The French publication France Soir today published the controversial caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, previously published by Jyllands-Posten. Dagens Nyheter writes that the purpose is to “initiate a discussion about the strong reactions around the world, caused by the publication in Denmark”. As if there was a need for more fuel to this controversy.
Skugge has lost it
Aggeman is spot on today when he critizes Expressen-blogger Linda Skugge, who is ranting about the fact that an anonymous blog with 130,000 page visits is called a success, while her own blog has more (145,000) per month.
“Han har haft 130 000 sidvisningar sen aug och det kallas succé. Jag har haft mellan 1-2 miljoooooner träffar sen aug. Och sen maj när jag började måste det bli det dubbla. Jag lovar att Hemliga pappan kommer sälja massor. Det känns som om jag hjälper fram en massa människor som sen säljer multum. Men ingen hjälper nånsin fram mig.”
Crikey, Skugge’s blog is part of Expressen.se, one of the most visited web sites in Sweden. “Nobody ever helps me” she writes. Well, Expressen.se has about 12 million visits per month so if only about one per cent reads Skugge’s blog, I’d say it’s a huge failure. Why all this envy? Skugge is one of a handful Swedish bloggers who get paid to blog, that’s not enough help?
PubSub or SubPar?
I can’t say that I’m extremely impressed by the accuracy in PubSub’s LinkRank. A quick check for the last week shows that PubSub is pretty far from being correct. White cells are PubSub stats for my blog, pink cells are Technorati links and actual numbers.
In me we trust
According to the Edelman Trust Barometer 2006, global opinion leaders say their most credible source of information about a company is now “a person like me”.
In the U.S., trust in “a person like me” increased from 20% in 2003 to 68% today. Opinion leaders also consider rank-and-file employees more credible spokespersons than corporate CEOs (42% vs. 28% in the U.S.).
Also interesting is that trust in government is low in the U.S. (38%) but high in China (83%, up from 63% in ’05).
Jyllands-Posten apologizes
Last September, the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten published 12 drawings of the Prophet Mohammed, which sparked anger among Muslims in Denmark and abroad. The degrading caricatures were later reprinted in a Norwegian magazine (in defense of free speech), causing a boycott of Danish and Norwegian products in the Arab world. The Danish-Swedish dairy producer Arla even paid for an ad in Saudi Arabian newspapers, in order to “stop the boycott from escalating”. As of yesterday, Arla products were off the shelves in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Lebanon, Kuwait and many other nations.
Late last night Jyllands-Posten issued an apology, not for publishing the drawings, but for the fact that the drawings offended Muslims! It’s a hazardous strategy, not to apologize for you own actions, but apologize for the reactions of the offended part. I guess the reason is that an apology for the actual publication would be seen as caving in to external pressure and in the long run a threat to the freedom of speech.
“They were not intended to be offensive, nor were they at variance with Danish law, but they have indisputably offended many Muslims for which we apologize.”
The same strategy was used in Norway:
In Norway, a foreign ministry spokesman denied media reports that the government had asked its diplomats to apologize to Muslim countries.
“We have not asked our diplomats to apologize for the publication of these cartoons, but to apologize for the agitation they have created,” she said, according to Norway’s NTB news agency.
It will be interesting to see if this apology will be enough to make this issue go away.
(By the way, maybe a pop-up for a net survey shouldn’t be what greets readers that click on the link to the apology.)
Committee blogs about integration
In September 2005 the Swedish government formed a parliamentary committee to do a review of integration politics in Sweden. Now the committee has started a blog about its task and the blog will be active until 1 June, 2007.
What is quite interesting is that the blog is hosted on Blogspot. That’s probably ok, but not the most obvious choice. I wouldn’t expect an American committee to host its blog on a Swedish server.
The blog also uses Sitemeter for site statistics. Kind of fun to see the adverts for Spongebob Squarepants screen savers on the stat page of a parliamentary committee.