Category: Media & Journalism

DagensPS introduces Twingly – we saw it coming

Swedish news site DagensPS.se has redesigned and introduces social bookmarks and blog links via Twingly. Sound familiar? Thats’ because we told you so, already back in March.

Today Dagens Media writes that the new site is launched, with social bookmarks and Twingly links. We also wrote that DagensPS were testing to let readers start their own blogs, but that feature has not become a reality yet.

Our screen dumps also showed that DagensPS planned to launch a media monitoring feature called PS Spy. That has now gone live and DagensPS’ CEO Bengt Uggla promises it will challenge professional monitoring services “that cost from 15,000 kronor per year”. PS Spy has taken a year to develop and significant investments. Uggla hopes to attract hundreds of thousands of users. The beta version that went live today searches online news sites and blogs in Sweden and the rest of the world. But it only seems to be searching sources during the last 7 days and the number of blogs it searches cannot be very large either. A simple search for “Lindex” only gives us 11 hits from as few as two blogs, Engla’s Showroom and Modefeber, incorrectly named Macfeber. Twingly’s own blog search engine finds 11 hits among Swedish blogs during the last 4 and a half hours alone. And that is a free service. On top of that, with Twingly and other free services like for example Knuff.se, you can subscribe to search results by RSS but I cannot find this feature to be available on PS Spy. We would also have liked the social bookmarking tools to be included in PS Spy, but they are not.

Media Culpa’s verdict: back to the lab again.

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Aftonbladet has Sweden’s top fashion blog – not!

In his bestselling book The Long Tail, Chris Anderson writes that the U.S. is a country obsessed with watching top lists, a culture which basically is one big popularity contest. In many aspects, Sweden is not much different. Bloggers like to compete and just this morning I had to check my ranking among Europe’s top marketing bloggers (#49 based on traffic) so I’m as guilty as the next guy. In other words, it is not surprising that when a blog or newspaper rank high on a list, they want to share that information with others. But the least you can ask for is that the ‘bragging’ is based on the truth.

I probably shouldn’t have given this article any attention, but it is hard to resist. The Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet today writes that one of their blogs is the most visited Swedish fashion blog.

“Sofi writes the largest Swedish fashion blog.”

That can only be true if you don’t consider Blondinbella, Kenza and Stina-Lee’s blogs to be fashion blogs. All three, by most people and themselves labelled fashion blogs, have more visitors than Aftonbladet’s Sofi Fahrman.

fashion blogs

Much can be said about the editiorial quality of blogs, but today a couple of teenage girls are more accurate than one of the largest Swedish mainstream media.

Footnote: Numbers in the graph are from Bloggportalen.se and states the number of visits per IP address and hour during the last 7 days.

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Top European media and marketing blogs

Nick Burcher of ZED Media has taken a closer look at the AdAge Power 150 ranking of the world’s top media and marketing blogs and listed the top 113 European blogs. Congratulations to Åsk ‘Dabitch’ Wäppling for grabbing the second place with her advertising blog Adland. Blogs about advertising are the most popular and it was also interesting to note that the top five spots were claimed by non-UK blogs.

My blog is in a flattering 15th place. Full list here.

Top 15 European media and marketing blogs for 19th July 2008 (Power 150 global ranking):

1 (21) Adverblog – ITALY
2 (22) Adland – SWEDEN
3 (23) I believe in adv – ITALY
4 (33) Niche Marketing – POLAND
5 (35) Adverbox – ITALY
6 (45) Russell Davies – ENGLAND
7 (49) David Airey – SCOTLAND
8 (50) Osocio – HOLLAND
9 (51) Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog – BELGIUM
10 (53) Blogstorm – ENGLAND
11 (60) Neville Hobson – ENGLAND
12 (62) Joost De Valk’s SEO Blog – HOLLAND
13 (82) Adliterate – ENGLAND
14 (91) Only Dead Fish – ENGLAND
15 (104) Media Culpa – SWEDEN

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NRK joins OpenID

NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, follows in the footsteps of BBC and today decided to become an OpenID provider. The reason behind the decision is that:

“The growth in user generated material, interaction with users and increased flow across NRK’s various content platforms raises the issue of a single sign-on system and the OpenID framework -which is an open, decentralised free framework for user-centric digital identity (quoting openID)- is considered to fulfill most of NRK’s needs.”

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DN builds FRA story on old Google quotes

Swedish blogs are buzzing about a controversial proposal that will allow wire-tapping by FRA, the National Defence Radio Establishment, of phone and email traffic that crosses Swedish borders. The Swedish Riksdag will vote on the proposal on June 18, so the law is a hot topic also in mainstream media. But I did not expect that it would be so hot that Dagens Nyheter would actually use a 12 month old story as their top story this morning. The headline in the printed paper is “IT company (or companies) in attack on new law” or “IT-bolag till attack mot ny lag” in Swedish. In the blurb below, readers are given the impression that Google just lashed out against the law, saying they won’t place any servers in Sweden, should the law become reality. But inside the paper we find that this is a quote by Peter Fleischer, Google’s spokesperson on integrity issues, made in an interview for InternetWorld in May 2007.

The second IT company to “go to attack” is TeliaSonera, which already back in June last year moved e-mail servers for their Finnish customers from Sweden to Finland in order to avoid wire-tapping. One would expect a lot more news value in the lead story in Sweden’s leading daily.

It was also interesting to see how DN used the quotes from InternetWorld, in Swedish below. DN has not used the quotes word-by-word, but instead re-arranged the quotes with different words (my bold).

IW: Vi har kontaktat svenska myndigheter för att ge vår syn på förslaget och vi har gjort det klart att vi aldrig kommer att placera några servrar innanför Sveriges gränser om förslaget går igenom.

DN: Vi har gjort klart för svenska myndigheter att vi aldrig tänker placera några Googleservrar inom Sveriges gränser om det här förslaget går igenom.

IW: Vi kan helt enkelt inte kompromissa med våra användares integritet och låta svenska myndigheter ta del av data som kanske inte ens rör svensk aktivitet.

DN: Vi kan helt enkelt inte kompromettera våra användares integritet genom att ge svenska myndigheter tillgång till data som kanske inte ens har med svensk aktivitet att göra.

IW: Förslaget är sprunget ur en tradition inledd av Saudiarabien och Kina och hör helt enkelt inte hemma i en västerländsk demokrati.

DN: Det här förslaget liknar något som hittats på av Saudiarabien och Kina. Sådant bör helt enkelt inte ha någon plats i en västerländsk demokrati.

It is worth noting that quotes are also protected by copyright, according to professor Jan Rosén at Stockholm University, and that newspapers in the past have criticized each other for exaggerated or improper use of quotes.

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