kullin – Page 69 – Media Culpa

H&M one of the world’s best brands

Interbrand has released its annual ranking of the world’s best global brands 2008. Coca-Cola is still the number one brand with a brand value of 66,667 $m. Finland is leading the Nordic league with Nokia parked in fifth place, but the number of Swedish brands on the list have doubled from one to two. Apparel giant H&M; is one of 8 new brands on the top 100 list and is ranked in 22nd place with a brand value of 13,840 $m. IKEA also climbs from 38 to 35th place. Apart from the new brands on the list, Google is the strongest climber with an increase of 43% in brand value.

Tags: brands, branding, hm, ikea. Ping.

Bilddagboken reaches 80 percent of Swedish youth

Bilddagboken is Sweden’s largest youth community where members can upload and share photos. The site has now reached 1.3 million unique visitors per week (unique web browsers), which is a 50% increase in one year (862,000 per week a year ago). The growth is good news for the owner Wyatt Media Group, which also owns the previous darling among Swedish youth communities – Lunarstorm. Lunarstorm has lost more than half of its visitors during the last 12 months, down from 673,000 weekly unique web browsers to 303,000 last week, a drop by 55%. According to Ekonominyheterna, visits to Lunarstorm peaked in March 2006 with 1.6 million visitors.

Stats from KIAindex.

Tags: bilddagboken, communities, foto, bilddagboken. Ping.

State of the blogosphere – with a Swedish twist

Technorati has just released its latest State of the Blogosphere 2008 report. Technorati now tracks 133 million blogs, but only 1.5 million of those blogs were updated during the last 7 days.

Here are some of the findings, with comments about the Swedish blogosphere as a comparison (from the BlogSweden 3 survey).

– 66% of the bloggers are male. 73% of European bloggers are male. (Swe: 76% are female)
– 50% are 18-34 years (Swe: 55% are 16-25 years)
– Female bloggers: only 9% are 18-24 years (Swe: a large portion, don’t have exact figures right now, are 16-20 years)
– Female bloggers: topics are more likely to be personal. 66% blog about personal musings (Swe: female blog readers like to read blogs about fasion and design (53%) and everyday life experiences (52%)).
– Women blog to stay connected and to make connections. (Swe: Female bloggers blog to a higher extent than male bloggers to get in touch with others and to stay in touch with friends and family)

Personal/lifestyle most popular blog topic.

Sweden: the most popular blog topics to read is “everyday life experiences”.

Self expression and sharing expertise are the top reasons for blogging.

Sweden: self expression (I like to write) most popular reason to blog.

Tags: technorati, blogosphere, statistics, bloggar, technorati. Ping.

G1 Google Android phone released

Here is the first video footage of the T-mobile G1 Google Android phone that was launched today in New York. The video shows the touch-based interface with its innovative solution for locking the phone through a gesture based code instead of a pin code.

The G1 will be available in the U.S. on 22 October 2008 for $179. Via Cool Hunting.

Tags: google, android, g1, google, android. Ping.

Careless whispers on Twitter

A few weeks ago, BBC journalist Rory Cellan-Jones blogged about the Scrabulous vs Scrabble hoopla on Facebook, in a light-hearted way, as he describes it. Not long after he had published the post he got a message from a follower on Twitter asking him “Why did you not mention Wordscraper?”, referring to another game. Cellan-Jones writes:

“I was a little irritated by this, as my piece was intended as a bit of fun rather than an exhaustive inquiry into the Scrabulous affair – which, after all, is hardly Watergate. So I Tweeted back: “cos I couldn’t be bothered”, and thought no more about it.”

The remark didn’t sit well with the Twitter ‘friend’ who wrote a lenghty blog post saying things like “Years from now, when British journalism has finally breathed its last, this phrase will be engraved on its tombstone.”

A few days later Cellan-Jones tweeted about a press release and described it as the “new leader in rubbish PR stunt of 08”. Apparently the PR person behind the release noticed the tweet and emailed Cellan-Jones with the comment “Got your feedback via Twitter. You cut me deep!!!”.

Social media services allow us to have more personal conversations with friends, or ‘friends’, but the personal nature doesn’t mean that conversations are private. The majority of our actions are in fact out in the public, open to anyone to view and respond to, and it might be wise to keep that in mind.

Better Business Blogging has a tongue-in-cheek post about how to avoid negative reactions in the blogosphere:

– Avoid expressing an opinion – there is nothing worse than opinions to get people’s backs up and there’s also a high risk that someone, somewhere will disagree with them. You may find that sharing information carries these same risks as it opens the door for dialogue and discussion.
– Make your posts as bland as possible – by reporting little of relevance or interest in your blog, you will successfully be reducing the number of people reading it. An added bonus is that nobody is likely to make the effort to engage in conversation by posting comments, positive or negative. Longer-term strategy but still very effective.
– Hide your blog – let’s face it, if people can’t find your blog then they are unlikely to react negatively to anything in it. This can either be done actively or passively: actively should involve regularly changing permalinks to break those unwanted inbound links, while passively you can simply sit back and steadfastly refuse to admit that the blog exists.

Via Journalism.co.uk.

Tags: twitter, journalism, microblogging, twitter, journalistik. Ping.