Tag: blogs

Tracking blog buzz

BlogPulse’s Trend Search is a nice feature I haven’t seen before, where you can track different search terms in the blogosphere. Take a look at this graph covering the blog posts mentioning Coke and Pepsi the last two months. It shows that Coke is discussed more frequently than its rival. The two graphs are following each other very closely, which makes me suspect that the difference between the two is due to the fact that Coke is not only carbonated water but also a drug.

Here’s another example. The Swedish blogosphere seems to be discussing feminists (“feminister”) more often than social democrats (“socialdemokrater”) and liberals (“liberaler”), at least during International Women’s Day.

Also see BlogPulse’s new Conversation Tracker.

Police threaten Finnish blogger with libel claims

Free speach in Finland is under attack. Jani Uusitalo, a Finnish blogger was contacted by the Finnish police with a cease and desist letter which demanded he removed information from his blog about events at the elementary school of Korivaara. Uusitalo wrote about the headmaster of the local school who supposedly gave fundamentalist religious schooling to kids in the elementary grades (3-4). The headmaster contacted the police who demanded the information to be taken off the blog, which should be unconstitutional, only a court can order web pages to be shut down

Visit his blog for the full story in English. (Hat tip to Phil.)

Bloggers and media rant over TV show

This is getting fun. Swedish public service television, an influential opinion journalist on a leading newspaper, an anonymous blogger and now the blogging president of Ung Vänster, the youth association of the left party – all punching at each other over a TV show about the definition of terrorism. And you didn’t think the Swedish blogosphere was able to stir up a heated debate?

Blog or no blog – it matters

Nicklas Lundblad reflects on the current process at Internetworld to name Sweden’s best blogs and, as I interpret it, about why blogs are so darn important. He writes:

“…why is it so important for everyone to be a part of the blog phenomenon? I have a website – kommenterat – where I write.

That’s it folks. Is it a blog? Is it a wiki? Is it a Typepad-driven libertarian opinion machine?

Who cares?!”

Well, I do. There is a distinct difference between a website and a blog in that I would never visit Nicklas Lundblad’s site on a regular basis (sorry), but since it is now in a blog format with an RSS feed, I am able to subscribe to his texts and that makes it a hundred times easier to follow what he writes. I can scan his posts and read the ones I am interested in, without having to go to the website to check if there are any new updates.

And the connectivity between blogs makes them infectious. If Lundblad makes a Technorati search on his blog, he will find this post in an instant. That would never happen if we had two separate websites.

Let’s face it, a genius without a channel to reach an audience, will not be heard or read but a mediocre writer like myself have hundreds of subscribers much thanks to the ease of use of the blog medium. The choice of channel is everything.