Blogs in focus as Aftonbladet.se gets award

Aftonbladet.se was named the best Swedish website at a gala yesterday evening when IDG publication Internetworld named the best websites in ten different categories.

The ten best media websites are:

1. Aftonbladet
2. SVT
3. SR
4. Expressen
5. Dagens Nyheter
6. TV4
7. SVD
8. Näringsliv 24
9. Dagen
10. NA

The top media sites are all complimented on interactivity and new tools like blogs (Aftonbladet, Expressen), pod-tv (SVT) and pod-radio (SR).

“Aftonbladet has finally taken a step back to interactivity. Now it’s here, on the web, that the follow-up discussions take place during the tv evening, and it’s here that the blog revolution seriously took off”

About Dagens Nyheter the jury writes:
“The only thing we are wondering about is why editor-in-chief Wifstrand persist in writing the blog that is the hardest to read in the country – and probably the most expensive.”

I agree that Aftonbladet is slightly better at implementing blogs on the site than Expressen, but it’s blog hosting service was launched about two months after Expressen’s. This was less than two months ago, back in April. So to say that this is where the blog revolution took off is a bit over-generous. Or was this a reference to Fredrik Virtanen’s blog?

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Hacker attack shuts down Swedish government website

The Swedish police closed down the bittorrent tracker the Pirate Bay on Wednesday and on Thursday hackers went after the website of the Swedish police. The website was closed late Thursday after a denial of service attack. Tonight hackers were able to put the website of the Swedish Government out of business. As of this morning the site is still not up. For a while a message to Minister of Justice Thomas Bodström was up on the site: “Thomas – we want our freedom back”. Aftonbladet has the screen dump here.

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“5862709402” and other World Cup advertising stunts

The FIFA World Cup 2006 in Germany is no doubt big business and we can’t wait to see Sweden kick some serious bu.., I mean footballs. Until then, here are a few interesting stories and marketing stunts from around the globe.

– From Adidas: German keeper Oliver Kahn as a 65 meter long poster over a motorway bridge near Munich. Incredibly cool, if you disregard the fact that Kahn is only second goalie to Jens Lehmann.

– Below: ESPN commercial for its World Cup coverage. Bono says Ivory Coast qualification ends civil war.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qadP1rqLS3g

– What does “5862709402” mean? It’s a number made up of the last two digits the years that Brazil has won the World Cup. Nike sells t-shirts with that number. Read more about the Nike vs Adidas battle here. For the first time Nike sponsors more teams in the World Cup than its rival. See also Joga Bonito.

– Nike Joga3 football vending machine.

– “A voodoo doll with five pins and the national emblems of all your enemy teams. Toilet paper with World Cup trivia. Pork slices emblazoned with a soccer player dribbling down the field.” Germany has gone football mad.

– Business Week: “Officials expect 32 billion cumulative viewers to tune in”. Advertisers are drooling.

Hat tip: Adrants, Agenda Inc. Tags: , , , .

Milking the moment

You can tell that the World Cup is getting closer and closer when any incident becomes a two-page story. Dagens Nyheter’s female photographer got a phone call in the middle of the night two days ago at her Danish hotel. Player Roberto Acuña of Paraguay had asked FIFA employee Manuel Hoffmann to make the call and try to arrange a date with the photographer. The player was clearly out of line, but you might say that DN is milking the moment when the story gets two full pages two days in a row, in the news section (not in Sports). On top of that DN has translated the articles to English and Spanish in order to get international attention.

Need I say that Paraguay is in Sweden’s group in the World Cup? But I guess that anything that can disturb our opponents’ concentration on the game is welcome…

Update, June 2: Today DN has another full page although nothing new has happened. DN says that FIFA “will still let Hoffmann work for Paraguay during the World Cup”. Oh, the horror. Anyway, Ann-Charlotte Martues writes a very funny and sarcastic piece about the story in today’s Expressen.

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770,000 Swedes have read a blog

A new survey will soon be published by SOM-institutet and it shows that 10 percent of the respondents (aged 15-85) have read a blog during the last 12 months. Some argue that this is a very low number, but that means that about 770,000 Swedes have read a blog. I don’t think that’s something to sneeze at.