Facebook is growing fast

The most well-known of the global social networking sites is obviously MySpace with in excess of 100 million registered users. But other sites are also thriving in its shadow, like Facebook for example. Carolyn Abram presents some impressive statistics:

– Facebook grew from 7.5 million users last July to almost 18 million users now. Over half of the users log in daily.
– The site has 30 billion page views monthly, is the 6th most trafficked US site and account for 1% of all time spent on the internet.
– There are more than 1 billion photos on the site.

Shel Israel has a great comment:

” If you are a marketing professional and you continue to ignore stats like these, my urgent advice is pay attention. A whole generation [is] absorbed in the social media and if you overlook them, you may have a future career in the restaurant service industry.”

 

Dagens Media closes blog – info still available via RSS

After the article by and about Niclas Rislund in today’s Dagens Media, the paper’s blog Köksveckan mysteriously has been closed. Two blog posts about the Rislund kerfuffle can no longer be accessed (although Researcher has the screen dumps). If the blog has been closed “for renovation” because several journalists on the photo have left the paper, the timing couldn’t have been worse. And if it is an attempt to delete the comments made by the reporters, they haven’t done a very good job. The articles can be read in Dagens Media’s RSS feed and you can still click on the link at the bottom of each post that says “comments” and it’s all available here:

First and second article.

UPDATE: The blog is up and running again. According to a comment on Researcher it was down for technical reasons, something the paper could have been much better at communicating in order to avoid conspiracy theories like my own.

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PayPerPost scheme taken one step too far

Asbjørn writes about a Danish company that offers bloggers between 40 and 400 DKR to blog about its clients. Representatives from Semoblog say that bloggers are encouraged to state their opinion and that there are no demands of positive publicity. According to this article, this practice does not violate the Marketing Practices Act as long as bloggers state that they get paid to write.

But as if that wasn’t enough, MediaPost writes about one PayPerPost-company that takes the whole thing one step further by “paying new bloggers for writing items that link to PayPerPost blog items”.

Adrants comments:

“Let’s see if we can get this straight. PayPerPost is going to pay bloggers to link to other blogger’s content, for which the sole reason of its existence was cash changing hands. Is anyone else having a WTF moment about this right now? Have these PayPerPost people lost all sense of reality? There are so many things wrong with this on so many levels.”

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Convicted journalist writes news article about his own court case

Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt has been using his blog very actively to defend himself against the current storm of criticism from media the last few weeks, much to the chagrin of the journalists that are after him. Expressen’s Per Svensson can’t hide his disappointment and writes in an article full of war metaphors, that Bildt “uses his blog as a weapon against one of the institutions of the liberal democracy – investigative journalism”. This is obviously a situation that Svensson is not used to, but if journalism can’t compete with the blog of an interviewee, then maybe it’s not the blog that is the problem, but journalism in itself.

A fantastic example that journalism doesn’t need blogs to destroy itself comes today from Dagens Media. One of its reporters, Niclas Rislund, used to work for Expressen. Last year he was fined for posing as a police man. Today the Supreme Court announced that it denies Rislund a new trial. And when Dagens Media writes about the story, Rislund himself is the author of the article in which he refers to himself as “Expressen’s former star reporter Niclas Rislund” (Expressens tidigare stjärnreporter Niclas Rislund).

Martin Jönsson at Svenska Dagbladet calls it “some kind of record in poor judgement”. It is hard not to agree.

But it’s not all doom and gloom in mainstream media today. The small Swedish company Primelabs today announced that the South African daily Sunday Times will display links from the blogosphere to its articles using Primelabs’ service Twingly. The two Swedish dailies Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet just recently added Twingly links to their online articles.

Colin Daniels, New Media Strategy Manager at Sunday Times said in a press release:

“Twingly is the most exciting product to hit the Blogsphere since RSS became an established Web technology and I believe its real potential lies in its ability to gain acceptance and link Bloggers and the mainstream media.

We are very excited about integrating Twingly into our future news site and making it an integral part of our online strategy. We believe that this is a big step forward in engaging with our readers and creating ‘link love’ with the small but growing number of Bloggers in Africa. It’s a win-win strategy!”

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Buy hot fake friends for your MySpace profile

Does your MySpace/Friendster/Facebook profile look dull? Only have ugly friends or lack friends all together? Now you can buy good-looking fake friends to your social networking site at FakeYourSpace. The site offers you “hot models” for 99 cents per model and month and will give you 2 comments a week. Here’s how the site describes its services:

“FakeYourSpace is an exciting new service that enables normal everyday people like me and you to have Hot friends on popular social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook.”

“You can have our Models leave you any type of customized message you may wish. Want to make an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend jealous? No problem. Have one of our Models personally flirt with you on your comment wall.”

What people will do to become popular…

FakeYourFriends is currently closed for a few days because it had used photographs of models from iStockPhoto.com without permission.

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