300,000 new Swedish bloggers in one day

Sweden’s leading online community Lunarstorm today launches a redesign of its member diaries. Lunarstorm is the largest web site in the Nordic countries with more than one billion page views per month. It has 1.2 million active members, including 90 percent of Sweden’s high school students. Members are able to publish texts on personal online diaries and today the diaries are enhanced with new blog-like features. They are also renamed blogs, which means that the Swedish blogosphere (previously predicted to have about 25,000+ bloggers) got 300,000 new bloggers.

McDonald’s is sponsoring the new blog feature according to Resumé.

Update: Urban is not convinced. The blogs are locked inside the Lunarstorm community and are not equipped with RSS feeds.

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More than half of the blogs at Expressen have no visitors

On 24 February, Swedish daily Expressen launched a new feature enabling readers to start their own blogs at expressen.se. It only took a few days for Expressen to exclaim “Success!”, and indeed, they are already hosting about 1,000 blogs. However, these blogs have very few readers. I took a closer look on Friday 10 March, and at 9 PM, only 2 percent of the blogs had more than 50 daily visits. 86 percent had 5 visits or less and more than half had no visitors at all. All the 959 blogs only totalled a measly 4,315 daily visits that day (with three hours left of the day).

Naturally these figures might improve ovet time and it takes a while to build an audience, but bloggers who created mirror blogs on Expressen.se to drive traffic to their real blogs must have been deeply disappointed.

Update: Expressen tempts new bloggers with “an audience of a million”. Via Johan.

Footnote: Only daily visits via expressen.se are counted. Blogs may have other visitors that do not come from expressen.se.

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Blogger of the week is missing

Torbjörn Bergmark is blogger of the week at the Swedish daily Västerbottens-Kuriren. But in the middle of his blogging he went missing and he is nowhere to be found. However, there’s no need to worry. Bergmark is the editor in chief of VK and he left to an unknown destination to celebrate his 60th birthday. Now the editorial staff turns to the readers in a plea for help. Has anybody seen our blogger?

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.