Swedish Blogging Goes Mainstream

Following a link on Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter this morning took me somewhat by chance to Allt om barn (literally, Everything About Kids). It’s not the kind of site I ordinarily visit but I took a bit of time to look around because the green colour caught my attention.

Allt Om Barn is part of the same corporate media empire that is responsible for DN and Expressen, two of the biggest media players in Sweden.

What kept my interest longer than a nanosecond, besides the colour green, was that I found it intriguing to see a corporate site working so hard to involve blogging. A selection of PR staff, columnists, editors and writers, linked by their interest in children, are blogging actively about family life and all that entails. Including parting shots of Expression’s newsroom.

It seems that this year is the year that blogging is really beginning to go main stream in Sweden. It’s no longer now just the territory of the hip and innovative. It’s appearing on what I would really consider corporate media sites and becoming part of the general media fodder. To put it another way; it’s light, bright and shiny online textual content. It’s cropping up as a natural way to generate web-traffic and, more importantly, build and hold an audience.

If you don’t read Swedish it’s a shame because site editor Ninni Schulman’s blog is both entertaining and informative.

It will be curious to see if Allt Om Stockholm embraces blogging too.

Weblog Comments and Netiquette

I do a bit of blogging over at Caught Offside, a British football blog. It’s a pure indulgence because I love Liverpool FC and I’m addicted to sports journalism. A day doesn’t go by when I don’t read a variety of broadsheets and blogs on what’s happening in the Premier League.

Whilst I love blogging and football, however, the amount of abuse and downright nastiness that you come across in the comments sections of football re-lated content on the web means you have to be pretty thick-skinned to survive writing in these territories.

Over at Caught Offside my approach is to always ignore the abusive stuff but try and engage with people that make thoughtful comments. At times, though, the vociferous nature of the comments can take my breath away. Here on my own site, I moderate all comments simply to keep spam to a minimum.

The Guardian, arguably the most interactive newspaper football site, invites comments on its football blog and moderates them too so the worst trolls get cut but in spite of the dialoging nature of the comments feature, I can’t help wondering if it’s the abuse that gets hurled at the journalists that keeps them from joining in the discussion.

It’s a shame, really, that web-etiquette is such that some sites (whether blogs or forums) seem to shudder under a weight of abusive commentary. I used to think that spam was the worst aspect of the comment feature in most blogging tools; nowadays, after a spell on the frontline of football blogging, I’m beginning to think it’s simply downright nasty or offensive comments themselves.

A little voice at the back of my mind keeps reminding me about Mark Bernstein’s suggestion that comments are dangerous.

Photo: Anger by Madstreetz

Success !

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Finally managed to sort out the bother I was having with IE6. It was to do with the sidbar width and image sizes.
How to occupy your time chasing code!

More on The Telegraph & Tone

Following on from my piece yesterday on how The Telegraph website is shifting to a more conversational tone, Mayor of London Boris Johnson’s piece in The Telegraph today oozes matey rhetoric.

Writing about the dismal state of British football, Johnson says:

It wasn’t so long ago that I went to a sports day at an inner-London primary school and was genuinely asked to watch races in which no one was allowed to win. Well, no wonder, frankly, that most of our medal hopes in Beijing are pinned on sports that involve sitting down - riding, rowing, cycling, sailing - but not running around or jumping.

And before you tell me that we need more “investment” in coaching and elite academies, let me tell you that the first priority is to end the crazed obsession with paedophiles that means anyone who wants to help with grassroots sports coaching must go through an enormous Criminal Records Bureau procedure, and submit to 6in-thick files dictating exactly how the children can be exhorted to do better without hurting their feelings.

Johnson (or his editor at the Telegraph) clearly realises that readers are part of the conversation nowadays. By addressing the implied reader Johnson effectively elicits comments from his readers. No surprise then that within an hour of this going online there were a couple of hundred responses. Perfect Web 2.0 strategy, eh?

Is The Telegraph Changing Tone?

I read a lot of newspapers both in print and online. For a long time now British newspaper The Guardian has maintained a slightly scampish tone in its football coverage. Now The Torygraph Telegraph seems to be adopting a similar voice.

Compare the two papers’ coverage of Robbie Keane’s reported move to Liverpool.

In The Guardian Andy Hunter writes:

[Robbie] Keane has emerged as a leading target for Liverpool after discussions between Anfield officials and their Spurs counterparts about Crouch, the England international who is valued at between £10m and £12m and is also wanted by Portsmouth, Manchester City, Newcastle and possibly Arsenal.

In The Telegraph ‘staff and agencies’ write:

Liverpool’s interest in Keane became apparent during discussions between the clubs over Crouch who is valued at about £10 million though the lanky forward is also wanted by Manchester City and Portsmouth.

A couple of years ago The Telegraph would never have used a word like “lanky” in a sentence like this. It implies a more subjective, descriptive appreciation of Crouch. In the past the tone would have been much more factual: i.e. “...the 6 ft 7” England striker is also wanted...”

Clearly, football journalism is beginning echo the blogs.

Internet Explorer = My Personal Irritation

Bit of a Monday Morning rant to start the week off: I see that the right sidebar is getting pushed down in IE 6. How bloody typical! It’s such a lousy browser and causes me no end of trouble. I’ve got to the point where I am just thinking of saying, sod it, and not fixing it. I recently saw an example of how one website designer dealt with this by putting up a “Your Browser Is Out of Date” message right across the centre of the page. Nice.

I really don’t know why people persist with IE6. Everytime I venture from my Mac I end up cursing. Browsing the web on anything else just isn’t a good enough experience. 

Email Interviews versus Face-to-Face

I was interviewed by Annette Schwindt this week. Annette handles the PR for Norwegian author Pål H. Christiansen.

The interview is about my translation of Christiansen’s amusing novel The Scoundrel Days of Hobo Highbrow.

The interview was done entirely by email, as Anette is based in Germany and I’m here in Stockholm. I often do “email interviews” when working as a journalist; however, I have to say I prefer actually talking to someone face-to-face. You get a better sense of the person you’re working with.

Email is very useful for follow-up work, getting some decent quotes and checking material. I’ve found this particularly important when I’ve done pieces on Cell Biology ! But it’s incredibly sterile. There’s all that paralinguistic information missing that reveals so much about a subject.

Still, when it came to being interviewed as opposed to asking the questions, I felt quite comfortable being able to write my responses as opposed to just saying them and having someone scribble hasty notes.

I’m yet to do an interview with someone via Skype or iChat but I guess it will happen eventually. I’m not sure about using a web-cam for an interview, though. I always find it so weird having to look up into the camera on the top of my iMac.

The interview with me should be online sometime next week, according to Anette is available here.

Website Redesign

I’ve changed the design of the the site this week as I didn’t like the colour scheme of the last one. The layout was nice but it just wasn’t working colour-wise. Plus, I wanted something a bit more flexible.

As of right now the CSS is 100% Brian Gardner’s Revolution Pro Media theme, which I recently purchased. Brian’s templates are purely for WordPress, which I don’t really like so I converted the theme to to ExpressionEngine. I simply don’t like using WordPress. It’s not as flexible as EE and I just find it so much easier to build complex sites with it.

I’ve done quite a bit of testing but no doubt there are a few glitches in the system as I write. Over the next few days I’ll tidy up any remaining problems and customize the design a bit more to suit my tastes.

I’ve been meaning to update the design of my site for quite a while but I’ve been busy finishing a few projects the last month or so.

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