press releases with headlines like these:

DHL sees advantages with a differentiated kilometre tax for heavy vehicles
DHL ser fördelar med en differentierad kilometerskatt för tunga fordon

Healthy fast food ready for break through
Nyttig fast food står inför genombrott

Unity for freedom
Enighet för frihet

World leader in HR in new co-operation with Jönköpings Södra
Världsetta inom HR i nytt samarbete med Jönköpings Södra

Star Wars robot in your own living room
Star Wars-robot i ditt eget vardagsrum

Kläppen attracts sun worshipers and people celebrating Easter
Kläppen lockar soldyrkare och påskfirare

I can go on and on with mindnumbingly boring press releases about topics that have absolutely nothing to do with what I am blogging about. It is quite obvious that Swedish PR professionals have a lot to learn about blogger relations. Contact me if you want a crash course 🙂

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A global top blog, or something like that…

You are currently reading one of the top 100 marketing blogs in the world, at least if you should believe Todd And’s list The Power 150 – Top Marketing Blogs. He is running an ambitious project which lists top blogs based on a number of factors like Google PageRank, Technorati links, Bloglines subscribers and Todd’s own opinion. Media Culpa is currently at number 71 in the list. Thanks Todd.

Adland is at number 25. Congrats Åsk.

The Danish blog reader is a woman

A new Danish blog survey, BlogTjek 07, shows that the typical blog reader in Denmark is a 34 year-old woman, living in Copenhagen. She reads about 2-5 blogs and prefer personal blogs.

– 63 percent of the readers are women, 37 percent are men.
– 50 percent of the male blog readers have a blog of their own, while only 40 percent of the female readers blog.

More than 3,500 blog readers participated in the survey. Full report here (pdf).

For reference see BlogSweden 2 (in English), a Swedish blog readers survey.

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Can you trademark “winter”?

I had to look at the date of this article in IHT, but it unfortunately didn’t say April 1st. Turns out that the Canadian governement is proposing to change the law to grant the organizing committee of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games the rights to common words like “winter”, “gold”, “silver”, “medals”, “sponsor”, “games”, “21st” and “2010”. The article says that journalists are exempted from the law, but will bloggers get the green light too? Probably not, if the IOC has the same anti-blog attitude as in the past.

[Via Dennis.]