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When I was in Palo Alto I was interviewed about internet strategy for the largest (subscribed) newspaper in Scandinavia, the Finnish Helsingin Sanomat. Katri Kallionpää that wrote the article was good enough to send me a copy and a PDF. You can find it here, Finnish followers! 🙂
I’m home! Asia was great, and I think I’m starting to understand it ever so slowly. Definitely going back to explore other areas as soon as possible.
But until then: back to work. I’ve got a good feeling about this autumn. I think a lot of good things are going to happen. For one thing, I’ll be working in Stockholm approximately two days a week. So all you guys up there that read this blog – get in touch and let’s have lunch! And that goes for everyone in the rest of the world as well of course 🙂
My plan was to continue writing this blog in the same style as before, but then I thought – why not ask the people that actually read it? What posts do you like the most and the least? Drop a line here below if you have any thoughts, and I’ll try to adjust my posting accordingly.
I thought I’d tell you a little more about a project that we just launched. It’s rather special and deserves a closer look. Also, I’m pretty sure that it is the first real mashup launched by a Swedish newspaper (or any major media company for that matter). You might have already read about it in our office blog.
The site is called Sommar på Näset (Summer at Näset) and is collaboration between our client Sydsvenskan and the school Sundsgymnasiet. It´s a hyperlocal initiative in the south-west part of Sweden and focuses on daily life in this buzzing tourist area (although it would be buzzing considerably more if it wasn’t raining so much).
Instead of trying to build everything ourselves, MSM-style, we’ve used the sites that we think are the best at what they do. These are the systems running together:
* Presence from Jaiku
* Photos from Flickr
* Maps from Google
* Blog from WordPress
* Content from Sydsvenskans CMS Escenic
* Calendar from Dygnet Runt
And it’s mainly updated with Nokia E65s! And that includes the water temperature in three places around Näset. SMHI could only deliver one figure for the whole region, so we built an updater through SMS instead.
On top of that it is also open for collaboration. Anyone in the area can take part by adding photos or Jaikus. And yes – it’s a beta. Our developer Hugo has been working miracles as it is just to get things up and running. There are a few rough edges here and there, but we’ll be working on them ahead.
I think the whole site is a good example of how we think media should be evolving. And it’s a good case of what of can be done with a limited budget and time frame, simply working and thinking slightly different. It’s a very brave move of Sydsvenskan to do a project like this, and I think many newspapers in Sweden will follow within the next few months.
On another note – I’ll be leaving for South East Asia tonight! That means I won’t be blogging here for a while. I will be checking email now and then so drop me a line if you want to get in touch, or follow my steps at Doppler and hook up!
tags technorati : hyperlocal sydsvenskan citizenjournalism jaiku googlemaps flickr mashup wordpress escenic nokiae65
tags bloggar.se: hyperlocal, medborgarjournalistik, mashup, sydsvenskan, wordpress, jaiku, google maps, flickr, nokia e65, escenic
I spoke to Fredrik Wass the other day about the importance of chunkability. It struck me that the mistakes being made by mainstream media (MSM) regarding news has a lot of similarities with what went wrong with the classified ads.
Classified ads used to be a major source of income for newspapers. It still is in some sense, but it’s considerably less today at least. Being the market leaders, their main focus was keeping the status quo. The same offer was presented in each paper, more or less. Things were good.
Then the internet came along and turned everything upside down. Craigslist in the Bay Area, and Blocket in Sweden. A better offer – cheaper, or free. Suddenly the market shrinks. The figure I read was that Craigslist made $6 million dollars, but $60 million dollars was removed from the market.
As I see it, the problem was that the MSM misjudged the market to come. They saw that the market for classifieds in the internet was considerably less profitable than the one in print. Following that argument, it would make sense to stick with what they had. Why cannibalize a profitable business?
The problem was that the comparison was wrong. MSM were hoping to keep their current business when that wasn’t an option. Wide usage of the internet and a superior offer had to lead to a shrinking of the market. Therefore the correct question that they should have asked themselves was “do we want any part of the classifieds market at all?”. If the answer was yes, the internet was they way to go. Keeping status quo simply wasn’t an option.
The same thing is happening right now, only this time it’s about news. MSM seems to think that supplying one paper, or any other channel providing the same variation of content, will still be the prolific way of consuming media. And as any reader of this blog will know – it’s not.
The days of having one newspaper are over. The days of getting one stream of information from one place are over. The future will be put together by hundreds or thousands of streams, filtered and aggregated by different people and companies before they finally are presented to the end consumer.
An example: Average Joe won’t just go to DN.se and read all the news there. They will read the editorial at DN, the sports at Aftonbladet, local news about Lund in Sydsvenskan, daily news at SvD and then perhaps 30 niche blogs. As a media company, you should be happy being just one of these streams. You can’t have it they way it was, the same way you can’t have the old market for classifieds back.
Remember – it’s either that, or not being read by anyone at all.
tags technorati : newspapers classifieds media microchunking media2.0
tags bloggar.se: dagstidningar, media, eftertext, microchunking, media 2.0
1 – Mobile is the first personal mass media (even the internet is only semi-personal).
2 – It is the first always carried media.
3 – It is the first always on mass media.
4 – Mobile is the first mass media with a built-in payment channel.
5 – It is the first media device available at the point of inspiration. And 6 – mobile is the first mass media with near-perfect audience information.
I think I’ve blogged about this before, and if not – I should have. This blog entry explains more, and you should be reading the whole blog regularly.
I met Kristina Dryza the first time in January last year, as a part of a Breaking Trends project that she was working with. Ever since, I’ve been waiting to see what she would be doing once she started running her own projects, Skinny Corp-style. The first one, KR LT Studio, is now out, and the concept is really interesting.
KR LT Studio starts out with the notion of personal space, which in itself is an interesting concept. Being able to create your own time and space within situations which might otherwise be deemed as the ordinary. For instance, being at home is more than just not being anywhere else – it is an opportunity to cherish these moments. Totally anti-stress and all about experiences. I think this is something that will catch on fast, in many different shapes and forms. I wrote about a similar idea over at David Report a while back.
For these occasions, the studio has produced special robes intended to be worn at home by women wanting to explore their own personal space. The collection called Inner Space consists of seven different robes, handmade in Lithuania by artists who have been in the trade for generations. Needless to say, this is about as far from Juicy Couture as you can get. There is a story and a feeling here. Go check it out yourself.
tags technorati : krltstudio futureluxury luxury robes kristinadryza fashion
tags bloggar.se: KR LT Studio, lyx, ny lyx, mode, dräkt, Kristina Dryza
Read this on the plane home yesterday and laughed so loudly that the flight attendant gave me a odd look. Still worth it though. I love the English language when it’s used like this.
More troubling than the ban, however, is its implication: French officials are sending important ideas to each other using BlackBerry e-mail. That is deeply disturbing. Most BlackBerry messages are composed during a brief spell of “BlackBerry prayer” in the middle of a meeting to discuss something else. Many others are thumbed out while jet-lagged in the car on the way to the airport, or inebriated in a taxi late at night.
Government officials and ministers have been making terrible decisions for centuries while sober, awake and concentrating. Making them while drunk, exhausted and distracted is unlikely to help – although anything is worth a try.
One thing to be said for BlackBerry messages is that they are short. That is an idea worth exploring. Government documents the world over should be typed using only the thumbs. If they cannot be sensible, at least they can be brief.
I was sent this interesting prediction by Davide Casaleggio. It takes up the future integration of virtual worlds, the web and reality. Nicely made, and even if it’s been posted here and there already it is well worth a watch:
When all else fails, there’s always money. That’s what Metro seem to have thought, missing the first blog race, and now offering 3 Swedish öre per page view (100 öre=1 SEK=0,14 USD) for bloggers that switch to their new platform. More at Martin Jönsson and Internetworld (both Swedish). An inevitable development really, just look at what Revver has been doing on the video side. YouTube are following suit. But it is it interesting from a blog perspective? Hardly. I’ll tell you why not.
Firstly, any new advertising model based on page views sucks. Especially for blogs as all the posts are in a row and there’s no real need to click around too much.
Secondly, this initiative is doing nothing but trying to maximise the amount of generic page views that they can sell to major advertisers. Pushing banner ads to a big bulk of blogs. This is not where they are strong. Blogs are sharp and specific, targeted to an audience interested in specific things. This enables the possibility of extremely targeted ads, and a higher CTR than you will get on any of the major sites. They should be leveraging this.
This pinpoints the third point. Media buyers need to recognise this fact and start creating media plans focused on reach, rather that views. We need BlogAds, Federated Media and all of those initiatives here in Sweden as well. A considerably wider media portfolio for each campaign.
Targeted ads are relevant for the readers, and therefore more accepted. This will be key when planning media ahead, in my opinion. Initially, this business will be hard to swing. The number of needed blogs in the same field will have to be higher than today in order to justify the work load that comes with it. Either that, or a PageRank-like algorithm that is purely contextual.
Fourth and last point. All people like money, but that’s generally not why they blog. I think paying very little money can sometimes be a lot worse than not paying at all. It puts a low figure, and therefore a low value, on the blog in question. I think the disappointment of hardly making any money is more destructive for visitor loyalty, than the incentive of trying to make money. More about this is my presentation about internet currency.
So what is interesting today? Local Explorer; the first major project from Rob Curley at The Washington Post (thanks Niklas!). I’ll be watching it closely.
tags technorati : revenuesharing metro blogs onlineadvertising robcurley washingtonpost localexplorer
tags bloggar.se: intäktsdelning, revenue sharing, bloggar, metro, nätannonsering, rob curley, washington post, local explorer
Just a friendly reminder that it’s time for Likemind Malmö tomorrow. We’ve missed a few ones because of public holidays and stuff like that, but now we’re back! And the network has grown to 25 cities worldwide.
Friday, 9 am at Solde Kaffebar, and the (excellent) coffee is sponsored by Anomaly. Swing by and say hello!
