Bloggers bite back

There is an episode in the fifth Friends’ season when everybody finds out about Chandler and Monica. The best part is when Phoebe decides to have a little fun with Chandler by pretending she wants to sleep with him. But Chandler realizes it is because “she knows” and plays along, because “they don’t know that we know that they know”. Chandler says:

“Ah yes. The messers…become the MESSEES!”

A person who could have said the same, is Marc Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. He was interviewed via email by the New York Times about the sale of Register.com, a company in which Cuban owns a 13.2 per cent stake. When the article was published, Cuban felt he was grossly mis-represented and decided to publish the email conversation on his blog so that others could decide for themselves.

B.L. Ochman has a good comment on the story:

“Interestingly, the publication of the raw material opens the story to different interpretations by bloggers and other journalists. In the long term, that will add to the credibility of reporting in all its forms.”

Of course, it doesn’t add to the credibility of this particular article, which seems to be a work with a predetermined angle. But in a larger perspective, Ochman is right.

Audioscrobbler extreme makeover

I’m a huge fan of Audioscrobbler, the service that tracks what music you are listening to and then compiles it into different charts. It has a lot of other features and I haven’t tried them all out yet. Anyhow, Audioscrobbler recently made a major redesign of the website and can now be found at www.last.fm.

My charts can be found here and the 10 latest tracks can also be found at the bottom of the right column of this blog, courtesy of RSS Digest. Other well known Swedish bloggers with Audioscrobbler is for example Rasmus of Copyriot. His profile can be found here.

Every blog post is an ad if you are a Kentucky lawyer

Today I’m glad I’m not based in Kentucky, because then I would be walking on very thin ice (because of our blawg). The Kentucky Attorney’s Advertising Commission has decided that each blog post is an ad, which in the Kentucky lawyers’ code requires a “A filing fee of $50.00 for each advertisement” and for every change in the advertisement. How ironic that the blawg who started it all is Ben Cowgill’s Legal Ethics Blog. Hopefully Ben will be able to continue with his blog eventually.

Swedish corporates are pitching bloggers

Having spent three weeks in my summer house in July, I had to wade through hundreds of emails when I returned back to civilization. One of them was from one of largest companies in Sweden, I will spare you which one because I am a friend of their head of PR. I believe it is the first time I have been approached by the communications department of a large Swedish company in my role as a blogger. I’m glad that public relations professionals are aware that bloggers are influential and potentially a target for PR pitches. But when it is performed in such a clueless way, I’m baffled.

First of all, the PR person hasn’t read my blog. If she had, she would know that I never ever write about stuff from her company’s industry. Is it really so hard to figure out that I blog about PR and media? It is in the headline. I do not blog about your products.

Second, if you are in the process of sending out a mass mailing, please make sure that I don’t feel like I’m on the receiving end of a spam attack. The email I got had obviously been forwarded at least once, so it had the “>” sign before every line, and the second half of the first sentence had apparently been edited, because it had a different color than all the other lines, at least in my email program. Translated:

> Hello,
>
> You receive this email because you are one of the most frequently read and
noticed blogs in Sweden.
>
> We wonder if you are interested in subscribing to press releases from XYZ?

Now, I am not trying to be mean, rather show that if you are pitching bloggers, you need even more finesse and fingerspitzgefühl than if you are pitching journalists. Not the other way around because bloggers will tell everyone that you’re making a mistake. Besides, it would have been smarter to let people sign up to press release subscriptions via the online press room or via RSS, but of course you can’t.

Metro abandons Swedish correction style

Metro, the largest daily in the world outside Japan according to themselves, have decided to launch a daily correction column. Corrections in Swedish papers are normally few and not in a fixed column, rather they are published where the original article was published. This is often explained with a worry about the paper’s credibility if corrections were given too much space. The tradition in the US and UK is quite the opposite and Metro in Sweden now welcome feedback from readers so that mistakes can be corrected in “Dagens fel” (“Today’s errors”).

Editor-in-chief, Sakari Pitkänen about the previous practice:

“It is an oldfashioned way of reasoning. It was probably ok before the internet. Today the correct information is spread on blogs, mailing lists and media watchdogs on the web. There is a risk that the reader might find the correction to a mistake everywhere but in the paper that published it. That would really undermine the credibility of the paper.”