Category: Other

Feminist debater and journalist Maria-Pia Boëthius is planning an independent and anti-patriarchal weekly publication called Basta, signalling that “it’s enough”. According to Journalisten the project will start out as a blog of some sort to develop into a “dead tree” publication over time.

Don’t miss Per Andersson in today’s Expressen about the blogosphere. Über-blogger Erik Stattin is interviewed.

A collection of Swedish podcasts can be found at Podcasting.se.

You can learn a great deal from just analyzing data. This new Trend Tool from BlogPulse that I wrote about earlier this week is really fun. For example, did you know that shopping is discussed much more frequently in the blogosphere on Saturdays and Sundays than the rest of the week?

So what can you do with this information? Well, the fact that people shop more on weekends is probably not news. But say that you complement your current marketing strategy with an online campaign targeted to bloggers and run it on weekends when people are in a shopping mood. You can advertise via Google AdWords and pause your campaign from Monday to Thursday to reactivate it again on Friday. That way there is a higher chance that your ads deliver leads than during the rest of the week. Maybe, I don’t know if it works. Main point is that by running a simple search you can find different patterns in consumer behaviour.

If we add another parameter, a search for the word “sell” the graph is close to inverted. Bloggers discuss selling less on weekends than the rest of the week. Why is that? Maybe we buy stuff on Saturday, get disappointed and want to sell it on Monday (kidding).

If you are doing business and haven’t heard about customization by now, maybe you should look for another career or alternatively join the The World Congress on Mass Customization and Personalization in Hong Kong this fall. Today’s consumers demand the ability to tailor products and services after their individual needs and preferences. They customize and personalize everything, from software (with different plug-ins and skins), to cell phone covers and web browsers. Media consumers are getting more and more used to customize their news consumption, so if you are a media company and assume or demand that all readers use the same tools and desire the same information you aren’t paying attention.

Here’s an example of a media web site that tells me what to use and lets me know that my choice of browser is wrong. This message greeted me at the website of female weekly Vecko-Revyn. The text reads as follows:

Too bad!
You don’t have the right version of browser. Click on the logos below to download a new version or click here if you still want to view Vecko-Revyn’s website. We recommend Internet Explorer 5.5.

I beg to differ. Only I decide if I have the right browser or not and you’d better have a pretty darn important website if I should choose to upgrade or switch browser just to visit you. If I was a webmaster I would try to make my website accessible for as many types of browsers as possible. Heard of Firefox maybe?

Footnote: I use Netscape from home.

I’ve been using Audioscrobbler for a while, and it’s really a neat application. It tracks all songs you play on your computer via a plug in to Winamp or iTunes for example. It then takes that information and compile top lists for most played songs and artists the last week and in total. Had there been an application like this when I was younger I don’t think I would have ever left the room (don’t tell anyone but I compiled lists like this by hand way way back).

Sharing listening habits is not uncommon, celebrities do it on iTunes for example. Blogger Roxanne has started a meme where she and other bloggers share the first ten songs to appear in their mp3 player every Friday. Rox Populi’s Friday Random Ten can be found here. And by reading Mark Comerford’s blog I know that he likes David Sylvian which automatically makes him an intelligent person…

Anyway, here is my main page at Audioscrobbler and you can subsribe to information via my RSS feed. Let the ranting begin.