Don’t blog about your holiday plans

Blogging about going on vacation could be an invitation to have your house burgled. The police in Sundsvall in Sweden now warns bloggers to be too open about their holiday plans.

– If you tell when you are on vacation there is a big risk that thieves will seize the opportunity, says Bosse Nordqvist at the police.

And if you think that burglars haven’t started to read blogs, then you might have to think twice. If they are bright enough to break into football players’ houses during away games (like Liverpool’s Jose Reina, Jerzy Dudek and Daniel Agger) then it won’t be long before they’re hooked on Twitter and RSS.

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Metro to re-open its blog service

Metro will re-open its blogging service Metrobloggen on August 2. The service closed after just two days after some 2,300 bloggers signed up. But Metrobloggen will only accept new users “as long as there is capacity and resources for new blogs”.

I still think this explanation seems to be a subterfuge for the real reason, i.e. Metrobloggen haven’t sold enough ads to support the system. Let’s compare with another Swedish blog host – Blogg.se. Users of Blogg.se have created 391 new blogs, 14,660 posts and 12,709 comments during the last 24 hours. If Metro with all its resources isn’t able to build a service with similar capacities, it is indeed implementing a good idea poorly.

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Ljungkvist got citizen journalism award

A huge congratulations to my friend Magnus Ljungkvist who yesterday was awarded “Nyhetspriset 2007, Årets avslöjande”, a new citizen journalism award that was founded by the political blog Politikerbloggen and the PR agency Prime PR. Ljungkvist received 25,000 kronor for his articles that later led to the resignation of Sweden’s Minister for Trade, Maria Borelius. A series of negative articles took off after Magnus Ljungkvist revealed some startling facts about her and her husband’s income during the 90’s. Borelius only lasted a record short period of 8 days as Minister. More background here.

The Swedish tabloid Expressen got the prestigious journalism award Guldspaden 2006 for the same story, although they published their “scoop” after Ljungkvist.

Johan Larsson, the man behind blog portals like knuff.se, intressant.se and nyligen.se, also got an award yesterday for his efforts to build great services for the Swedish blogosphere.