Gitta Wilén and Lotta Holmström. Photo: Pelle Sten

This will be the last post at Citizen Media Watch. As you might have noticed, we haven’t posted in ages. Our focus has been elsewhere, and continue to be so, so with some regret we are making it official that this blog is now simply an archive of our previous posts. We’ll keep it a “landmark only”.

We have met a lot of interesting people and had great conversations along the way. We hope our old posts will shed some light on an era that came and went quite quickly, but changed journalism in many ways.

Over the years we’ve addressed countless issues, for instance we wrote about Wikileaks before it got public. Here are some of our other favorites.

First and last blog post
• Citizen media: A definition. The very first blog post.

• Thinkpublic – designing with people. The last post, with many thanks to Brit Stakston for the video interview with Ella Britton at Think Public.

Gitta: I think that think public, both on land and online, will grow as a phenomenon and become a way to create a more open and smarter communication.

A global perspective
We had an ambition to cover not only citizen media in the western world, but to some extent have a global perspective. We’ve written about projects and events in China, Sri Lanka, Belarus, India, Korea, Thailand, Brazil, Iraq, Singapore, Tunisia and Lebanon.

Lotta: Citizen journalism’s strength is most shown in countries where freedom of speech is limited. The Tunisia prison map is one great example, there are many others. With internet access ordinary people can report first hand on troubling events.

The newsroom of Folha onLine, São Paulo, Brazil.
Photo: Gitta Wilén

• Brazil’s no. 1 online newspaper Fohla OnLine – and its bloggers. Gitta’s first guest post at CMW, before she became a regular blogger here. It got numerous hits from Brazilian readers: a visit at the editorial desk at Folha OnLine, in São Paulo, Brasil.

• A warm welcome to Gitta Wilén

Lotta: It was a natural development of this blog for me to invite Gitta to be a 50/50 collaborator after her having contributed three great guest posts. We make a good team!

Gitta: It has been totally awesome all the way working with Lotta and CMW. We are both storytellers, work-o-holics and Internet addicts.

Hyperlocal and geotagging
Over the years we spent writing at CMW, hyperlocal news went from the next hot thing to failing because hyperlocal markets weren’t ready, to now again being quite interesting since geotagging and geolocation through smartphones is really taking off.

• Here’s one of many posts on this topic: Geotagging makes YouTube videos local at iCommunity.TV.

Lotta: Just look at Gowalla, FourSquare and now also Facebook’s recent integration with Places. We tell stories based on where we are, to a select number of people or to the world. Collaborative maps pinpointing events certainly have their place on major news sites too.

Gitta: It has taken far more time to get there than I thought i would. I seriously thought that geotagging would be implemented and a part of our navigation tools, much earlier. But, let’s handle it wisely and with care.

Teaching and talking
We got opportunities to lecture from our experiences at CMW. For instance Gitta was invited by Jonas Söderström (Inuse), to teach web journalism at Fojo.

Gitta: I managed a one week web journalism seminar at Fojo, with a group of independent Belarus journalists and held some lectures for Belarus journalist students, from the Istitute of Journalism, Zjurfak, at the Belarus State University, BGU. Being the teacher I learned a lot about their situation. Freedom of expression is not to be taken for granted.

Thanks to Fredrik Wackå, Lotta got invited to the university in Karlstad to speak about the role of journalists in future media.

Lotta: I was asked who else they should invite, and thus got the opportunity to suggest Robin Hamman of (then) the BBC and to meet him and discuss the Manchester blogging project I had been following since 2006.

Guestblogging at Mindpark
• Will there be a dark period for journalism? Some thoughts after listening to the journalism debate at SIME 2008. Also published in Swedish at Mindpark. Joakim Jardenberg is a keen Creative Commons advocate, and he also blogged about our SIME interview with Joi Ito.

Gitta: I has been an honour to collaborate with Joakim Jardenberg as a member of the Mindpark blogging team. Both Lotta and I admire his will to unrelentingly guard the soul of the web.

We had a talk with Joi Ito about hyperlocal citizen media and Creative Commons, among other things.
Photo: Lotta Holmström

• Joi Ito: Don’t sign bad licenses. Our meeting with Joi Ito, and a discussion about hyperlocal citizen media.

Gitta: Our meeting with Joi Ito was one the memorable experiences from my time with CMW. Creative Commons is one of the most interesting movement on the Internet.

The future of journalism
The shift from megaphone to discussion partner was a major one, and is probably the one topic we’ve covered the most. Here are some of our posts on the matter.

• Personal transparency, the eleventh change for journalism and Personal journalism, the future of online reporting. Some thoughts on the role of future journalists.

• Sandra Jakob at HD.se – It’s not laziness, it is fear. One of many geek girls with great ideas in a series of video interviews.

• The Lebanese ambulance attack and trust in citizen – and established – media. On trustable sources, bias, traditional media and the blogosphere.

• Swedish news sites narrowing the gap to the blogosphere and The Twingly effect. When Swedish news sites first connected to the blogosphere.

Lotta: I was working at Aftonbladet in February 2006 when they started Läsarbladet, The Readers’ Daily, and I became Readers’ Editor. It was an attempt to engage the readers to contribute with journalistic material to the site, and to create an alternative starting point with the most read and liked stuff in focus, as opposed to the editors’ choices.

It soon became obvious that as an online tabloid it was easy to get readers to send us great photos of their cats and creative gingerbread houses, but enormously difficult to get initiated articles from readers on today’s topics. Later Newsmill proved it could be done, though in the form of opinion material, and also showed the need for asking the right questions.

Gitta and Lotta with Ruiwen Chua and Sriram Krishnan from NUS.
Photo: Brendalene Tan

Students of Singapore conferences and the social media bubble on Jaiku
• Hej! 2007 live updates. Live blogging from Hej! 2007 and meeting all the great people there, who soon conversed on microblogging service Jaiku.
• Why Jaiku outshines Twitter. Fond memories from the Jaiku era.

Gitta: I worked and lived in Singapore, year 2000–2001, starting up the Icon Medialab office. When the NUS guys invited us, parts of what later should be named as ”Bubblan” on Jaiku, to their KTH projects, I felt like home. I would like to send all my love to: Sriram, Ruiwen, Ramkumar and Mahesh.

Lotta: Hej!2007 and the following Stockholm NUS events showed us Swedes what unconferencing was all about, and led the way to great (un)conferences like SSWC and Annika Lidne’s Disruptive Media conference series with integrated Twitter feeds on display. I really enjoyed going to Singapore with Gitta and meeting up with the NUS guys again in 2008.

The blogosphere

Blogging is of course a great tool for citizen media, and it’s gone from a marginal activity to becoming mainstream.
• How many Swedish blogs are there? An attempt to sum up the Swedish blogosphere in 2007 which got some attention.

CMW <3 geek girls
We were invited on a bloggers pass at Sime 2008, thank you Andie och Mahesh. Since we are two proud GeekGirls we took the opportunity to talk to YouTube phenomenon Mia Rose about her music and techie geekiness. The interview put on Youtube has reached over 17 000 fans, so far.

• Mia Rose: Portray yourself with your true colours. An interview that attracted a large and quite different readership than we were used to.

Things we wish we had devoted more time to
Where’s the money? A lot of citizen journalism projects met an early end due to lack of resources. Backfence is one of many examples.

• Backfence’s Mark Potts: We’re re-evaluating our strategy. Email interview with the Backfence co-founder after I posted Trouble at Backfence?

Being successful using the web to collaborate and ask for material for making hardcover books sounds kind of awkward in the era of the ebook, but it works really well for Fredrik and Teo Hären. There are lots of more examples and yes we should have written all about them.

• Teo Härén about their series of Idea books: Invite, collaborate and share – the money

Gitta: I would liked to been able to write more about business opportunities made wisely, on the web and via communication social media.

Lotta: Starting out we were examining a fairly new territory. My focus was on understanding it and its future implications. I think now that perhaps we should have moved on sooner to looking at the revenue aspect, even though we did address it some. I guess the main reason I didn’t focus much on it is that it’s not what makes me tick. I’m a sucker for creative ideas not too limited by the harsh reality of economics.

From now om Citizen Media Watch is a landmark only, but this is not a goodbye, this is a HELLO!

Lotta: lottaholmstrom.se (sw/en), skriva.net (sw) & Saychee.se (en, photo blog)

Gitta: Digitalstorytelling.se (in Swedish only).

Lotta Holmström & Gitta Wilén

“Guardian Local is a small-scale experimental approach to local newsgathering. We are focusing on three politically engaged cities and we expect to launch in early 2010,” said Emily Bell, the director of digital development at Guardian News & Media. Sarah Hartley, the Guardian local launch editor said: “While researching developments at the grassroots of community journalism, I’ve been impressed by the range and depth of coverage from local websites and blogs. This experimental project reflects both the shifting nature of journalism and the reality on the ground.”

The focus is on local political decision making, and Bunz draws a parallell to the public subsidy NPR has received in the States, pondering if this might be a model for the UK too. Another option is funding from organizations like the Knight Foundation.

In Sweden we’ve seen several local newspapers/sites collaborating with bloggers for local and hyperlocal news (one recent example is Smålandsposten’s Mitt Lammhult), but the national papers seem less prone to. The largest daily Aftonbladet still has its locally contracted bloggers on the larger cities’ pages on Bloggportalen – for instance Norrköpingsbloggen on the Norrköping page – but with the loss of the local sections on Aftonbladet.se I doubt they get much public or journalistic attention. A lot of them are no longer active.
At the same time there are cities and even whole regions who lack journalists covering them, reports Swedish journalists’ union’s paper Journalisten (unfortunately I can’t find the article available online).
It’s not a problem in itself if national media skip local coverage as long as there are local initiatives – by journalistic sites of bloggers with an interest in these issues. Where they’re lacking, though, there’s a danger that corruption spreads.

(via Jeff Jarvis)

Disclaimer: I am a former employee of Aftonbladet.se.

Leah Culver writes:

We have some very big news today at Pownce. We will be closing the service and Mike and I, along with the Pownce technology, have joined Six Apart, the company behind such great blogging software as Movable Type, TypePad and Vox. We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009. We love the Pownce community and we will miss you all.

We’re very happy that Six Apart wants to invest in growing the vision that we the founders of Pownce believe so strongly in and we’re very excited to take our vision to all of Six Apart’s products. Mike and I have joined Six Apart as part of their engineering team and we’re looking forward to being a part of the talented group that has created amazing tools for blogging and publishing.

So it looks like some microblogging functionality will be integrated into these blogging services. I for one think it’s only natural that we see some microblogging services closing down. There will probably be a concentration to Twitter, Jaiku and a couple others that turn out to be the better ones, or simply where people you know are. Though it’s a piece of cake to automatically update several microblogging sites, there’s little point as long as there are no smart ways to keep track of replies and be a part of the conversation without having to check all the sites manually. If you know of a good service that does that, please let me know.

Other news from Six Apart: they are giving away free pro accounts to laid-off journalists (via CyberJournalist) in the TypePad For Journalists Program.

We want to help independent journalists become more entrepreneurial, and to give you the tools you need to succeed with your own blog.

Cool initiative. For those who are not accepted, there’s always WordPress, of course.

There are good examples of microblogging serving a journalistic purpose, though these initiative do not necessarily come from professional journalists.

• The Twitter Vote Report is one, where Americans across the country made short reports on how the voting in the US election was really going, using hashtags to pinpoint where they were and what their report was about, for instance #machine for problems with the voting machines. They also reported on waiting times. It all ended up on a big map where you could follow the progress in real time.
• Get eye-witness reports and comments. For instance check out this Twitter channel on the bombings in Mumbai. More on the Mumbai coverage here.
• Live reporting from an event. By using an established microblogging site you get comments from site members and you invite them in a natural way.
• Live commentary to tv shows. One example is Drive on Fox.
• Coming up with questions for interviews. By asking people what they want to know from a person you’re to interview you get more interesting questions, and you know you’re asking stuff your audience want to know.
• Local news gathering. Here’s an interesting example from Harrisonburg, VA. Or even as a source for bigger breaking news.
• Cynthia McCune talks about microblogging as a “21st century police scanner”, listing these uses for reporters: keep up with sources, get quick feedback, get referrals, post live updates to sport scores.
• Breaking news. Anders Brenna at digi.no writes: “Twitter is both the perfect journalist tool for being first with breaking news, and the best relief from the tyranny of breaking news.” Super-fast publishing of the latest news without risking that the reader won’t come to your site for the full story. You can even send a message and point to it once it’s out.
• Paul Bradshaw has some advice for anyone wanting to use microblogging to cover a topic. Check out the comments too for a few ideas on good use.
• Another post on how news makers have to change and use micro-blogging tools.

Do you have more good examples? We’ll collect them and update this list (giving you credit, of course).

Also, here’s some advice on what not to do.

At SIME, Joi Ito expressed concerns that professional journalism journalism may perish.
- It would be very difficult for a blogger to get a military unit to fly them into Sudan to cover that in first-hand. It would also be very difficult when you write a scathing article about corruption in Singapore to fight the libel suit you get from Lee Kuan Yew and try to stay out of jail. Legal protection against libel suits and also heavily funded first-person war journalism, that’s going to be a while before amateurs will be able to deal with that, he said, and continued:
- I think that everywhere where we’re losing the revenues of physical distribution or transaction costs, whether that’s the financial markets affording analysts or whether it’s academic journalism affording peer review, all these professionals that used to be hired to deal with quality are being put out of business because the distribution can’t afford to pay those guys anymore, they’re all suffering from the same thing. I think bloggers and all the amateurs will pick up a bunch of that, but there’s still going to be this gap. I think it’s going to be a while before we get organized enough. And I’m afraid that professional journalism may collapse before we pick up, and there may be a kind of a “dark period” when we can’t send people to Sudan or we don’t have the ability to fight against the biggotous people that we ought to be going after.

David Sifry thinks the future of journalism lies within the blogosphere.
- I think we actually have a responsibility, given the fact that we are all disintermediating these big media companies, to make sure that we can find a way to help make sure that journalism survives.

Joi Ito and David Sifry in a panel debate about blogging and journalism during SIME 2008.

Yesterday, Joakim Jardenberg of Mindpark wrote a long blog post describing the steps necessary for a paper distribution-dependent local newspaper to make enough money online to be able to survive without the paper edition, should that be necessary. It’s in Swedish, so I’ll take you through his main points.

His solution has three parts: having enough visitors, knowing/keeping track of visitors and using advanced mechanisms to match them with advertisers. Like Jardenberg says, this is no rocket science and behavioural targeting is nothing new. But it hasn’t been evolved enough, and that’s why Jardenberg’s take is interesting. He gives an example with real figures from local paper Helsingborgs Dagblad, and he’s pretty convincing. They need a 40 percent share of the money spent on local advertising in their area to make it.
Though the solution can be explained in a few simple steps, those are not easy steps to take, and Jardenberg is aware of it. He lists these obstacles (my translation):

• Technology isn’t quite mature enough. But with baby steps in the right directions we’ll make it in time.
• Local sites might lose their relevance. Without an audience the revenue model collapses.
• We might not have the stamina. This won’t pay off tomorrow. Count on 5-10 years to reach those 40% in a healthy way.
• Our sales force is immature, we still sell paper ads online. Our main advantage, our local sales people, are also those who need to change the most.

A slide in a presentation by Joakim Jardenberg about the decline in Helsingborg Dagblad’s reach.

Jardenberg goes into more detail, and has interesting ideas about data collection and transparency, so if you’re interested, here’s a rough translation of the text through Google Translate. On the whole, he is optimistic about the future of journalism.

The death of local relevance, as mentioned by Jardenberg above, is one of two threats addressed by Jonathan Kay in a blog post at Canada’s National Post’s Comment section’s blog, Full Comment. Kay talks about saving the print media, but this could well be applied to local journalism on the whole.
Kay writes:

The breakdown of Canadians’ sense of community has also contributed to newspapers’ challenges. Slogging through stories about the people who share your city, your province or your country makes sense only if you feel a sense of emotional investment in your neighbours. But in a globalized age, an increasing share of Canadians don’t feel that way. As office-bound yuppies, they commune with their distant college-era friends using Facebook or email, but don’t know the names of the people they pass on their street.

Kay’s other point is the death of spare time. If people don’t have time to read, journalism is in trouble. Print even more so. The three types of print media that will survive are, according to Kay:

(1) Business-oriented media that cater to older, more affluent readers of the type who can justify the expense of long-form news consumption (in both time and money) as a work activity.

(2) Premium publications that cater to the ideologically involved and intellectually upscale

(3) The hyperlocal.

As Kay is talking about the survival of print, I am a bit surprised about his third point. I think hyperlocal is one of the areas where the web can bring so much more than a print product, as it’s all about communication and round the clock updates.
But then, hyperlocal sites are struggling. When Gitta and I talked to Joi Ito a few days ago, he said hyperlocal is failing because local businesses aren’t mature enough online. I think that’s a valid point, and I believe that once they mature and more and more people expect to find hyperlocal news online, this is a very interesting area.

My own take is that journalism will survive and come out stronger and better through this media shift, though it will take a few years of struggle. And it may not look exactly like it does today at the end of it. Which is probably a good thing.

Update: There’s a Swedish version of this text availble at Mindpark where we were invited to guest blog.

This means that we’ll be covering SIME for two days – Wednesday and Thursday this week. We’ll be bambusing, taking photos, possibly live blogging, definitely microblogging, and also making a few video interviews that will appear on our blip.tv channel a bit later on.

Today Gitta and I met to plan our SIME coverage. Here’s what some of it looked like.

Lindberg writes (my translation):

The blogosphere won the FRA debate because it was right. It was an issue that was pretty much dead everywhere else. It touched a nerve, it made people react. And – although not each individual blogger could get all the technical facts of a very complex issue right – it was possible to discuss it on a fundamental level.

Lindberg expresses criticism against the mass-emailing staged by evening paper Expressen, which urged people to copy a text about the FRA law and send it to all the members of the Swedish Riksdag. She thinks this is a form of spam rather than a good way to communicate people’s opinions to decision makers. There blogs are a better option, and Lindberg stresses their role as opinion media.

She writes (again, my translation):

Blogs are first and foremost opinion based media. When competing with tv or papers that have greater resources for investigative journalism, fact checking and the like, they are underdogs, even if they can compensate for this somewhat through networking. But misconceptions and errors can still spread through blogging networks. In such cases you lose credibility.

And she concludes:

The lesson to learn is that the impact of a medium depends on trust. Trust is volatile. You have to nurture it, or you will lose your readers.

(Video clip from the demonstration outside the Riksdag, which to a great extent came to pass because of activism from bloggers)

Over the past week, Paul Bradshaw over at Online Journalism Blog has been publishing a series of posts based on a survey he’s conducted with 200 blogging journalists from 30 countries, mentioned ealier here at Citizen Media Watch.
The aim of the study was to find out how the journalists perceive that their work has changed after they became bloggers. The areas of interest are idea generation, information gathering and production, with the addition of the relationship with the (former) audience and post-publication.

Today the final post was published along with the conclusions from the survey. I do recommend reading all the posts about it. The results shows variations in responses depending on what field the journalists cover and in what medium.

For a summary, what the journalists perceived had changed were:
- their understanding of their audience’s wants and needs (through feedback and stats) and an improved relationship with the audience
- their work-process, which included the former audience in the research phase before a story was published, as a “two-way, ongoing process”, sometimes crowdsourcing
- they thought more about multimedia and interactivity, and published more multimedia material
- a wider range of news sources, and with that a deeper understanding of how trust is built online
- a greater need for speed, sometimes beneficial, sometimes resulting in publishing rumours
- they said they are digging deeper than before
- writing looser, more personal and less formal
- they broke news on the blog first, then followed up in their traditional medium
- possibilities of exploring “minor” stories that barely made it into their traditional medium
- more linking to external sources/stories
- stories last longer, as the conversation with the former audience lives on and generates new angles/leads
- an increased tendency to use microblogging and social bookmarking to draw attention to a story
- they appreciate other bloggers more than before

The part I found the most interesting was the bit about the conversation. I’ve long been talking about the changed role of the journalist, and being interested in what your commenters have to say, and responding to it, is key.

Bradshaw writes:

The ability to enter into correspondence with users, to fix errors and post updates were frequently identified as changing journalistic work, turning on its head Lowrey’s sugestion that bloggers “often emphasise immediacy and opinion at the expense of accuracy” (2006) and that journalism would protect itself by focusing on editing; responses suggest that, conversely, journalists are relying on commenters to contribute to the editing process.

Without an interest in the audience, blogging is not a conversation. Without conversation, you’re missing some of the great opportunities that blogging brings.

1. From a lecture to a conversation
2. The rise of the amateur
3. Everyone’s a paperboy/girl now
4. Measurability
5. Hyperlocal, international
6. Multimedia
7. Really Simple Syndication
8. Maps
9. Databases
10. Just a click away

I’d like to add an eleventh change/challenge for journalists. One that is closely connected to no. 1, but I think it deserves it’s own mention.

11. Personal transparency

As a consequence of blogs, wikis and citizen media sites becoming more important sources of information for the general public, I think we’ll see a new awareness of the importance of trust, and knowing who your source of information is. Bloggers are often open about what their views are and who they are affiliated with. If they’re not, you bet someone else will find out and make it public.

I am convinced this openness will be demanded of journalists as well. You might not need to reveal details about your private life, but you will need to give your readers/viewers/listeners an idea och what you represent. This is an important distinction, since for instance journalists working with sensitive information, infiltrating or walraffing will need to remain fairly anonymous when it comes to for instance how they look and sometimes even what their names are in order to do their job well. But they can still build up trust. Swedish blogger Beta Alfa is a good example that you do not need to reveal your real name in order to achieve this. Being open about your affiliations, for instance, and anything else that might influence or be suspected to influence your work, is a good start. Also simple things like providing a list of links to what you’ve written before on a subject.
I call this personal transparency.

In other parts of the world, however, those simple actions can get you into serious trouble. I recently read an article in AsiaMedia about the situation in Sri Lanka. The country is the world’s third most dangerous place for journalists to operate, with only Iraq and Somalia being more deadly. Seven journalists were killed there in 2007.

Pedestrians who use their cellphones to film bomb attacks or even everyday events get questioned by police, and it’s not only authorities that pose a threat to reporters or anyone with a camera. There’s a trend of citizens not turning to the tools of citizen media to improve their situation, but instead turning against anyone trying to do this, or anyone remotely suspected of it.

Anyone with a still or video camera in public is immediately suspected as a “trouble-maker.” This endangers our right to click and shoot for personal or professional purposes.

Despite this, however, there is a movement of citizen journalism, though it’s a lonely and vulnerable job, especially with a decrease in democracy in recent years. New media activist Sanjana Hattotuwa is interviewed, and says:

- In Sri Lanka, the significant deterioration of democracy in 2006-2007 has resulted in a country where anxiety and fear overwhelm a sense of civic duty to bear witness to so much of what is wrong. No amount of mobile phones and PCs is going to magically erase this deep rooted fear of harm for speaking one’s mind out.

The article writer, Nalaka Gunawardene, brings up an example which clearly shows the poor state of democracy and the hardship for bloggers in Sri Lanka.

A fellow blogger recently wrote a moving piece about a 65-year-old woman who sells fruits and vegetables at her local market in Colombo. The story behind the story was how the blogger had been surrounded and questioned by four men and the police, who demanded to know whether she had “permission from the municipality to photograph.”

Luckily, the vegetable sellers came to her rescue. “They… said they asked me to come with the camera to take some photographs of them,” she wrote.

But she posed the question: “Do we have to have a camera license like a gun license of yesteryear?”

(via Social Media)

I’ll start this year off with a 2 month vacation from this blog. I’ll be travelling during January and Febuary, and post updates in The Many Faces of L., but won’t do much here at Citizen Media Watch. See you in March, when I start my new job as managing editor at Broaden Community.

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.

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.

- Marketing used to be about mass communication. It won’t die out, but targeted marketing will compete with it.
It is harder today to reach out to an audience. You have to be better and more funny. Reach as the only measurement of success will not work.

Media becomes a number of conversations. Getting a full coverage of media will be close to impossible when everyone becomes a publisher. The concept of journalism will be more vague.

When form is separated from content, the channel is never as important as the person behind the message, Mattias says. Who you listen to is a person like yourself.

Personality type testing is important, because you need to know what drives people. What ticks them off. There are different type theories. Östmar shows Keirsey’s types.

Your choice of words communicate your personality. Analysing the words in blog posts will tell what personality the blog has. It becomes much harder when you bring in context as a parameter.

He asks for a bit of help with the business model.
- I’ll buy you a beer!
…though the main theory is that if you can predict people’s needs, you can reach them more effectively. That should indeed be interesting to marketers and communicators.

This is the original interview which I translated and edited into this article on aftonbladet.se.

What brings you to Sweden?
- You could probably figure it out with one guess… the weather in November. No, naturally it was a Swedish woman. We met in 1991 while we were both tågluffare (interrailers). I’ve been visiting Sweden off and on since then, but have only lived here the last six years. Now I feel more at home in Sweden in many ways than I do in the US.

Are you still working as a travel writer?
- Yes. That and giving lectures about travel (with National Geographic Adventure Magazine) is my main income. Lately, I’ve been writing a lot for The Guardian. Before that I was writing a column in Scanorama for three years and writing/editing the rest of the travel section. Plus, I write books and various freelance magazine and newspaper pieces, including some political satire for Esquire Magazine.

Why do you think nobody’s used the Onion’s formula in Sweden?
- Hard to say. So many things have worked well in both the US and Sweden – The Simpsons, Abba, Seinfeld, Ikea, On the internet side, Tjuvlyssnat was successfully taken from “Overheard in New York.” Producing original material is considerably more demanding, though, and writing humor is one of the most challenging formats. Spermaharen was close to The Onion’s formula. It had a little more absurd humor than The Onion and was less news oriented. Grönköpings Veckobladet feels – in my eyes, anyway – quite dry and seems to be aiming at an older audience.

Is writing satire for Swedes different from doing it for Americans, you think?
- The basic approach is similar, I think. But you have to have a sense of the nuances of a culture to pull it off. I’ve learned loads living here, but it’s a work in progress. However, having a full grip on the culture is a work in progress for Swedes as well. So the more people you have to discuss with, the better. Fortunately, I have some Swedish friends (and a wife) who seem to enjoy this. It’s nice to throw in some silliness now and then, but when satire works best, it highlights a nugget of truth and presents it in a new and entertaining light. I like this example in The Onion: “Bush Vows To Eliminate U.S. Dependence On Oil By 4920.”

What reactions have you got so far on Faktumé?
- So far the comments have been overwhelmingly good. The main complaint is that I’m not putting up five postings per day. At the moment, it’s just a labor of love. Still need to pay the bills. And spend time with my kids. So I can’t devote my entire day to this. I could put up a few entries a day, but I’m trying to concentrate on quality.

How come you don’t allow comments or trackbacks on the blog posts?
- I’ve seen on other sites that people sometimes use such comment areas as places to promote racism, sell penis enlargement services, offer to transfer millions of Euros from Nigerian banks and other things that probably shouldn’t be there. I just don’t have the time to go through and monitor all the comments. Also, for what it’s worth, The Onion has managed without comments as well.

Who else is writing the blog? I take it you write the English section and your Swedish friends write the Swedish versions?
- Something like that. There’s a bit of secrecy at this point (one friend, for example, works in Rosenbad and wishes to remain anonymous). Typically, it gets written in Swenglish by me, then translated by my wife or friends. We discuss the word choice and storyline and they point out any cultural reference opportunities I may have missed. Then I translate it back into English for the English version. No matter what language you write it in, it’s always good to show it around for some feedback, put it down for a little while and return to it with fresh eyes.

Perhaps irrelevant to Faktumé, but what are the most amusing signs you’ve found in Sweden? (Doug is the editor of
- Haven’t had any great ones from Sweden (mostly signs with the word “fart”). Swedes have mastered English a bit too well. Even better than Americans, who seem to mess up the signs quite often.

Anything else you’d like to add about the blog or your exeriences with this project?
- Humor is the last thing you grasp when learning a foreign language. One of the most frustrating things about being a foreigner is to be in a room full of laughing people and be the only one who doesn’t understand the jokes. I’ve lived outside the US since 1991in many countries and know this frustration all too well. Even though most speak perfect English here, there’s very little humor (if any) translated into English. So for the tens of thousands of English speakers in Sweden, this may offer a unique window.

What is PodCamp Europe? It’s an UnConference of podcasters, bloggers, and new media professionals & amateurs for two days to share, explore, challenge, and grow our abilities in new media. Learn about audio and video podcasting, blogging, photography, Second Life, Twitter, and all kinds of other new and social media tools. Whether you’re a veteran or interested in getting started, PodCamp is for YOU.

My personal requests/wishes for speakers/topics:

• it would be nice to get a presentation from the guys from Twingly (who are coming to PodCamp anyway)
• something on vlogging and how it’s developed
• community management and trolls
• creativity at the core – why all this tech stuff is just different tools of expression. I’d like to hear this from someone who expresses herself/himself creatively, an inspiring pep-talk with an artist’s perspective on the web, with examples of creative projects to join or steal ideas from ; )
• gadgets – what are the best options for blogging and podcasting today
• someone from trig.com – how’s it going?

What would you like to hear?

If you don’t want to make a presentation, make sure to sign up as a participant for PodCamp Europe anyway. If Hey2007 was cool in the way interaction and blogging in different ways was encouraged, I am hoping an unconference will be even more so. And as far as I know this will be the first unconference to be held in Sweden.

Tjuvlyssnat.se is a Swedish version of the popular US blog ”Overheard in New York”. In a short period of time it has gained a great success, being the most read blog on Bloggportalen.se, and last summer the blog landed a book deal. The book is also very successful.

Last week Damon Rasti, one of the people behind the site, talked a bit about Tjuvlyssnat on Stockholm Media Week.
Tjuvlyssnat started out as a hobby project between Damon and his friend. They started publishing conversation they had overheard, and the site got a lot of attention. More and more people started contributing.
- It’s everyday conversation, but here they are collected in one place, said Rasti. It reminds you of gossip, but it is more innocent.
The people in the conversations are usually anonymous everyday people.
- It’s never been our intention to expose celebrities.

Tjuvlyssnat.se is ad financed, and it’s going very well.
- When you can influence and contribute content you are much more okay with ads. You understand they are necessary to keep the site going.

Rasti said he has many new projects coming up, one of them with a major media company. But as the papers were not yet signed, that was all he wanted to reveal. Also he’s working on a mashup and two new sites for young girls.

From the description of the spirit of Hej! 2007 it sounds great:

We don’t want it to be some stuffy old seminar where everyone sits for hours on end. We want people to talk, walk, mingle, laugh and cheer. Oh. And we really don’t like suits. Jeans are cool. So leave your suits at home and bring that laptop and a healthy dose of enthusiasm and cheer!

Here’s an article in Swedish on Hej! 2007 and the importance of credibility and trust as users come more into focus online. Eric Wahlforss and Alexander Ljung are “trust consultants”, and two of tomorrow’s speakers. They will talk about some of their experiences from a three month study trip in the US. Should be interesting.
Here’s the list of all speakers.

What is PodCamp Europe? It’s an UnConference of podcasters, bloggers, and new media professionals & amateurs for two days to share, explore, challenge, and grow our abilities in new media. Learn about audio and video podcasting, blogging, photography, Second Life, Twitter, and all kinds of other new and social media tools. Whether you’re a veteran or interested in getting started, PodCamp is for YOU.

(via Media Culpa)

Just my five cents on that. And to let you know that I’m back. Tomorrow I’ll start blogging on Bloggvärldsbloggen in Swedish. I’ll try to keep these two blogs separated, but an excuse for possible double-posting might be in place even before I start out. There is only so much time, and I want to keep them both active, along with my personal blog and Skriva.

there’s a bit of a kerfuffle going on right now in light of revelations that even as she has been producing stories for ABCNews.com, she has also been performing in infomercials for DuPont, one of the largest companies in the world.

Congdon herself mocks or atleast laughs at the whole thing in her blog.

ABC and HBO both approved the DuPont spots. And under the “blogger” title, which is what I am, hello? I am not subject to the “rules” traditional journalists have to follow.

Isn’t that what new media is all about? Breaking the rules? Setting our own? I see nothing wrong with doing commercials, which is what they, quite transparently, are.

I definitely think Terdiman has a point when he sends a bit of advice Congdon’s way:

That attitude is more one of someone intent on being a performer, not a journalist. And while bloggers generally don’t have to answer to anyone except themselves and, to some extent, their readers, Congdon is in a totally unique category: She is a blog-bred personality who has crossed over to the mainstream. If she was video blogging for ABC.com, that would be one thing. But her work appears on the news site, and that makes her part of the news team.

So, while she is a nice person, and seems to have good intentions, I think Congdon may well want to think about whether she wants a future in journalism. If not, then she’s fine. But if she does, she may be burning bridges which she can’t cross again.

More on Amanda Congdon’s career: From Rocketboom to the newsroom

Reporters without borders issued a statement voicing their concern about the law being a threat to free speech.

The sections of this law supposedly dealing with ‘happy slapping’ in fact have a much broader scope, and posting videos online showing violence against people could now be banned, even if it were the police who were carrying out the violence

Happy slapping is when a gang beats up someone, films the event and spreads the film – just for “fun”. This is what the law is meant to prevent, but as it is written, it will effect citizen journalists doing important work.
Reporters without borders goes on to talk about how important ordinary citizens are as “recorders” of the authorities’ activities around the world, naming Egypt as a recent example where bloggers have revealed scandals involving security services. Video recording played an essential part in revealing the widespread use of torture.

In the field of human rights, it is them and not professional journalists who have been responsible for the most reliable reports and information – the information that has most upset the government. Reporters Without Borders thinks it would be shocking if this kind of activity, which constitutes a safeguard against abuses of authority, were to be criminalized in a democratic country.

Odebi, a civil liberties group in France, has collected some of the response to the news.

In Sweden, anyone can actually be a journalist in the sense that there is no required education you have to have in order to call yourself a journalist. You need to work as a journalist to be a member of the journalists union and get a press card though.
I am not sure how this works in France, but I am assuming they have some kind of journalist card to define who’s a professional journalist. If not, it would be interesting to know how they distinguish between citizen and professional journalists. And what about journalists who blog on their free time? If I, for instance, would film a French police officer beating up an innocent person, and I would blog about it here, would that be against the French law? I don’t blog here as a journalist, but as a citizen.

(via Beta Alfa)

Folha Online is the most important online newspaper in Brazil and the editorial office is situated in São Paulo.
Folha went online seven years ago. Fifty people work in shifts; there is always someone there to update the news, in the open landscape office.
The website has about 700 000–1 million visitors per day. The number of Internet users in Brazil, and their online time, is increasing fast.

I check in as a visitor and the information board in the lobby tells me that it takes about four buildings to host the Folha Online, the Folha Newspaper and the Internet portal OUL, which Folha Online is a part of.

Ricardo Feltrin, 44 years old and the chief web editor, shows me the editorial office.
– People want to read about gossip and, in second place, about news, he says.
Ricardo has been working as a journalist for 16 years and he runs the web TV show “Ooops!”
It is all about national and international celebrities. The click rate is very good.
It is to be found on their Internet portal OUL. And Ricardo himself is a well-known character in São Paulo.

After being introduced to the staff and a quick walk through the website, it is time for lunch.
– What I would prefer to eat? You can find anything you want here in São Paulo, Ricardo says.
We grab a taxi and make the short trip from downtown SP to the part of the city that is called “Liberdade”. It is the Japanese district and a result of the labour immigration from the Asian country during the 19th century. It made São Paulo the “second city of Japan”.

We enjoy: dumplings, stuffed squid, extra ordinary sushi, and sashimi, while talking a bout life, travelling and Folha Online’s future.
Ricardo is worried. The owner of Folha (the Newspaper) and Folha Online is Octavio Friar de Oliviera. He is 94 years old and no one really knows what might happen when he is not around anymore.

We are having tempura (deep fried) ice cream for desert. This is one of the best Japanese restaurant is São Paulo. The artist behind the counter creates wonderful little masterpieces and you are allowed to bring you own fish and get it prepared.

In the taxi back to the Folha, I ask Ricardo Feltrin if they are using any user generated material, like blogs, on Folha Online?
He tells me that they only have their own bloggers, which are already connected to Folha Online.
Their first blog was the political blog and the author Josias de Souza did his first posting in October 2005. He was followed by Sonia Francine Gaspar Marmo. She writes about sport, a culture blog, a blog about gay people and a seven more blogs.

One of the Folha online bloggers is Marcelo Katsuki. He is 38 years old and works as a graphic designer at the online paper.
The name of his blog is “Comes & bebes” (food & drink). He tries to do at least one posting per day.
– I wanted to learn how to cook and did cookery course, he says and smiles.
Marcelo did hesitate when he was asked if he wanted to start a blog and write about food, drinks and cooking.
– There are people writing about gastronomy for the Folha newspaper and they are very good, but I decided to have a try, Marcelo says.
He did his first posting in August 2006.

His blog is divided in to a couple of different sections, which makes it possible to squeeze in about everything that falls with in the area of food.
He still has to buy the cookery books that he writes about.
– My friends tell me that I should not do that, but it is my hobby, Marcelo says.
His favourite cuisines are Thai, Brazilian-Bahian and Japanese.
– Normally I get about 5–10 comments on every posting. At first they were complaining about my writing, but now I am mostly getting positive comments, he says and gives me a kiss on the cheek, the way you do in Brazil, when we say good buy.

I guess I have to send a Swedish cookbook to Marcelo, when I get back to Stockholm. Even though Ricardo Feltrin tells me that he has heard that Sweden has got not quite so good food, but very nice women ; )

Birgitta Wilén, São Paulo, Brazil.

Read more about blogging and newspapers in Brazil at the International Symposium of Online Journalism

With this as background, Pawal writes that SVT sending its email traffic through the UK becomes extra worrying since the focus of the surveillance will be on traffic outside Sweden’s borders.
Also other countries can spy on email traffic if its sent outside of Sweden.
Pawal continues (my translation):

When you explicitly send unencrypted emails via a foreign country you cannot have given personal integrity a thought. It’s easy to draw the conclusion that they ought to encrypt all emails that are the least bit sensitive. We’ve known this for a long time, but so far the there’s been a limited risk of being surveilled within Sweden.

The other day I got interviewed about investigative journalism in blogs, and could come up with few examples of this in Sweden. I’m glad to be given one so soon.
Following Pawal’s post, the Swedish Journalists’ union has urged the parliament to turn down the proposition, blogger Calle Lidström has revealed that a number of Swedish newspapers also send their emails abroad, and Pawal writes in a follow-up post that there’s a rumour about SVT employees not even being allowed to encrypt their email.
There’s a law in Sweden that prohibits the investigation into a journalist’s sources. One wonders how to avoid scanning media emails if this proposition is taken. Especially if those emails are a part of an international data communication.

I like visual aspects of surfing blogs, and I like to see faces. That’s why I introduced the “blog spin” on Läsarbladet, a small flash banner displaying random faces from Aftonbladet’s blog community and linking to their blogs.

I also use MyBlogLog where I get to see the faces of visitors to my blogs, and show mine whenever I visit other MyBlogLog users’ sites.

In this spririt, Tino Buntic started the 2kBloggers project.

55 million blogs…
I’d like to showcase all of them, but I’ve settled on just 2000 bloggers.
Bloggers come from all walks of life! Some are SEO experts. Some are writers. Some are sports enthusiasts. Some are affiliate marketers. Some are business professionals. Some are political. ALL HAVE OPINIONS!!!

On the 2000 bloggers site, he’s displaying and linking to 2000 bloggers who have signed up to be included. I’m in there with a link to this blog. Here’s the montage of all the bloggers’ photos.
I think it’s a nice way to get a bit more personal.

There’s also a Buddymapping map for the 2kBloggers. Oddly enough we’re only tree people on it.

Twingly is developed by Primelabs, a Swedish research-oriented IT company. Here’s how they describe Twingly (my translation):

Twingly is a blog search engine and ping service which is the missing link between the blogging world and media. Twingly collects blogs from all over the world – already more than ten million blogs.
At twingly.se you can search among the Swedish blogs in our index.

It’s interesting to see that more and more news sites become aware of the importance to get closer to their readers. Linking to blogs is a good way of doing this, and twingly seems like a pretty good tool. Some questions have been raised about the news sites filtering the results though. The blogs featured in the link boxes are supposed to be the “most interesting” among those that link to the specific article. The sorting is done by Twingly, by relevance and what they call “blog authority”, along with the number of links from other blogs. Swedish blog internetbrus writes (my translation):

Whether it really is the most interesting posts [that appear in the link boxes] is hard to tell when you haven’t seen the posts that have been filtered out. Sure you can do a link search to find more posts, but as we wrote yesterday there are flaws in search engines’ link searches.

Media Culpa also reacts against the selection:

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.

Money for tools (computer equipment, voice recorders, cameras etc), and for time – investigative journalism takes time. None seems to worry about lacking journalistic training.

Though the first thought that struck me was “do we want to turn blogging into journalism?”. Blogging isn’t journalism, though it can be. It’s merely a platform, how you use it is up to you as a blogger. And it should be.
I wouldn’t want all blogs to be “just” journalism. The opinionated, wild stuff is part of what makes a blog a blog. But I do know what Sabater is getting at.
These are the questions she’s been asked to answer, in preparation for a talk at Harvard.

If we believe in an informed and engaged citizenry, what does that require? What skills and information do citizens need? What is important political information that bloggers and other new media types can provide that isn’t currently being available or accessible? What is essential political information for a citizen in the new era? Is there such a thing?

The important thing here is numbers, I think. A blogger on his or her own is pretty powerless, but we come in numbers. And the collective skills are powerful, as is the contact base. Bloggers can be watchdogs. Through collaboration they can investigate – if each devotes a little time, and contributes his/her skills.

What is needed, then? The same possibilities for insight into companies, parties, government bodies etc as journalists have. Open up the press conferences to bloggers, publish how-to’s to the public on how to search for information in public documents and databases, create a blogger knowledge database where bloggers can find other bloggers who are experts in a specific area and are volunteering to help out.