Author: kullin

U.S. women say blogs are reliable source of advice

According to a survey from the online network BlogHer, as many as 24 percent of the (U.S.) women in the survey now watch less television because they are blogging instead.

Some other conclusions were:

– Approximately, 36.2 million women actively participate in the blogosphere every week with 15.1 publishing at least one post a week and 21.1 reading and commenting to blogs a week
– More than 40% of women surveyed consider blogs a reliable source of advice and information
– 40% of bloggers believe their biggest impact is through fostering relationships with like-minded individuals
– Half of women surveyed say blogs influence their purchase decisions

Tags: , , , , . Ping.

Gawker sells Wonkette, and other stories

• CNN reports that the U.S. blog empire Gawker Media is about to sell three of its sites: music site Idolator, the “urban travel guide” Gridskipper, and the gossip site Wonkette.

“In an internal e-mail obtained by CNET News.com, [Nick] Denton explained the sale: “To be blunt: they each had their editorial successes; but someone else will have better luck selling the advertising than we did.” The e-mail, and more, can be read here.

• Tom Foremski writes that the European software company Autonomy launches a new software “that can identify illegal content in corporate communications such as blogs, emails, any document, and phone recording, and even in video files.” Foremski calls it “A Policeman Inside Your Computer And Inside Your Corporate Blog”. [Via BMdigital on Twitter]

• According to a press release from SocialMedia Networks, the company today launched “the first social-enabled advertising network. The SocialMedia Advertising Network gives advertisers the ability to target users based upon their social network profile and behavior using applications as an advertising channel.”

Tags: , , , , . Ping.

Jaiku page hits top ten in Google in less than a month

jaiku_logo I share my last name with 109 other people in Sweden, so it’s not very common. And although my blog, which has a decent page rank, is published on the domain kullin.net, it is not ranked #1 in a Google search (it is #2 and has been for some time). The reason is probably that I have chosen not to name the blog after myself and instead call it Media Culpa. But what fascinated me when I made a vanity search on my name today was how fast my Jaiku page has climbed in the Google results. I have only been active on the micro blogging site Jaiku for less than a month and my page on Jaiku is already #6 on Google.se. In fact, the top 100 results are full of different pointers to my presence on Jaiku and it beats my Facebook and LinkedIn profiles by miles. The first Twitter reference clocks in just shy of #90.

So what? Well, first of all it strikes me how much better Jaiku performs compared to Twitter, in SEO terms. The amateur analysis is that this is an effect of the way the URLs are designed. Google rates http://kullin.jaiku.com higher than http://www.twitter.com/kullin since the former is considered a sub-domain (please correct me if this is not the case). There are probably other reasons too, of course (could there be a language parameter involved since I write in Swedish on Jaiku and in English on Twitter?).

My second thought is that it once again shows how well different forms of social media/user generated content ranks in search engines. Previously we have talked a lot about blogs and wikis in the search results, but we obviously have to look closely also at micro blogs. Social media monitoring is already complex and it evolves quickly. So companies that want to monitor their brands constantly need to tweak their monitoring tools. If they are listening at all, that is.

Footnote: Google owns Jaiku.

Tags: , , , , , , . Ping.

Young politicians in Malaysia required to blog

The Swedish journalism professor Kent Asp said a few months ago that blogs have had almost no effect on the local political opinion. Regardless of how close to the truth such a statement is, there is enough signs from the other side of the pond that we can be convinced that blogs and social media have great potential to impact political views and elections. In Malaysia, the ruling party seems confident that blogs will help the party get re-elected.

CNN reports:
“Abdul Rahman Dahlan, secretary general of the United Malays National Organization party’s youth wing, said all those vying for national youth posts must have blogs to introduce themselves and their programs ahead of party elections in December.”

“All candidates must have blogs,” Abdul Rahman told The Associated Press. “If not, they are not qualified to be leaders.”

Footnote: In Sweden, blogs about politics are among the top categories. On Bloggportalen for example, there are close to 4,000 blogs listed in that category which makes it the third most popular, and 1,053 are listed in the sub-category “politicians”.

Tags: , , , , , , . Ping.

Official Scrabble Facebook application launched

Two guys in India developed an online version of Scrabble under the name Scrabulous, which has become incredibly popular. There are currently 629,000 daily users of the application on Facebook. The problem was that it did not have the proper authorization from the copyright holders (Hasbro and Mattel for the board game and Electronic Arts and RealNetworks for digital rights). After a period of lawsuit threats and talks about a deal, RealNetworks has now announced its own Scrabble application for Facebook: “Scrabble by Mattel“. It will only be available to Facebook users outside the US and Canada, although the company will not monitor users’ locations.

The new app has been online for a few weeks and has so far attracted 2,400 daily users. Although still in beta, it has also been critized for not working as well as Scrabulous.

Not surprisingly, many users are commenting on the application page about bugs and suggestions for improvements. Many are also outraged about the fact that users in North America don’t have access to the new app.

RealNetworks should do a better job explaining that they don’t have the rights to make that possible at the moment and they should also actively answer questions and monitor the debate. One could easily have anticipated that some negative feedback would appear during the initial phase and that the future success of the app depends on how you handle this feedback.

Via Marketing Pilgrim.

Tags: , , , , , . Ping.

Schibsted takes community site to Spain

The Norwegian community site Nettby is quite a success. It has currently more than 650,000 members with 10,000 more added each week. According to Propaganda, the site has 50 million page views per day (that would mean that each member would visit almost 80 pages per day…?). Anyway, the site’s owner Schibsted is planning to launch Nettby in Spain as a part of the site for the free daily 20 Minutos.

Tags: , , , , . Ping.