Category: Blogging

This is getting fun. Swedish public service television, an influential opinion journalist on a leading newspaper, an anonymous blogger and now the blogging president of Ung Vänster, the youth association of the left party – all punching at each other over a TV show about the definition of terrorism. And you didn’t think the Swedish blogosphere was able to stir up a heated debate?

Constantin Basturea reports that he has more than 100 PR bloggers on his Blogdigger group “Headlines from PR Blogs”, up from 30 blogs in March last year. And that does not include the two Swedish blogs JMWs blog and JKL blog.

Nicklas Lundblad reflects on the current process at Internetworld to name Sweden’s best blogs and, as I interpret it, about why blogs are so darn important. He writes:

“…why is it so important for everyone to be a part of the blog phenomenon? I have a website – kommenterat – where I write.

That’s it folks. Is it a blog? Is it a wiki? Is it a Typepad-driven libertarian opinion machine?

Who cares?!”

Well, I do. There is a distinct difference between a website and a blog in that I would never visit Nicklas Lundblad’s site on a regular basis (sorry), but since it is now in a blog format with an RSS feed, I am able to subscribe to his texts and that makes it a hundred times easier to follow what he writes. I can scan his posts and read the ones I am interested in, without having to go to the website to check if there are any new updates.

And the connectivity between blogs makes them infectious. If Lundblad makes a Technorati search on his blog, he will find this post in an instant. That would never happen if we had two separate websites.

Let’s face it, a genius without a channel to reach an audience, will not be heard or read but a mediocre writer like myself have hundreds of subscribers much thanks to the ease of use of the blog medium. The choice of channel is everything.

Swedish Internetworld has been kind enough to include my blog in the nominations for Best Blog, under the category “IT & Media”. 50 blogs in total are nominated in the four categories Politics, IT & Media, Culture and Misc. Voting ends on March 15.

If you like this blog please consider casting your vote here, just click the circle in front of “Media Culpa” and then click the grey button at the end of the page that says “Rösta” (“Vote” in Swedish). That’s all. Thanks.

Swedish blogger Sara thought that an ad from L’Oréal could be interpreted as being pedophile-like. She reported it to ERK (The Trade Council Against Sexist Advertising) and sent out a press release. A TV station commented on the story and it didn’t take long before L’Oréal had responded and promised not to use the ad again. The reason the photo looked like a man holding a child was that the breasts of the woman had been retouched (read removed). Well done Sarah and a swift and correct response from the advertiser.

Before and after retouching the photo:

The RSS feed of Spinwatch has been hacked. The title of the feed shown in Bloglines has been replaced by “Hacked by …” and the individual posts are not accessible via the feed. Hope they straighten things out soon. In fact, I remember seeing a note at the bottom of Spinwatch’s site a few weeks back that claimed it had been hacked, so obviously someone is keen to obstruct their news distribution.

Spinwatch is a web site researching “the PR industry, corporate PR and lobbying, front groups, government spin, propaganda and other tactics used by powerful groups to manipulate media, public policy debate and public opinion”.

UPDATE: The problem has been solved and the RSS feed is working properly again. The four most recent posts are accessible, but older posts have not been restored.