Media Culpa

Coming from a company making its living producing intellectual property, today’s headline in Dagens Nyheter is all the more surprising. “Slipp slabbet, ladda ner istället” (“Avoid the trash, download instead”). DN today encourages readers to download 50 Cent’s new single “Candy Shop” to avoid seeing the distasteful cover (and indeed it is). But to most people, downloading equals getting access to illegal copies of digital music, and since iTunes does not exist in Sweden, and neither CDon nor Poplife has the single available for legal download, the suggestion can only be interpreted in one way. Instead of encouraging illegal filesharing, why not boycott 50 Cent all together until he realizes it’s the 21st century? [Article not online, appears on page 2 in DN Kultur.]

Yesterday was the first anniversary of this blog (and I managed to miss it). Some fairly recent summaries of the first year statistics can be found here and a summary of publicity during 2004 is here, with the addition that the interview in Internetworld now is online.

To misquote my favourite EP of all time, “16 Days/Gathering Dust” by This Mortal Coil (featuring their unforgettable version of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren”), I am back from 16 days of vacation in Thailand, doing not much else than lying on the beach gathering dust. No tv, no radio, no newspapers and no internet for two and a half weeks is very refreshing for a media addict like myself. But back at the lab again, my Bloglines account is close to collapsing, and I seriously don’t know where to start reading all the thousands of posts that have piled up since I last logged in. But here are a few things worth noting that happened the last weeks.

* Media monitoring company Agent25 follow in the footsteps of Observer and starts monitoring a number of blogs. UPDATE: My blog is on the list of blogs in English, along with prominent bloggers Bjørn Stærk, Johan Norberg, EU Commissioner Margot Wallström, Peter Lindberg, Stefan Geens, Stockholm Spectator, Undercurrent and Carl Bildt (see below).
* Annika Billström, City Commissioner in Sockholm starts blogging.
* Former Swedish prime minister and leader of the Moderate Party, Carl Bildt has started blogging. What took you so long?
* Alf Fyhrlund from SCB, the Swedish Census Bureau, has started a blog about regional and local statistics in Sweden and interantionally. Link via Markmedia.
* Dailies Trelleborgs Allehanda and Ystads Allehanda starts RSS feeds. (Hat tip to Fredrik Wackå).
* Swedish public service television SVT reconsiders its attitude towards blogs. Two months ago journalist Per Gudmundson was forced to shut down his blog, ranked Sweden’s 4th most influential by Observer. Now SVT are looking at how to use blogs to “develop communcation between SVT and its audiences”. Irony, anyone?
* SBS who owns TV channel Kanal 5 bought cable channel Canal Plus.

…check back later.

A guy takes a photo of a photographer taking a photo. Guy posts photo of photographer on Flickr. A friend of the photographer finds the photo and the photographer then joins Flickr and posts the photo she took while being photographed. Phew… You’d better read the story at FlickrBlog instead. It’s quite amazing.

New York Times Link Generator: Creating weblog-safe links to NY Times articles.