Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
Bschool.com is an online resource for MBA programs. In a blog post this weekend, the site lists the 50 best blogs for public relations professionals. I’m proud that Media Culpa is included in this distinguished crowd.
Check out the list and you will probably discover several new great blogs to follow.
Image credit: Doktor Spinn.
I’m very proud that Media Culpa has been included in HubSpot Hot 100 Marketing Blogs, a list of top blogs about online marketing.
My blog is currently ranked surprisingly high, at #6, which is extremely flattering considering all the industry luminaries that are included. The ranking is performed by the Blog Grader tool and the report card for my blog can be found here.
I blogged earlier this week about how Metro had decided to shut down its blogging platform Metrobloggen.se, leaving thousands of bloggers with no other option than to cut and paste, if they wanted to move their content to some other platform. In a statement, Metro now says it is going to “save” all blogs from deletion. My translation below:
“Metro will soon, and well before April 25, offer all bloggers on Metrobloggen the ability to continue blogging. Current content will also be saved. We will get back with further information shortly.”
I think that Metro could have investigated this before they communicated that the platform was being closed. This new statement comes just a few days after the first one. Still, we don’t know if they are offering some tool that enables exporting of content or if they just offer to save the content as is. Either way, it is positive news that they will help bloggers to keep their blogs up in some form.
The Swedish free daily newspaper Metro has been hosting blogs on its blogging platform Metrobloggen.se since 2007. Back then it was described as an immediate success, with more than 2,000 registered blogs during its first 36 hours of operation. The original idea was to share advertising revenue with bloggers, but that model was soon ditched. And apparently the blogs have not generated enough revenue to keep the platform running, because Metro announced today that it is shutting down the service on April 25.
Metrobloggen.se is currently home to at least 10,000 blogs, possibly a lot more. Many are of course no longer active, but Metro’s decision comes as a blow to many bloggers who are left with no help in transferring to a new host. In a note today, Metro says:
“You can continue to blog on Metrobloggen as usual until April 25. After that date, the site can no longer be accessed and no content will be available or saved any longer.
Up until April 25, you can manually or in other ways save your content. Metrobloggen can unfortunetely not provide any tools or help in order to automatically copy your content.”
I do not oppose the closing down of this platform per se, I am sure they have looked into the business model and found that it doesn’t make good business sense to continue. But it’s sad that they offer no help for the bloggers who have generated millions of page views and ad impressions. Metro could have come up with some means to export the content and easily transfer it to another blogging platform. Many bloggers will probably not bother to copy and paste every single blog post and move it elsewhere.
WordPress has an RSS importer for self hosted blogs, but I haven’t tried how it works and most of the bloggers at Metrobloggen probably are looking for easier solutions like blogg.se or blogger.com.
Metro says they are working on a solution, but they say there is no guarantee they will find one before they close the site down.
Update: Ted Valentin has developed a solution to help bloggers export their blogs from Metrobloggen to Blogger or WordPress. Check it out here.
Yesterday, I had a long talk with a journalist about personal branding and social media. We talked about how I started this blog and how it has developed over the years. As a matter of fact, today I am celebrating seven years of blogging on Media Culpa, which I started on Feb 17, 2004 (actually a little earlier, but those first test posts were deleted before going live on this domain).
To celebrate the occasion, I thought that I would share some small details about the past year for this blog.
If you want to follow my blog, don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed or “like” it on Facebook.
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Photo credit: Melanie Hughes.
One thing that we have learned from blogging is the concept of “permanence”. Each blog post got a unique web address that was supposed to stay the same over time, hence the name “permalink” or permanent link. In theory, there are almost no limitations to the storage space on the web, I can have thousands and thousands of unique URLs under the same domain name, so there is no real need to delete or move content to make room for new. Things could stay in the same place for years.
Permanence for online objects is important because when people find your content and link to it, they may generate traffic for a very long time. If you move stuff around or change URLs (especially without proper redirects), you not only lose traffic and make it harder for people that want to find your content, but the sites linking back to you suddenly don’t look so great anymore. One example, in my latest blog post about blogger influence, I embedded a presentation by BlogHer. But now, less than two weeks later, the presentation was suddenly missing from my post. Readers were greeted by this message:
The same happened to a similar post on Mediabistro, which is quite a prominent site.
A quick check on the BlogHer account on SlideShare revealed that the presentation hadn’t been taken offline, it had just been updated with a new web address, which of course meant that any site that embedded the presentation was now showing a dead link.
Replace, don’t move it
If you need to update a presentation on SlideShare that you have already made public, deleting the old version and uploading a new is not the best solution. Instead, you just replace the old one with the new one, and hey presto, you keep the old web address and all embedded objects now show the updated version.
Here’s how you do it.
Log in to your SlideShare account and select the presentation you wish to replace. Click on “Edit this presentation” next to the title of the presentation.
Then go to the page that says Replace presentation and choose the new file.
Upload and you are done.
Now your presentation can keep it’s permanent place on the web, while you are able to get a new version of your content out.
UPDATE nov 2014: Slideshare has a new layout. To find the edit options you need to go to your uploads. Below each presentation there is a drop down menu called “Edit”. Click on that and then on “Settings”. That’s where you now find all the edit options like re-upload.