Bosses block blogs

Wired today has a story about how companies are starting to use security filters in order to block employees’ access to blogs, for example by blocking any site with the word “blog” in the URL (which affects all blogs hosted on blogspot.com or blogsome.com). Corporates worry about productivity and security issues. But of course, all blogs are not bad for business. One must not forget all the positive aspects of blogs in terms of gaining and sharing knowledge, building relations, marketing etc. But then again, Resumé points to an article on adage.com (reg. required) that says employees in the US will waste 551,000 years reading blogs in 2005.

“About 35 million workers — one in four people in the labor force — visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them, according to Advertising Age’s analysis. Time spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs.”

Procrastination has never been more ubiquitous.

Pascalidou-gate reaches L.A.

The story about Alexandra Pascalidou’s “inspiration” of an L.A. Times article has now become an international embarrassment, as one of the major local blogs, L.A. Observed, today posted a comment.

It’s interesting that Pascalidou’s response hasn’t resulted in further questioning. She hasn’t admitted that she used or even read Hernandez’ article, when it is obvious to anyone who compares them that she must have. She is a regular columnist in Metro, the paper that recently launched a new concept with a daily correction column. Question is, will Metro do a follow-up, or was this initiative of transparency just lip service?

In contrast, when Resumé today revealed that Dagens Industri’s stock reporter Ingemar Carlsson was an active day trayder while he was giving stock advice in Dagens Industri, Carlsson published a sincere mea culpa and apologized. And he published it before Resumé managed to publish their scoop online.

My guess is that Carlsson will be back at DI after a short time-out, while Pascalidou’s “columnist brand” has been severely damaged. Especially since she has another crisis still waiting to explode once more, namely that she has been accused of using a ghost writer but denies it. Freelance journalist Isobel Hadley-Kamptz comments on her blog “since I know who the ghost writer is, I know she is lying“.

Dagens Nyheter agrees with me

Dagens Nyheter, 19 Oct, 2005, about how even their own journalists promote the iPod and forget that other brands (like Creative) pioneered mp3-players with hard drives.

“iPod är den första tekniska apparat som gör det möjligt att bära med sig en del av sitt kulturarv. Ett extra minne till hjärnan som kan fyllas med det som präglat och format ens identitet”, hette det till exempel i DN i augusti i år. Skribenten tycks glömt till exempel de Nomadmodeller som Creative tillverkade före iPodens födelse.

Exactly my point, on 3 Oct, 2005.

Bonus link: Slate on the iPod press cult.

The journalist who exposed Pascalidou also copied an article

Swedish journalist Alexandra Pascalidou, who recently was accused of using a ghost writer, is now being accused of plagiarism by marketing weekly Resumé. A column she wrote in Metro on 29 Dec, 2003 is strikingly similar to an article by Daniel Hernandez, which was published in LA Times and the Boston Globe two days prior (Dates according to Resumé. I have not been able to verify the date in LA Times). The two articles are indeed very similar to each other.

But is it just Pascalidou who cuts corners among journalists or is this a behaviour that is a common and “justified” means of getting things done in journalism? Let’s check an article by Magnus Helander, the journalist at Resumé who exposed Pascalidou.

Helander wrote an article on 4 Oct this year about a successful blog ad campaign from Audi, citing Online Media Daily as source. But 8 hours before Helander’s article appears online, an almost identical article (no longer online, 2011) was published by Urban Lindstedt at Internetworld. Phrases in bold are from Internetworld, phrases below are from Resumé [exact order may not entirely match the full articles].

Audi la en halv procent av annonsbudgeten i en kampanj för att köpa annonser hos större bloggar.
Audi lade en halv procent av sin annonsbudget på att köpa annonsplatser på bloggar.

Denna halva procent generade 29 procent av trafiken.
Resultatet blev en succé.
Bloggannonseringen genererade 29 procent av trafiken till biltillverkarens kampanjsajt.

Audi spenderade en halv procent av sin annonsbudget på bloggannonser på stora amerikanska bloggar när kampanjen “The Art of Heist” skulle lanseras.
Audi ville driva trafik till sin nya hemsida för kampanjen “The Art of Heist”.

I slutändan genererade bloggannonserna 29 procent av trafiken till kampanjsajten, enligt Brian Clark, vd på GMD Studios.
Enligt Brian Clark, vd på GMD Studios, drev bloggannonserna 29 procent av trafiken till kampanjsajten, uppger Online Media Daily.

Men många annonsörer är tveksamma till att annonsera på bloggar på grund av risken att de får negativa kommentarer på bloggarna.
Många potentiella bloggannonsörer uppges vara rädda för att utsättas för negativa kommenterer på bloggarna.

Men Clarke menar att annonsörer inte har råd att ignorera bloggannonser.
Men enligt Brian Clark har annonsörer inte råd att ignorera bloggannonsering.

– Om du är rädd vad användare ska säga finns det två strategier: Bli involverad i diskussionen, eller stoppa fingrarna i öronen och låtsas att den inte existerar, säger Brian Clarke till Online Media Daily. Folk pratar om dig vare sig du lyssnar eller inte.
– Om du är rädd vad användarna ska säga finns det två strategier: bli involverad i diskussionen, eller stoppa fingrarna i öronen och låtsas att den inte existerar. Folk pratar om dig vare sig du lyssnar eller inte, säger Clark till Online Media Daily.

It is quite unlikely that both Helander and Lindstedt, independent of each other, on the same day came up with the same idea to write about this story that was originally published 29 September. And decided to quote the exact same paragraphs from the article. From the looks of it, this is a poor re-write of a re-write.

Not that it matters a lot in this incident, but I strongly suspect they (read Lindstedt) got the idea from this post on my blog, the day before their articles appeared online. In my short post I linked to Davenetics where I found the story. And if you look carefully you see that I managed to nick a sentence from Davenetics, so we are all plagiarists to some extent, are we not? To my defence, at least I (and most bloggers) link to the original.

Either way, plagiarism can’t be tolerated in journalism. It is lazy and it is cheating.