Swedish dailies track [some] blog links

Sweden’s leading daily newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet have started to include links to blogs who comment on articles on the papers’ websites, Washington Post-style. Blog posts are tracked via a tool called Twingly and a list of the most blogged articles at DN can be found here. Example at SvD here. Twingly was just recently launched and has currently indexed about 2.8 million blog posts, which of course is a small number compared to the 1.6 million blog posts that the blogosphere spits out daily. The accuracy will of course improve over time as more and more blogs are tracked by Twingly.

Currently, the Swedish blog portal Knuff is far better att tracking blog links than both Twingly and Technorati. Here is a comparison between the three services and how they track the five top blogged articles at Dagens Nyheter.

Blogs posts tracked
Article Twingly Technorati Knuff
#1 24 19 26
#2 1 10 23
#3 2 2 18
#4 0 6 13
#5 2 4 10

UPDATE: The comparison above is a bit unfair, as Martin from Primelabs explains in the comments to this post. Apparently DN does not show all the incoming links that Twingly has in its database. In the Help section on the site, DN writes that you can find “a list of all blogs that link to an article on DN.se”. For some reason DN chooses to list only a selection of links. If this process turns out to filter out negative articles, then I expect an uproar in the blogosphere when bloggers find out they are being “censored”. Should DN continue to leave out a large part of the conversation they will most certainly open up for criticism.

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The Swedish alphabet just got longer

I read in Dagens Nyheter that the Swedish alphabet just got longer. This certainly does not happen every day. It now has 29 letters instead of 28, since “W” is now considered a letter of its own, as in most countries, and not just a variation of “V”. The reason behind the change is that the 13th edition of SAOL, the Swedish Academy’s dictionary of the Swedish language, has been published and a large number of words beginning with “w” has been added, the most important of course is “webb” (web).

w00t!

2006 a promising year for Swedish PR

It seems like 2006 might become a very good year for the Swedish public relations industry, according to a survey by the PR association Precis. 57 percent of its companies say that order levels are better today than last quarter and 68 percent expect next quarter to be better than the current.

Nearly 80 percent of the PR agencies expect to have increased the number of employees the next quarter. Marketing communications and media relations are the two disciplines that have been increasing in demand the most from last quarter and the industries with the highest increase in demand are IT/tech, health/pharma and food.

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Swedish media about Richard Florida

Swedish media aren’t entirely buying Richard Florida’s praise of Sweden as the most creative country on the planet . Below are a some links (in Swedish) to articles about Florida’s recent visit to Sweden.

Dagens Nyheter
Expressen
Göteborgs-Posten 1 and 2
Stockholm City
Svenska Dagbladet 1 and 2
Sydsvenskan

It’s probably not related, but I found this to be an interesting survey, a new study on countries and national pride. Sweden is at the very bottom of the 33 countries surveyed.

Americans and Venezuelans lead the world in national pride by Smith and Kim. In the report, Smith and Kim write: Sweden’s low placement reflects the fact that Swedes tend to associate national pride with nationalistic extremism and racism.

Except when it comes to sports, that is…

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300,000 new Swedish bloggers in one day

Sweden’s leading online community Lunarstorm today launches a redesign of its member diaries. Lunarstorm is the largest web site in the Nordic countries with more than one billion page views per month. It has 1.2 million active members, including 90 percent of Sweden’s high school students. Members are able to publish texts on personal online diaries and today the diaries are enhanced with new blog-like features. They are also renamed blogs, which means that the Swedish blogosphere (previously predicted to have about 25,000+ bloggers) got 300,000 new bloggers.

McDonald’s is sponsoring the new blog feature according to Resumé.

Update: Urban is not convinced. The blogs are locked inside the Lunarstorm community and are not equipped with RSS feeds.

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