Author: kullin

Five bloggers blog about finding a job

Arbetsförmedlingen Arbetsförmedlingen, the Swedish Public Employment Service, today launched Jobbsökarna (“Job Seekers”), a blog project where they recruited unemployed people by sending out SMS. Five people have been selected among the 1,400 applications and these bloggers will share their thoughts and views about the process of getting a job. As soon as one of the bloggers get a job, he or she will be replaced by a new blogger. It’s a fun and creative initiative but I wish that they would have included “must have” blog features like permalinks, RSS and so on. Comments are not available either. One of the goals for the initiative is to share and distribute information about seeking jobs in new ways, between people without middlemen, so it is a bit unfortunate that they don’t use all the sharing tools that normally comes with a blog. There is very little interactivity on the site. You can however send a tip to the blogger about a new job.

Photo: Magnus Pehrsson (Arbetsförmedlingen)

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How to police 3 billion Flickr photos

How do you police a site consisting of close to 3 billion pieces of consumer genererated media? Ask Heather Champ, Director of Community at photo sharing site Flickr, who oversees that the 30 million members of Flickr follow the community guidelines and don’t post pictures that the company consider illegal or inappropriate.

Champ says there is a clear need to have a control function to monitor the site.

“The amount of time it would take for the community to self-regulate — I don’t think it could sustain itself in the meantime,” she says. “Anyway, I can’t think of any successful online community where the nice, quiet, reasonable voices defeat the loud, angry ones on their own.”

Her team handles feedback from people like for example a woman who complains that her ex-boyfriend has posted inappropriate photos of her or the parent without custodial rights who wants photos of the child, posted by the other parent, removed. Champ says that people sometimes do stupid things due to the anonymity of the web:

“People become disassociated from one another online. The computer somehow nullifies the social contract,” she says.

Read the entire interview by the San Fransicso Chronicle.

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Nyheter24 launched without RSS feeds

A new Swedish “online tabloid” called Nyheter24 (News24) was launched today. It is promoted as a challenger to Aftonbladet.se (*yawn*) with high tempo and heavy usage of images. The British paper The Sun seems to have been an inspiration. The site will focus on news, sports and entertainment. One of the founders is Douglas Roos, previously CEO of gambling company Ladbrokes, and Vassa Eggen notices that Ladbrokes has banners all over the site and are also mentioned four (!) times in this article.

There doesn’t seem to be any RSS feeds on the entire site, which you would expect from a new news site in 2008, especially since it includes a number of blogs.

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Swedish baby among most popular YouTube videos of all time

The most popular YouTube video of all time has been viewed more than 103 million times. It’s got almost 302,000 comments and 267,000 ratings (average rating 4.5 out of 5). Those are amazing numbers especially considering that the video has embedding disabled, so the file can’t easily spread across the web like most other YouTube videos. The video is the hit song Girfriend by Canadian pop princess Avril Lavigne and it was uploaded on February 27, 2007.

ReadWriteWeb writes that among the 10 most popular YouTube videos ever, 6 are music videos by professional musicians, 2 are comedy (professional comedians), 1 is a Spanish love story, and 1 is a Swedish amateur video with the baby William who just can’t stop laughing. That video has to date been viewed 62 million times and has 84,000 comments (average rating 5 out of 5).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P6UU6m3cqk

Top 10 (million views):

1. Avril Lavigne – Girlfriend (103m)
2. Evolution of Dance (100m)
3. Lo que tú Quieras Oír (76m)
4. Leona Lewis – Bleeding Love (70m)
5. Rihanna – Don’t Stop The Music (n/a, video not available in Sweden so no link love for you)
6. Chris Brown – With You (70m)
7. Timbaland – Apologize (feat. One Republic) (68m)
8. Jeff Dunham – Achmed the Dead Terrorist (66m)
9. Alicia Keys – No One (65m)
10. Hahaha (Swedish baby) (62m)

Update: Apparently Avril Lavigne fans have inflated the number of views of the Girlfriend video by gaming the system. Wired has the details.

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RSS reader Bloglovin’ launched

bloglovin The team behind the Swedish RSS reader Blogkoll today launched an English version of the site, called Bloglovin’. The Swedish version was launched in October 2007 and today has 37,000 members. The easy to use reader has become especially popular among the local fashionistas, 84% of the members are women who mainly follow fashion blogs.

The reader now also comes with a new feature called Muffin, which is a thin frame at the bottom of the page which lets readers go to the next unread blog post with just a click. An illustration of how that looks can be found here.

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