Media Culpa – Page 231 – Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations

Observer starts monitoring US blogs

Swedish media monitoring company Observer owns Bacon’s Information who monitors media sources for clients in the US. In November, Observer decided to start monitoring 10 influential Swedish blogs and now Bacon’s have announced they will start monitoring “the most reputable online news blogs” in America. According to the press release:

“Initially, these will be blogs of active journalists, but as our in-house researchers scrutinize and approve additional news-related blogs, we will add to the scope of our coverage.”

According to bloggers, Bacon’s will be monitoring just 250 blogs. Darren Barefoot has a post on why this is a crappy idea. Jeremy Pepper thinks it’s not. Personally I think that the quality approach (vs quantity) is ok for the non-tech savvy PR people, but any PR practitioner with a little more knowledge about the blogosphere would obviously add services like Feedster, PubSub and Technorati.

Color predictions for 2005

Purple is the new pink. Redesigning your blog? Check out Adam Polselli’s color forecast for 2005, with inspiration from “Gap’s sparkly scarves and Banana Republic’s metallic thread coats and skirts”. Polselli predicts what colors will be popular during the year.

Update: Polselli and Spectacle also have a nice bunch of color schemes for the web.

Blogs and wikis are complementary to media

The New York Times writes (reg. Required) about how blogs are complementary to traditional media and have become a vital source of information in the aftermath of the earthquake in southern Asia. Another example is Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet which is continously updating a web page with external links to tsunami information from non-traditional media like blogs, wikis and personal homepages.

Bloggers get together to raise money

British web designer Andy Budd has started a blog called BlogAid to encourage bloggers to donate their advertising revenue to help support the earthquake and tsunami victims.

Link via NevOn.

BitTorrent video files from the tsunami

The P2P file distribution tool BitTorrent has been under serious attack during the last month from the digital rights movement, but the method can also be used in less dubious ways than sharing illegal copies of music, film or games. For example sharing video footage of the tsunami disaster. The web site Waves of destruction collects photos and videos from the catastrophe and many video files are distributed in BitTorrent format. The site has had thousands of BitTorrent users the last days.

Tsunami before/after photos

If you need any additional motivation to donate money to the victims of the tsunami, these satellite photos of the disaster area show the horrific differences before and after the waves hit land. For example Banda Aceh shore. More here.