Should media sponsor journalist blogs?

Wall Street Journal: Should Newspapers Sponsor Blogs Written by Reporters?

“Now, more newspapers are warming to the idea of offering official reporter-written blogs. The Boston Globe is considering official blogs following the Mercury News’s model. At the Dallas Morning News, more than 20 sports reporters contribute to a blog on the paper’s Web site. Their posts must be screened by editors, but a spokesman said that requirement might be dropped.”

Link via Tim Porter. [Edit: WSJ, not NY Times – thanks Scott.]

RSS 4 DI

Dagens Industri, the leading business daily in Sweden, now comes with an RSS feed for headline news. From what I can tell the feed was launched on July 11 (? I can only find the first 100 posts). This is interesting also in another perspective. As I wrote in January, Dagens Industri normally moves articles online after about a week, so any blogger that tries to link to an old DI article will be greeted by this error message:

By introducing an RSS feed maybe DI is moving towards better permanence on the web.

Feed: http://ditrader.di.se/News/rss.aspx

MMS to Flickr

I am trying to learn how to send photos from my cell phone to Flickr (I know, that’s sooo 2004). It seems to be working out quite well.

Here is a photo of Nybroviken, Stockholm city, and the ferry to Djurgården. It was taken while I was waiting for the Raphael Saadiq concert earlier this month.

CBS starts blog to watch itself

From NY Times (free reg. required): CBS News is turning its eye on itself.

“As part of an ambitious attempt to revive CBSNews.com with a broad array of free video news produced just for its Web site, CBS said yesterday that it would also introduce a Web log to comment on CBS newscasts, whether broadcast or online.”

“[…] the Web log, to be called Public Eye, will assemble questions from viewers and criticism from various sources, and immediately bring in reactions from the CBS newsroom.”

More blog research

Here are a few quick links to recent blog related research. A conclusion can be that corporate blogs are good for your brand, but many consumers don’t “get blogs”, in that they don’t understand how they work and much of their usefulness is lost.

Catalyst Group has a new study (pdf) about blogs and usability. It is interesting reading and not all thumbs up for the blogosphere.

Market Sentinel and Weboptimiser have published a white paper (pdf) about the impact of RSS, search and blogging for brands. [Via Marketing Studies.]

“87% of the population use search engines as their primary means of finding sites. Search results are increasingly impacted by commentary from message boards and blogs.”

Backbone Media has published a report (pdf) that gives valueable insights into the world of corporate blogging. Some conclusions are:

“Over 83% of bloggers saw a traffic increase, while for 54% of respondents the blog represented less than 35% of their traffic. For 5% of bloggers their blog represented 100% of traffic. Journalists contacted 59% of survey respondents. Less than half of bloggers received a published article from the contact. 18% of bloggers have experienced negative PR.” [Via Media Orchard.]