Citizen Media Watch

The usual crowd has shown up for Facebook Garage Stockholm, the third event organized by Nustart in Stockholm. The focus is on Facebook, but also social networking sites in general and their development. The first speaker is from MySpace, for instance.
- This is an audience-generated event, says moderator Beata Wickbom.
That’s what sets these Nustart events apart. Things like backchannels have become an integral part of the events.

All my pics from Facebook Garage Stockholm

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.

Update 2007-11-24: Four more speakers added!

Next Saturday afternoon the nice guys and gals at Nustart will host another conference at Nymble at KTH in Stockholm. The last one, Hej!2007, was a great success, and I am looking forward to Saturday when Hubbub07 takes place.
The focus this time is on fixed to mobile applications in web, voice and IPTV. The six ten speakers represent four interesting companies in this field:

• Sorosh Tavakoli, Founder of VideoPlaza, will talk about online video advertising
• Trond Bugge, serial entrepreneur and founder/CEO of Super Local Media, will evaluate the importance of mobile location-based access to information at a global level
• Henrik Thomé, entrepreneur and CEO of Sonetel, will talk about “Open source, globalization and Internet technology gives super-powers to the customer-focused IT-entrepreneur. Why have staff? Why have infrastructure?”
• David Haddad, co-founder of Spontu, will talk about convergence of positioning technologies – mobile internet, smartphones and social networking.
• Peter Arvai, VP of Product Development at Mobispine, will talk about mobile internet challenges for both operators and content providers
• Patrick Broman, software architect at Mobile Sorcery, will talk about catalyzing the mobile revolution
• Niklas Tyllström, CEO and Co-founder of Green hat People, will speak about the timing of convergence.
• Hjalmar Winbladh, CEO and Founder of Rebtel, who is challenging the telecom giants.
• Per Mosseby, CEO of Pixbox, will speak about “why the preferred mobile Internet device among the wealthy will continue to be the laptop computer, and why the smaller-than-subnotebook-revolution is happening - in developing countries”.
• Per Leine, CEO of Extransit

One of the things I really liked about Hej!2007 was that live blogging and use of backchannels were encouraged and made use of during the day. This is also the case at Hubbub07. Here you can follow the event:

Jaiku Onelinr Flickr

They are all visible on the live Hubbub site. There you can also find live blogs. I will be blogging live here at Citizen Media Watch, so check back during the event!

Encouraging live coverage and backchannel feedback might seem obvious, but far too often it’s an aspect that organizers put way too little effort in facilitating for the audience. Even at the recent SIME event, the backchannels were as far as I understand not official SIME backchannels and the feedback was not used on stage. Unfortunately I could not attend SIME this year, but Joakim Jardenberg’s thread on Jaiku addresses this and other issues.

A Swedish version of the Norwegian community site Nettby is to be launched shortly. Nettby is a success story with over 500 000 members. Now there’s a call for Swedish name suggestions at the site. Ironically, mostly Norwegians will name the Swedish site.

Here’s what the post on Nettby says (my translation):

If you have a suggestion for a Swedish name on a service like Nettby, send it to us! We will pick the top 10 suggestions and reward them with a 6 month Nettby Max subscription and Nettby t-shirts.
The person making the suggestion we decide to use will receive an Ipod Touch!

I’m trying to get a grasp of the Swedish blogosphere, to answer the simple question of how many Swedish blogs there are. Simple, that is, until you start digging into it. Then you realize immediately that you have to limit yourself to Swedish blogs on Swedish blog services, as there are no country-specific statistics on for example wordpress.com or blogspot.com (none that I’ve found, please alert me if you know of any), and there are countless other services out there.
And also that you will never get an exact number.

I found Anton Johansson’s excellent list of blog portals and services from January this year, and I’ve used it as a starting point, updating the numbers for the different services, withdrawing some that doesn’t exist anymore and adding some new ones.

This is a first draft, and I hope to get comments, contributions and corrections making it better. The numbers are rounded to the closest hundred blogs and are taken from official statistics at the different sites. Note that some of these numbers indicate the total number of blogs whereas others (blogg.se and webblogs.se) show the number of blogs active during the past 30 days.

Blogg.se: 111 200 blogs active in the past 30 days
Passagen: 25 900 blogs
Bloggorama: A total of 19 100 blogs on seven domains, of which Blogspace.se is the largest with 14 400 blogs
Aftonbladet Blogg: 15 400 blogs
Bloggagratis: 10 600 blogs
Blogdog: 8 600 blogs
Weblog.se: 8 400 blogs active in the past 30 days
Expressen: 7 200 blogs
Bloggis: 6 800 blogs
Tjejsajten: 4 900 blogs
Blogtown: 3 900 blogs (members - which seems to be the same thing at this site)
Veckorevyn: 900 blogs

The total number of blogs from these services amounts to 223 000 blogs. Now, that’s quite a lot of blogs. However, there are a lot of issues that makes this number less interesting.

• It is not a measurement of the number of active blogs
• There are Swedish blog services not included. I found no statistics on Blogga.nu, Blogs.se or Mobilblogg.nu. I disregarded Egenblog.se which only had 15 blogs.
• I have probably missed some services alltogether. Please let me know.
• There’s no way of knowing which percentage of the total number of Swedish blogs this number represents. One vague indication of the number of Swedish blogs on blogspot and wordpress is the number of blogs from these services that are registered on Bloggportalen. There are 4 627 blogspot blogs there, or 26 percent of the total number of blogs on Bloggportalen. There are 605 wordpress.com blogs.
  I can’t even make a qualified guess of the number of blogs on their own domain.

Joakim Jardenberg of Mindpark says that papers are dying. All trends show that.
The last paper will be publised in April 2040 according to Philip Meyer.
In Helsingborg newspaper reading has gone from 90 to 60 percent in only a few years.

We compensate by creating new channels, such as the website and free papers.
- We have expanded our reach at HD. The way we connect to people is not important. The important thing is that we keep on delivering eyeballs to our advertisers.

We still idealize paper publishing. Joakim turned to me to give the example of Aftonbladet’s blog service, where the key point is that you can be published in the paper (well, one of the benefits, I’d say having your blog post appear at aftonbladet.se’s main page is just as appealing). Another example is that Beata Wickbom is very happy about the Sime supplement in SvD (the above image).

The day we can utilize our journalists and have them collaborate with their audience we can use their competence much better, Jardenberg says.
- The old and new worlds are at war. Get over it!

Check out Jocke’s slides from Daytona Sessions here.

Daytona Sessions are about to begin at Debaser Medis in Stockholm. The usual crowd has showed up, plus some additional people and some I haven’t seen in a long time.
Henrik Torstensson is the first speaker of the day. The jaiku backchannel is active. Most my posts will be there.

Very interesting statistics today from Johan Myrberger at The Killer Attitude. He has taken Jeff Pulver’s statistics one step further, with detailed graphs. Sweden has close to one million Facebook users. One million. In a country of nine million people. That is pretty amazing.

Finally Aftonbladet has started to automatically link to blog posts linking to its articles. Certainly not first in Sweden, but in my opinion one step further than the others. Big disclaimer: I am very much involved in this, so expect some bias.

Swedish company Primelabs has provided MSM with blog link widgets through its Twingly service since February. Dailies DN and SvD were first out, followed by among others Idg, Dagen and Mindpark. While this is a great service, some of the sites only show the headlines, without even mentioning from which blog the headline comes.
We wanted to do more, to provide a tool to give an instant idea of what the blogosphere is saying on a topic, and also to guide the readers so that they know before they click on a blog link not only which blog it is, but also who is behind it.

In Aftonbladet’s blog listings, which come from the blog catalogue service Bloggportalen, you get the headline of the blog post (linked to the post), you get the name of the blog, and if you hover your cursor above it you get a photo and information about the blog/blogger. There’s also a three line excerpt from the post.

So far the initiative has received mainly positive feedback, though some concerns have been voiced that the blogosphere will become less interesting if it starts to follow the agenda set by MSM even more than today. I think this might be true to some extent, but I also think there are a lot of bloggers out there who blog not only for the traffic but because they have something important to say, and they will keep saying it.
I also hope that MSM will learn to showcase great examples of uniqe topics and angles from blogs. This is certainly my ambition in my work at Läsarbladet.

More about Aftonbladet’s blog links at my Swedish blog Bloggvärldsbloggen:
Smygpremiär för blogglänkar på Aftonbladets artiklar
Nästa steg: ytterligare tolv avdelningar har blogglänkar

Two Swedish Digg clones have merged. Digga shut down earlier after pressure from Digg.com. Now it re-emerges along with competitor Sovrat, as the two sites merge under the name Pusha.se.
Here’s what the Pusha blog says (my translation):

Digga and Sovrat have been cometitors from the start in the struggle to create a Swedish equivalent to popular American site Digg. At the end of September, Digga was contacted by Digg, who asked them to change names since Digga was too similar to “Digg”. We then thought it was time to stop competing and instead merge into a strong and unified site.

Pusha will use the same technology as Sovrat and the same database, so that old Sovrat members won’t notice much change. You will also recognize the design, even if we’ve made a few usability improvements.