Citizen Media Watch

I once more welcome Gitta Wilén as a guest contributor here at Citizen Media Watch. This time she has interviewed a hyperlocal blogger, Alf Fransson.

Alf Fransson, 69, is blogging about a small area 1.3 Swedish miles from Askersund in Närke, Sweden. By putting up his own placards at the local petrol station/grocery store, he has managed to engage the people who are living in the area to read and to give response to his blog material.

The Åsbro blog has been up and running since the beginning of this November 2007. Fransson says that he got inspired to start blogging by his stepdaughter. The address for the blog is estabo.blogspot.com. Estabo is the name of the place in Åsbro where Fransson lives.
- I did not want to use the blog address “asbro”, because it is Swedish for something else but Åsbro, he laughs.

There are 1.600 people living in Åsbro and Fransson’s blog is about things which concern the inhabitants: “Do we need efficient street-lighting?”, “Why is there cable worth over a million lying down by the lake ‘Åsasjön’?” and “What is going on at the Åsbro kursgård?”

Fransson has been visiting and writing about the companies in the area. One of the companies is Alfapac, which is Åsbro’s largest industry and employs about 80 people.
- It gives me the chance to satisfy my own curiosity as well as getting material for my blog, he says.

There are some musicians and authors living in Åsbro and Fransson has plans for future blogging:
- I am thinking about interviewing people. I would like to write about personalities in the field of culture, he says.

Fransson also wants to blog about interesting places to visit in the area. Not so well known excursion spots.
- Most of the people do not see the beauty of their own neighbourhood, Fransson says and adds:
- There is an old sacrificial well situated in the forest that I would like to show to you and my readers.

Yesterday MySpace held a big party in Stockholm to celebrate their launch of the Swedish version of the site. Along with a bunch of Swedish bands, LA stand up commedian Pablo Francisco did a gig which was much appreciated by the crowd of Swedish MySpace users and their friends.
Not all users were thrilled about the site being in Swedish though. One person who had journalism as an interest got it translated into belly dancing. And parts of the site still seem like they’re translated by babelfish.
- We’re working on continual updates to make the site more useful, MySpace’s Jonas Lindberg Nyvang told my colleague Arna.
Also, like Hans Kullin noted, the timing of the release was rather bad, since the site was down for maintenance yesterday.
Nevertheless, a large number of fans had made their way to Mosebacke in Stockholm.
Some users we talked to preferred the site to be in English, saying they got on it to improve their English in the first place, and to meet people from all over the world. Others, however, thought it was about time to get a Swedish edition.
- My English is quite bad, so this is a good thing, said Natali, 19.

Pablo Francisco, the lead act at the party, is one of the many artists with a MySpace profile. We got an interview with him about using sites like MySpace for building a career.
- People put my act on the internet, which is a beautiful thing, because the internet is more exciting and more fun to be around than television now. Because you can actually communicate with the stars, get advice and be friends with them, he said.
Check out the video clip from the interview below.

A young Swedish guy is setting an example for how upcoming film directors could work online. André Hedetoft is going to make a low-budget superhero internet series, and he’s using blogs and social networking sites to get the funding and the buzz needed to get going.
A couple of months ago, André posted a challenge on YouTube. He said that he’s started a fan-club for himself. If a thousand people would join he would not only start the production of his internet series “The Extraordinaries”, but also get a tattoo with the words “Geek movie director”.
Yesterday André got his member no. 1000, and I got a chat with him about his future. This interview is also available in Swedish on Bloggvärldsbloggen.

Congratulations André!
- Thanks! Never in my life did I think 1000 people who support me and are genuinely interested to know more about my projects would sign up. But at the same time I knew I would never give up.
How are you going to celebrate?
- By tattooing Geek Movie Director on myself, for real! Also I’ll make a special video for members only.
Tell me more about the tattoo. Where will you put it?
- It will be my life-long promise to one day become the obvious geek movie director. I’ll place it somewhere visible, probably on my arm.
What’s your background? What got you into film-making?
- It started when I was born 7 weeks early, in an elevator. I spent a lot of time sick in bed while growing up. There I fell in love with story-telling through the superheroes in comic magazines. Then, when I saw Jurassic Park at age 11, scared and squeezed in between my parents, I knew I wanted to become a movie director. To take people places, to make them experience emotions and adventures they might not experience in their daily life.
What does the term Geek movie director mean to you?
- For me it’s about combining my love for nerd culture with film-making. Examples of “Geek Movies” would be Star Wars, The Matrix, Spiderman and 300.
In which ways do you consider yourself ground-breaking in your movie-making?
- I’m not really trying to break new ground, it’s more about finding new ways to realising my dreams through my creativity. The internet has opened up a way for me to distribute and finance my films. That’s why I’m going to make a superhero series that will be viewed for free, world-wide, through YouTube, Facebook and Dvoted.
What will Extraordinaires be about?
- “Extraordinaries!” is about normal people without super-powers, who become the super-heroes of our time through extraordinary actions. A superhero tale you can really relate to!
You’ve said that the series will be created together with people you meet on Facebook. How will that work? So if I chat with you on Facebook, you might put me in the series? :-)
- Definitely! The internet has opened the doors to a whole new way of making film. “Extraordinaries!” is a low-budget project, and it will be created together with people from around the world in front of and behind the camera. If you join my fan-club at andrehedetoft.com or befriend me on Facebook, anything could happen!
When will the first episode be online?
- Production starts today, and the first episode will be out in January. Though you can already follow the pre-productioon through weekly production diaries online.
Finally, what do you wish for the most at the moment?
- Sponsors for my production diaries, so that we can really make a series to blow people off their chairs!

Read more about André and his projects on his blog. Also check out the Extraordinaries teaser below.

Jonathan at lab:kloud9 was kind enough to include me in their series of Webb Dialogues. Here’s the interview, in which I talk a bit about my background, my outlook on citizen media, and some of the trends I perceive as strong today.

Shel Israel is writing a new book on social media and how it’s moving power from institutions to people: “Global Neighbourhoods”. And he wants your help making it good, publishing excerpts excerpts and chapters as he edits them and asking for input. Currently he’s working on the third version of the overview.

My thanks for your input on the previous version. You have in fact forced me to see this book more clearly than I previously did, and perhaps more clearly than Scoble and I did when we began the journey that became Naked Conversations.

Please do it again. This will be my final posting of this overview as I move on to the Table of Contents (TOC). Your changes will appear i it when I post the final TOC. Please coent on the tagline which has also been changed. So please give me your best shot.

(via Scobleizer)

Norway’s most famous vlogger Raymond Kristiansen has been vlogging for two years and looks back at his experiences. His first post covers about a month, his first month of vlogging and all the discoveries he made.

To me, videoblogging (or video on the net that is downloadable and preferrably with an rss feed) was the missing link. It was what would allow people from regions like sub-saharan Africa to communicate with the world (I have a good friend in Nigeria). Videoblogging, if done with a low-key approach to it, could really change how we communicate.

More is to follow, Raymond writes.

Amanda Congdon has landed a job at ABC News. The former vlogger star will keep up her usual Rocketboom style in the short news clips she’ll be doing for ABC, the NY Times reports.

On her first minishow, which became available yesterday on ABC’s Web site, Ms. Congdon shows up in a taut Steely Dan T-shirt and opens with her trademark girly casualness: “O.K., this is weird.”

Virginia Heffernan who wrote the Times article has an interesting analysis of the Congdon phenomenon, comparing her way of expressing surprise or disbelief straight into the camera with the melodrama of Walter Cronkite.

It’s an interesting career step, and yet one more proof of the shooting stardom that can stem from blogging.

(via Scripting News)