IHT praises Sweden

About a week ago, Stockholm got praise in the Washington Post. This week it is the International Herald Tribune who raves about Sweden.

“If all the world were like Sweden, there would be little news to report.”

I guess that’s a compliment (?). The article also predicts that Sweden will attract talented workers (no signs of reversed brain drain yet though – this week an article in Dagens Industri noticed that many more people moved to Ireland to work, than to Sweden).

“…a new study by Professor Richard Florida, of Carnegie Mellon University, which measures the kind of creativity most useful to business – talent, technology and tolerance – puts Sweden at No. 1 in Europe and ahead of the United States. In the future, Florida argues, this means that Sweden will become a “talent magnet” for the world’s most purposeful workers.”

The writer also reflects on the Swedish psyche and turns to filmmaker Ingmar Bergman (sigh!) and his view of “the Swedish soul – its solitariness, its obsessiveness and its melancholia”. Are we really this dull? Let this guy attend a concert with the Hives and he will have a different view of Swedes.

Brand spy crawls blogs for copyright infringements

Some corporations are taking steps to guard their brands and trademarks from copyright infringements online. A Digital Brand Asset Management company called Nameprotect “engages in crawling activity in search of a wide range of brand and other intellectual property violations that may be of interest to our clients“.

Word to bloggers, your blog may be crawled by a webcrawler seeking for illegal uses of trademarks, just like Josh’s World was (no, he hadn’t done anything illegal, probably just mentioned a brand name in one of his posts). Now, I guess that blogs aren’t the primary target for these webcrawlers, and Nameprotect says they are honoring robots.txt files so that any site owner can block out crawlers, but I can’t help but wonder what other webcrawler applications the future will have in store, ones that aren’t working by the same ethical standards as Nameprotect.

Bloggers should (apart from follow the law of course) start to learn about how robots crawl their sites and what to do about it. I can’t see why for example owners of copyrighted photos can’t crawl blogs to find illegal uses of their material.

Playstation a no-no in Swedish prisons

In the light of the recent jailbreaks in Sweden, perhaps it is understandable that a certain amount of paranoia has struck the Swedish Prison and Probation Service. Now, no prisoners are allowed to have Sony Playstations in their cells because “they can be manipulated for making wireless communication“.

In the 90s, computer games were allowed in Swedish prisons, but due to the technical development of the games, prison managers fear that they will be used to send SMS and email, with the purpose of planning an escape or to smuggle drugs etc.

I guess prison blogs are out of the question then…?

Hitchhiker’s movie blog is not a blog

The cult book The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams is being filmed and the launch of the movie is supported by a blog. I think it is a brilliant idea to use blogs to create a buzz for this movie. The book has cult status and an affectionate fan base, including myself and I guess many bloggers will spread the word about the movie blog even without examining it first. But the blog just doesn’t cut it yet. Why?

  • No comments function
  • No RSS feed
  • No permalinks, although some longer posts have unique URLs
  • Only 7 posts since its launch in May
  • A photo gallery was launched in June with only 2 photos so far

Content is everything, and this blog doesn’t have any. Is it even a blog? I would say no. The site even made my computer crash so I had to write this post twice.

Link via Micro Persuasion.

CIA in PR offensive

In the wake of the events in the USA the last few years, not even the CIA can avoid using PR anymore. The secretive agency has launched a public relations offensive in recent weeks to protect its turf.

“… reporters are more frequently invited to CIA headquarters, in Langley, Va., a short drive from Washington, for news conferences and background interviews with senior agency officials…”