Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
Swedish Internetworld has been kind enough to include my blog in the nominations for Best Blog, under the category “IT & Media”. 50 blogs in total are nominated in the four categories Politics, IT & Media, Culture and Misc. Voting ends on March 15.
If you like this blog please consider casting your vote here, just click the circle in front of “Media Culpa” and then click the grey button at the end of the page that says “Rösta” (“Vote” in Swedish). That’s all. Thanks.
Swedish blogger Sara thought that an ad from L’Oréal could be interpreted as being pedophile-like. She reported it to ERK (The Trade Council Against Sexist Advertising) and sent out a press release. A TV station commented on the story and it didn’t take long before L’Oréal had responded and promised not to use the ad again. The reason the photo looked like a man holding a child was that the breasts of the woman had been retouched (read removed). Well done Sarah and a swift and correct response from the advertiser.
Before and after retouching the photo:
The RSS feed of Spinwatch has been hacked. The title of the feed shown in Bloglines has been replaced by “Hacked by …” and the individual posts are not accessible via the feed. Hope they straighten things out soon. In fact, I remember seeing a note at the bottom of Spinwatch’s site a few weeks back that claimed it had been hacked, so obviously someone is keen to obstruct their news distribution.
Spinwatch is a web site researching “the PR industry, corporate PR and lobbying, front groups, government spin, propaganda and other tactics used by powerful groups to manipulate media, public policy debate and public opinion”.
UPDATE: The problem has been solved and the RSS feed is working properly again. The four most recent posts are accessible, but older posts have not been restored.
While Swedish media just recently learned about blogging and now podcasting, US media are already exploring vlogging, or video blogging. Here’s the story of an 11-year old, supposedly the world’s youngest video blogger, who even got on ABC World News Tonight.
Dan Gillmor, one of the leading thinkers in blogging and journalism, has moved to a new blog called Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism – A conversation about the future of journalism “by the people, for the people.” RSS feed here.
A recent blog survey by Perseus revealed that the majority of bloggers are women (56%) but a new survey by Pew Internet shows that 57% of all US blog creators are men. The two studies were performed quite differently. Pew made two telephone surveys with in total 1,861 internet users in the US, while Perseus surveyed 3,634 blogs on eight leading blog-hosting services. Perseus analysis “does not cover nonhosted blogs – blogs that individuals maintain on their own servers using their own tools”.
I am not an expert on statistics but it seems that Pew’s survey draws conclusions from a very small number of respondents. If they surveyed 1,861 internet users and 7 per cent of them had created a blog, that is only 130 people (74 male, 56 female).