Category: Other

A creative afternoon

It has been an inspiring afternoon in Stockholm City Hall. As I’m riding the bus home I’m trying to summarize my thoughts about the whole creative class model and I realize that I need to let it sink in for a day or two.

One thing though that I found to be a common theme in the commentaries afterwards was that few were willing to completely accept the notion that Sweden ranked first in the creativity index. There are of course political aspects of that, PJ Anders Linder wrote about that in SvD the other day. More on this later.

Every human being is creative

I have just listened to the presentation by Richard Florida at the Folkhemmet 2.0 event in Stockholm. His theory is that we currently are going through the greatest economic shift in history, greater than the industrialization. He is talking about the shift to a creative economy, a change not based on natural resources, but based on the human mind.

He claims that 50 percent of people in Stockholm are employed in what he calls creative industries, a number that is higher than any other city that he has researched. The numbers for Gothenburg and Malmo are 45 percent and 40 percent. Creative industries are for example science, entrepreneurship, art, entertainment etc.

His advice is to leverage the creativity in everyone, he is not talking about a creative elite. And successful societies are defined by 3T: Technology, Talent and Tolerance.

But as was noted in the following debate that Florida had problems with proving a connection between high creative ranking and prosperity.

I’m off to the seminar

I’m sending this post on my way to the seminar in order to see if blogging via mobile works.

Noticed by the way that CNN will cover the event. Good, I’m there, CNN is there, we’re ready to go…

Open letter to Bosse Andersson, Expressen

Dear Bosse,

Your competitor Aftonbladet yesterday acquired the blog portal Bloggportalen.se for an undisclosed sum. This is great news for Expressen. Among all the Swedish blog portals, Sigge Eklund’s Bloggportalen is probably the last one I would have invested in, had I been in your shoes (sorry Sigge, I’m a regular reader of your blog though). It is a register of 3,500 blogs with little functionality other than presenting a number of blogs in different categories. As the blogosphere evolves, many blogs on the site will become inactive and the time spent on putting in new ones will be overwhelming. Of course, Aftonbladet will probably develop some way of updating the register automatically (note: beware of spam blogs). A library of blogs is just not that interesting, and here’s why – the blogosphere isn’t really about blogs, it is about the content in blogs. And Bloggportalen is not about blog content.

A central feature of the blogosphere is connectivity and the core of that connectivity is the “ping”. Johan who runs a number of brilliant blog portals has done something extremely smart. He has created a site (Nyligen.se) that most Swedish bloggers ping when they have a new blog post. He has another called Intressant.se that sorts content into different categories. From this information he has been able to build other cool sites like Knuff.se which analyzes and sorts the information on Swedish blogs, letting readers follow how different topics or articles gets discussed in the blogosphere. It’s a bit of Technorati mixed with PubSub, all RSS enabled of course.

Now, Bosse, you start to get my point. Expressen should buy Nyligen, Intressant and Knuff and hire Johan Larsson for an embarrassingly high salary. Around these different portals I’m sure Expressen could build some really nice features that Aftonbladet would envy.

Best regards,

Hans

Footnote: Bosse Andersson is Head of Expressen.se

Update: Podradio and Urban Lindstedt comment too.