Media & Journalism – Page 13

IDG tracks blog comments with Twingly

The IT publishing house IDG has started to publish links to blogs that comment on their online articles. IDG is using the Twingly service that the two dailies Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet have been using for a couple of months.

– It is important for us to become more active in the blogosphere, which is an important part of the new media landscape, says Lisa Bjerre who is responsible for the initiative at IDG.

Update: Webbsnack notices that there is a new feature where it shows the RSS feed of the blog if you drag the mouse over the link. Pretty neat. See more here.

Tags: media, twingly, bloggar, media. Ping.

Metro pays bloggers per page view

It’s been awfully quiet here for a while. I’ve been busy with some other things (like being interviewed about blogs by Svenska Dagbladet) and my broadband connection crashed for a week or so. But the blogosphere doesn’t stand still just because I’m offline. Today, for example, we could see the launch of Metrobloggen, a new blog tool where the free daily Metro offers its hosted bloggers 3 öre (about half a US cent) per page view. If your blog becomes a hit you might actually earn a buck or two.

But there are some caveats of course. Page views are counted on a monthly basis, but the numbers aren’t aggregated. The lowest limit is 150 kronor, which means that you need to have at least 5,000 page views per month to get anything. 4,999 views and you get zilch.

Bloggers aren’t allowed to publish any other ads on their blogs. And by signing up you also give Metro permission to use anything you write and publish it without giving you compensation. Aftonbladet has the same terms of service, by the way. Personally I prefer to own the stuff I write.

Tags: blogging, media, bloggar, metro. Ping.

“That man Sarkozy”

Now that Nicolas Sarkozy is the new French president, he might be spared being called “that man Sarkozy” by the editors of Financial Times.

FT accidentally published a dummy page, 12 Sept 2005:

Some great reward for bloggers

Swedish blog readers have killed one high profile blog this week and rescued another from being buried. Right wing veteran Dick Erixon came to the point where he couldn’t justify blogging for free any longer so he published an ultimatum – help me collect 100,000 kronor (about 11,000 euro) or the blog dies. In just five days his readers contributed 90,741 kronor via SMS and Erixon has now decided to keep blogging.

At the other end of the spectrum, journalist and Sweden’s self-proclaimed “blog queen” (eh…?) Linda Skugge has decided to quit blogging due to threats, negative comments and emails from her readers. As much as I hate seeing any voice being silenced by hatemongers, it is hard not to think that what goes around comes around. Skugge has built a brand by being provocative and she can stir up a debate with a blog post that is shorter than this sentence.

Thomas Mattsson, editor in chief at Expressen Nya Medier comments (my translation):
– Interactivity pushes media companies to open up for the possibility to criticize journalists. I think it that journalism will benefit from it. There will be a period when journalists will need to get used to it.

Aftonbladet locks in top content

Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet will start to charge for more of its online content. Martin Jönsson points out that even the top news story on Aftonbladet.se today is locked for non-subscribers. This is especially noteworthy since the same story is also covered in Metro this morning – for free.

Footnote: The article is now available at Aftonbladet.se here.

Tags: pay per view, media, aftonbladet, metro. Ping.