Dear Bosse,
Your competitor Aftonbladet yesterday acquired the blog portal Bloggportalen.se for an undisclosed sum. This is great news for Expressen. Among all the Swedish blog portals, Sigge Eklund’s Bloggportalen is probably the last one I would have invested in, had I been in your shoes (sorry Sigge, I’m a regular reader of your blog though). It is a register of 3,500 blogs with little functionality other than presenting a number of blogs in different categories. As the blogosphere evolves, many blogs on the site will become inactive and the time spent on putting in new ones will be overwhelming. Of course, Aftonbladet will probably develop some way of updating the register automatically (note: beware of spam blogs). A library of blogs is just not that interesting, and here’s why – the blogosphere isn’t really about blogs, it is about the content in blogs. And Bloggportalen is not about blog content.
A central feature of the blogosphere is connectivity and the core of that connectivity is the “ping”. Johan who runs a number of brilliant blog portals has done something extremely smart. He has created a site (Nyligen.se) that most Swedish bloggers ping when they have a new blog post. He has another called Intressant.se that sorts content into different categories. From this information he has been able to build other cool sites like Knuff.se which analyzes and sorts the information on Swedish blogs, letting readers follow how different topics or articles gets discussed in the blogosphere. It’s a bit of Technorati mixed with PubSub, all RSS enabled of course.
Now, Bosse, you start to get my point. Expressen should buy Nyligen, Intressant and Knuff and hire Johan Larsson for an embarrassingly high salary. Around these different portals I’m sure Expressen could build some really nice features that Aftonbladet would envy.
Best regards,
Hans
Footnote: Bosse Andersson is Head of Expressen.se
Update: Podradio and Urban Lindstedt comment too.