Björn Jeffery

A lot of Bonnier in this blog to start off with, but being the size they are it’s difficult to avoid (or I’m just sucking up to them as this Bonnier-owned magazine implied :).

Bonnier Newspapers have invested in HemOnline, a project that lets home-owners sell their house or apartment cheaper than using regular estate agents. The catch is that they have to take care of the viewings themselves.

Johan Larsson at Internetworld implies that this might not be the smartest idea as it the estate agents spend a lot of money on advertising in Bonniers newspapers. He also adds that it on the other hand might be better to be a part of the evolution instead of just fighting it. I agree with the second part.

Certain streams of revenue just won’t be there in the future – deal with it. Look at Craigslist – they made $6 million and $60 million disappeared from the market. It’s always better to try to get a share of what the future market is worth rather than to deny that it will change – and stick with what works at the moment. Of course you can do both at the same time, which is the obvious move to make for all media companies losing advertising by the day.

tags bloggar.se: hemonline, bonnier, media, dagstidningar, annonsering

I’m re-reading Netocracy by Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist, a Swedish book that was slightly before its time when it was first released in 2000 (English in 2002). I will probably be referring to this book quite a lot in the next few posts as I think it’s more relevant now than ever. It’s not news in any way, but I aim to use this blog as some sort of mental notebook in order to build up a thesis, rather than to just document the thesis that I already have. I’ll use the category “Quickfix” for these posts, in case you want to skip them.

The book describes the shift between feudalism to capitalism and now the ongoing shift to informationalism. Bard and Söderkvist describe how the value of property in feudal times changed over night as the capitalistic view on valuing property differed radically. Estates were previously valued by the distance from the royal residence (and weren’t for sale, obviously). In capitalism, the estate was suddenly valued on other standards – size, style etc – and now had a price tag. The feudal way of valuing estates was rendered useless and not accepted, and in time it disappeared completely. Enough background.

Let’s move over to the web instead. Music and film also have a price tag in our capitalistic society. But as it happens, some people don’t acknowledge the monetary value of these products anymore. They downloaded it for free instead. Because they are cheap and don’t want to pay? In a capitalistic point of view: yes. But seen in an informationalistic perspective they simply don’t accept the value that these products traditionally have been given. It does not mean they don’t value it at all, but the framework and meme in which they use is one not shared by the creators.

tags bloggar.se: informationalism, nedladdning, piratkopiering

I’m trying to catch up on some reading and found an interesting post by Ross Mayfield:

The problem is there are too many companies being created that have no aspirations to be companies. Most survey the feature portfolio of tier 1 and tier 2 acquirers and are precision guided towards flipping within 18 months. Many make no attempt at generating revenue and most that do generate revenue from the advertising of other startups, let alone demonstrating a business model.

A dirty little secret for those actually building these things into businesses is that generating community value takes time.

I’ve been thinking about this a while considering that it is part of my job to see through startups without a working business model (or actually, it is my colleague Fredriks job – soon to be read in our new blog Good Old Business). Obviously these sites have interesting aspects to study aside from the potential revenue streams, but this matter can not be put aside. At least not for me as that is the first question my clients will ask me.

Working in a European market where Bay Area-sized investments are considerably more rare, the business model is crucial to even see the light of day. I would have thought that this was the obvious line for any VC, but after reading this I can see a little clearer what’s going on. Meta-money and marketing through Techcrunch – no wonder this could happen.

He continues:

Today’s successful ventures are twice as old as the 18 month window. They were born when it was a shitty time to create a company, were largely either hacks cast out openly to serve an immediate itch and community (e.g. Blogger, Six Apart, Technorati, Newsgator, del.icio.us) or almost accidental creations that caused a business model iteration (Flickr).

Read the post – it’s well worth it, and a bit of an eye-opener for me actually.

After hearing JP Rangaswami talk at Reboot in June I knew straight away that I had to start reading his blog regularly. Although mentally exhausting at times (in a good way that is!) I keep coming back and I keep being fascinated by the clarity that he manages to pass on to the reader. And this even though the level of abstraction is high. I strongly recommend anyone interested in the way the internet is changing society to pay him a visit. In a post yesterday he wrote the following:

I don’t read blogs to find out things faster than anyone else; I don’t read blogs to find things to link to and comment on before anyone else; I don’t read blogs because I can’t find any books to read.

I read blogs because they’re participative, they are accessible, they help me learn. I write blogs because I want to participate. In a community.

Spot on.

Andra bloggar om: JP Rangaswami, social media, blogg

I’m trying to create a few new habits for myself regarding health and learning. One of them is taking a morning walk before work and listening to a few interesting podcasts while I do it. I started off with the two latest TEDTalks, Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia and Richard Baraniuk from Rice University.

Of the two, the latter was the most interesting. Baraniuk described his knowledge sharing project Connexions which is an interesting idea in itself. But the most interesting part of it was the fact that projects with free content – community produced and licensed under CC or similar – kills the middle man completely. In the new chain of production it goes from author to printer to distribution. No external handling, marketing or editing. Not necessarily at least.

There will be a new market evolving just supplying the means for people to do everything themselves. A network for distribution of small editions books for example. Like Logoworks if you will – enabling a low cost professional framework to use for small scale businesses or projects.

(if you know of good podcasts for my morning walks please leave a comment!)

Andra bloggar om: community, richard baraniuk, jimmy wales, wikipedia, connexions, podcast

After some turbulence within Bonnier concerning CEOs and chairmen of the board, the Swedish tabloid Expressen today announced Thorbjörn Larssons successor. Jonas Bonnier, most known from his years at Bonnier Magazines, will take over the chairmanship.

As news in itself it’s not up to much. But it is a clear signal that the inevitable power shift within Bonnier is about to happen. Bengt Braun out, Jonas Bonnier in. About time too.

One of the key points that made Jonas Bonnier successful at Bonnier Magazine Group (BMG) was the fact that he let magazines within BMG compete with each other. A classic face off – if an editor wanted to launch a cooking magazine and they already had one – so be it! May the best magazine win. Bold, and successful.

Applied to the world of daily newspapers this is unusual, at least in Sweden. Bonnier Newspapers said no to the idea of Metro because it would hurt DN and Expressen. So along came MTG and scooped it up instead. The rest is history.

If Jonas Bonnier is willing to make the same sort of strategic moves within the newspaper sector this could prove to be a very interesting time ahead. I think he will, and he would be the perfect person to take over in these times of free newspapers bubbling from all around.

Andra bloggar om: bonnier, media, tidningar, tidskrifter, jonas bonnier

Last Friday was the official re-launch of Citykollen.se, the social calendar that we built for Stockholm City. It’s still a bit shaky in places (a Beta!) but a thousand times better than last time. We got a lot of criticism last time concerning both the technical structure and launching such an un-finished site. Some of it was fair and square (and helped us a lot), some wasn’t really applicable in the real world of client work in that time frame that we had. But it got me thinking.

I thought I’d write a bit about how client work differs from making your own web app. I find it difficult to find the right level of transparency when working with information and plans that are crucial to the company’s business. When we launched the site the first time we knew that it was far from finished. The main reason for still doing it was that we had information that a competitor was about to launch something similar. And as they would have had more resources it was decided that we needed all the advantages we could get. Being the first mover, for example. As it happened the competitor never did launch a new site, but that’s beside the point.

Anyway, to try and make the most of the early start Stockholm City decided to only market the site towards to a chosen few, i.e the people actually arranging the events that we wanted to have in the system. Adrian, responsible for the newspapers current event calendar, spoke to them regularly in order to make sure that the new version was built the way that they wished. But in order to let them have something to comment on we had to release something.

Private beta you might say? Well, with the information that we had that wasn’t really an option. And even if it was, why always hide everything until it works? The amount of people in Sweden knowledgeable about these matters are quite few, and I reckoned that the site would reach them one way or another. I also knew that they would come with valuable comments, though harsh in places. But in the spirit of openness and transparency, shouldn’t it be encouraged to open projects up for _everyone to comment, not just the chosen few of a private beta?

The combination of opening sites up prematurely combined with having to hold information back that was crucial to our decisions made us look like, well, idiots. I still can’t tell you everything today. It’s a hard nut to crack and if you have any ideas on how to approach it I’d be more that happy to read them.

tags bloggar.se: transparens, strategi

A short note just to mention that my article about social media was published today. Swedish only I’m afraid.

technorati tags: media

Andra bloggar om: media

I’ll have to return to the subject of Citykollen.se tomorrow. Sweden’s largest daily newspaper, DN, got their new Editor in Chief today – Thorbjörn Larsson. For those of you not to familiar with Swedish media it is suffice to say that he is a giant in the business. He was onboard ship when Aftonbladet passed Expressen as the most popular tabloid and is a member of the board of many large media companies. Those of you fluent in Swedish will find a good career summary over at Martin Jönsson and the competing newspaper SvD.

His analysis on the other hand is somewhat lacking in my opinion. The arguments for his return to editorial duty seem to be focused on him being a strong leader with a lot of publishing experience. That is of course true, but the most interesting factor here must be that Bonnier Newspapers have four Editors in Chief that actually get along and could work together. Larsson was Stockholm City’s chairman of the board and has started the paper together with Mikael Nestius. Otto Sjöberg is Larssons old protégé, and finally Peter Melin at Sydsvenskan was appointed by him.

In order to match Schibsted (that is rumoured to be releasing a free newspaper in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö very soon) some sort of co-operation will be necessary. This is not the current tradition of Bonnier in any way – their titles have always been independent and self steering. But matching both Metro and Schibsted one by one will be expensive. And newspapers in general aren’t doing very well financially at the moment, as we all know.

I think Thorbjörn Larsson was the obvious choice for DN, and one of the few that could take the job on as well. But the most interesting news must be that the chances of Bonnier Newspapers joining forces are better than ever. It probably won’t happen straight away, but there is definite potential. This autumn is going to be very interesting to follow.

Disclaimer: I work as a consultant for two Bonnier Newspapers – Sydsvenskan and Stockholm City. My work has nothing to do with these issues and the information above is based on my own thoughts concerning Swedish media, not internal gossip.

Andra bloggar om: DN, thorbjörn larsson, media, tidningar, Bonnier

We rolled out our second Good Old blog the other day. It will be written by our programmer Hugo Wetterberg who seems to have fallen in love with the Dojo. Fine by me – Dojo and I don’t really understand each other as well as I might have hoped, but we get along well. Citykollen.se is the first project that we’ve used it for. It is a social calendar for Stockholm, made for the free newspaper Stockholm City. I’ll write more about how we planned the site and why it works the way it does in my next post. Right now I have to finish a debate article about social media for Sydsvenskan – in print tomorrow some time this weekend.

Anyway, the blog is called Good Old Tech and is ment for the tech-savvy folks interested in web development.