Month: January 2006

The local daily Örnsköldsviks Allehanda is the first Swedish newspaper with a video blog, or vlog. Yesterday one of its reporters, 21-year old Liva Sandra Sverker who is currently working at ÖA’s printing house, launched the very first video blog at the paper’s web site.

– I think my video blog will be about anything. Everything that makes me mad, happy, sad or surprised will get a spot on my screen, she tells the paper.

But that’s not all. The paper invites readers to register for a space of their own, either for a regular blog or a video blog. And it’s all for free.

Swedish newspapers have not been as quick to introduce citizen journalism initiatives as for example their Norwegian counterparts. In fact, apart from Norrbottens-Kuriren, most of the initiatives have been about starting journalist blogs, but this is clearly a sign in the right direction.

Technorati tags: citizen journalism, participatory journalism, video blog, vlog.

SR, Swedish public service radio, launched a series of podcasts , or “podradio“, in May 2005 and the shows have since been downloaded a total of 1.3 million times. Last summer, the show fittingly named Sommar (Summer) was downloaded about half a million times in June, July and August. SR now offer 28 different shows as podradio, the most popular show currently being science show Vetenskapsradion (Science radio) with 40,000 downloads.

For copyright reasons, all podcasts are without music and no solution seems to be close at hand.

Source: Dagens Media.

Technorati tags: podcast, radio

Today is the last day for sending in your nominations for Bloggies 2006, the sixth annual blog awards. Click here to go to the nomination page, and if you like this blog, please consider putting it in as one candidate in for example Best European Blog (excluding UK and Ireland).

The Swedish jeans brand Cheap Monday comes with an attitude and a logo with a skull, wearing a cross turned upside down on its forehead. The devilish logo is now making rounds in the press in the US, something I strongly suspect was the point all along.

Chicago Tribune writes that in spite of, or because of, its logo, the jeans are flying off the shelves:

The jeans’ makers say it’s more of a joke, but the logo’s designer said there’s a deeper message.

“It is an active statement against Christianity,” Bjorn Atldax said. “I’m not a Satanist myself but I have a great dislike for organized religion.”

Many bloggers have ads on their blogs from Google’s AdSense. Now Techworld reports that “Google has confirmed it is investigating a Trojan horse that replaces its AdSense advertisements with fake ones hawking pornography and gambling sites, among others”.

Technorati tags: AdSense, Google, advertising.

Brandweek is making predictions for 2006 and blogs will continue to transform everything, even soup!

Blogs will change everything. For consumers, blogs will change the way you make soup, the way you de-worm your dog and the way you look at your reflection in a store window. You name it. For marketers, the blogosphere in 2006 will prompt them to think very seriously and then somewhat less seriously and finally to think even more seriously than the first time about their business models. Eventually, blogs will force marketers to realign their prejudices and ways of doing business until they are doing the exact same thing, except they’ll be spending more time reading blogs.