Blogging goes mainstream. Yesterday on the front page of Dagens Nyheter, today on the first page of SVT text (Swedish Television). The article is about how bloggers who published information about Apple, might have to reveal their sources.
Lawyers read blogs
There are some interesting stats in the new blog reader survey from Blogads. Like for example that more than 5% of the readers are lawyers or judges. In addition, 7.1% say they are in the legal industry, more than in media, advertising and PR. Wonder if they are reading blawgs about their own business or if they are checking the blogosphere for their clients.
Other findings are that the New Yorker seems to be a popular publication among blog readers. Almost 18% subscribe to it. Furthermore, one out of five blog readers is a blogger.
Quote of the day
Adam L. Penenberg in Wired, about the Wall Street Journal being close to invisible in Google.
If you can input the name of your publication into a search engine and not come up with any stories, you must be digitally tone-deaf.
Related article.
Ads in RSS – oh yeah, it’s coming
The blogosphere is currently abuzz about the entrance of advertising in RSS feeds on a broader scale. The other week, Kanoodle announced they were partnering with Moreover for the launch of BrightAds.
Through BrightAds RSS, Kanoodle’s content-targeted sponsored links will be inserted directly into site owners’ RSS feeds within posts or as individual posts.
As a response Ed Sim at the BeyondVC blog decided to launch a second feed to be able to fool around with the ads. He’s convinced RSS ads will become standard procedure for publishers. Monitor his blog for feedback on the experiment.
First, the fact of consuming RSS feeds will typically reduce traffic at many publishers’ websites giving them less opportunity to monetize their assets. Ads in RSS will help publishers overcome the lower traffic to their sites while still providing their users with up to date content. Secondly, ads embedded in RSS feed gives great targeting opportunities for advertisers and publishers.
In October, Pheedo estimated the number of RSS ad impressions for 2004 to be 77 million, up to 308 Million in 2005 and 1.2 billion in 2006. Now, I don’t know if that’s a lot or not, but it’s fairly safe to predict an increase in feeds that add ads as publishers, both bloggers and traditional media, want to monetize on a large subscriber base. Not everyone can quit their day job to live on donations like Jason Kottke.
InfoWorld.com earlier this year reported that its top RSS feed page on its Web site was receiving more total visits than its home page. How can such a distribution channel remain ad free?
Media threaten linking bloggers
Lawrence Lessig bashes the syndicators of the Bill O’Reilly column who accuse a blog of “unauthorized linking”. But that’s not the only recent case. Not long ago Tulsa World had a somewhat similar approach and sent cease and desist orders to Michael Bates, a blogger who linked to the newspaper’s website and reproduced portions of that content on the blog, an act most possibly considered fair use.
As Rhetorica reports:
This is nonsense, of course. And it’s made worse by the fact that newspapers such as the TW do the same thing every day, i.e. comment on published material.
Tulsa World responds.
Footnote: The pdf that Bates linked to in this post, has been replaced by a pdf with the message “PDF permission denied”.
Update: An article in Bergens Tidene last weekend (in Norwegian only) addresses the topic about legal and illegal linking. Via “thinking with my fingers“.
Army head in trouble for hiring PR firm
Hiring PR agency Burson-Marsteller might have cost the Major General Lars Johan Sølvberg, Chief of Staff for the Norwegian Army a new job, VG reports today. He was up for the job as military attaché in Washington D.C., but when it was known he had hired external advisors for a report about the army, the defence leadership changed their minds.
I’m a bit surprised that they considered it a waste of taxpayers’ money to hire an external advisor. If you for some reason don’t have the internal resources or for internal political reasons want an outsider to produce a report, it must be ok. But if the agency has done a poor job, that’s another matter and something you should critize, but not by default rule out the possibility to hire external professionals. Now this is a more doubtful way of spending tax money on PR firms.