Category: Other

Since June media has been hammering the same message over and over again – oil has never been as expensive as now. True, and false. It is true that the different statistics that go back to 1983 or 1988 show that the oil price has not been higher during the period from the mid 80s up til now. False, because they only look on the actual dollar per barrel price, not adjusted for inflation, and the prices in 1980 were much higher, and the period before 1983 is excluded.

Stats that don’t take inflation into consideration are just fluff, it doesn’t mean anything. If your salary today was slightly higher in dollars than it was in 1980, you wouldn’t jump up and down with joy, because your money are worth less now.

In the US, Spinsanity has touched on the topic and how the oil price has been used on the political arena.

A more critical approach from media would be healthy, like when Dagens Industri (reg. required) for example last week noted that if adjusted for inflation, the price in 1980 was more than twice what it is today. But these examples are very rare.

Check my previous post, and below, for stats and graphs for inflation adjusted oil prices.

Chart from Inflationdata.com. Full size chart here.

Stories involving Sweden from last week:

> Sweden could be a talent magnet

> The sentence for pastor Åke Green’s hate speech against homosexuals is still a hot topic. It even sparked the Libertarian Alliance to demand that Sweden should be suspended from the EU (!). Interestingly, the Libertarian Alliance has some loose connections to the Swedish PR agency K-Street. The Libertarian Alliance is associated with Libertarian International, whose Swedish arm is Frihetsfronten, whose editor is Erik Lakomaa, founder of K-Street. Not that there’s anything wrong with it…

> Sweden threaten walk-out unless pair are banned: Kenteris and Thanou again.

> PlayStation banned from Swedish prisons: This one is fun. It was a story from Sydsvenska Dagbladet that I translated and did a short post on, which got picked up by the blog we-make-money-not-art, which in turn was picked up by Engadget and then the story spread across the net. What bummed me a bit was that most blogs linked to we-make-money-not-art instead of to me.

Cyberjournalist.net reports on two US athletes who blogs from the Olympics in Athens. Scott Goldblatt is on the U.S. swim team and is blogging for nj.com. What is more interesting is that U.S. officials told Goldblatt he can blog, “as long as I do not move into the territory of journalism” And Goldblatt says that Canada is not allowing its athletes to blog. Why a special blog gag order? Can they update their regular web pages? There’s nothing you can say in a blog that you can’t say on any other web page so to forbid blogging doesn’t serve any purpose.

While we are on the Olympic theme, today we got photos and video coverage from Kostas Kenteris in a hospital in Greece. This must be the worst crisis management case in years. Why is this guy still wearing his shoes in bed and why can’t we see the faces of the people working in the hospital? Even if Kenteris and Thanou are innocent, does anybody believe that the motorcycle accident and the hospital visit are not fake?

Consider for one moment that Kenteris and Thanou have not been using illegal substances and that they were not informed of the doping test that would take place in Athens. And that the motorcycle accident actually happened. Anyone who have spent two weeks in PR would recommend that they:

1. Show what you got: The entire world thinks you’re a cheat and everyone is trying to hunt you down, so you don’t hide in a hospital for two days sending out suspicious video footage wearing sneakers in bed. If you’re hurt, show it to the public. Take a photograph of the bike, it must be a wreck, right? Send out a press release with the exact time and location where the accident happened. And do your best to find the mystery man who drove you to the hospital.

2. Volunteer to take a doping test. You’re innocent, so you might as well step up to the plate and let them examine you.

3. Talk to the press: Unless you’re in a coma, you can talk to the press. Hiding isn’t making journalists go away, to the contrary they will dig deeper and assume that you are guilty.

Instead, Kenteris and Thanou are caught up in what looks like lies and half-truths. Either they are guilty or they have a very bad manager.

Michael Moynihan of Stockholm Spectator Media Watch has been disappointed that his revelations of plagiarism in Dagens Nyheter hasn’t been causing any debate in Swedish media. Some blogs have noticed and commented on the story, but no traditional media have touched the topic, until today when competing daily Svenska Dagbladet ran a piece on plagiarism titled “It’s hard work to do your own thinking“, by editorial writer Moa Eriksson.

About a week ago, Stockholm got praise in the Washington Post. This week it is the International Herald Tribune who raves about Sweden.

“If all the world were like Sweden, there would be little news to report.”

I guess that’s a compliment (?). The article also predicts that Sweden will attract talented workers (no signs of reversed brain drain yet though – this week an article in Dagens Industri noticed that many more people moved to Ireland to work, than to Sweden).

“…a new study by Professor Richard Florida, of Carnegie Mellon University, which measures the kind of creativity most useful to business – talent, technology and tolerance – puts Sweden at No. 1 in Europe and ahead of the United States. In the future, Florida argues, this means that Sweden will become a “talent magnet” for the world’s most purposeful workers.”

The writer also reflects on the Swedish psyche and turns to filmmaker Ingmar Bergman (sigh!) and his view of “the Swedish soul – its solitariness, its obsessiveness and its melancholia”. Are we really this dull? Let this guy attend a concert with the Hives and he will have a different view of Swedes.

Some corporations are taking steps to guard their brands and trademarks from copyright infringements online. A Digital Brand Asset Management company called Nameprotect “engages in crawling activity in search of a wide range of brand and other intellectual property violations that may be of interest to our clients“.

Word to bloggers, your blog may be crawled by a webcrawler seeking for illegal uses of trademarks, just like Josh’s World was (no, he hadn’t done anything illegal, probably just mentioned a brand name in one of his posts). Now, I guess that blogs aren’t the primary target for these webcrawlers, and Nameprotect says they are honoring robots.txt files so that any site owner can block out crawlers, but I can’t help but wonder what other webcrawler applications the future will have in store, ones that aren’t working by the same ethical standards as Nameprotect.

Bloggers should (apart from follow the law of course) start to learn about how robots crawl their sites and what to do about it. I can’t see why for example owners of copyrighted photos can’t crawl blogs to find illegal uses of their material.