At some point there’ll be a more detailed report on my findings in Scandinavia, but for now, here’s a smattering of some of the people I’ve been talking to and the information I’ve gathered on the ground in Stockholm, Helsinki and Tallin (Estonia). My ‘Scandinavian Odyssey’ began with a dry sandwich aboard a British Airways flight From London into Stockholm’s super-futuristic Arlanda airport. Sitting next to me were a Swedish
I’m in Stockholm this week (till Friday) researching tech, media and mobile companies here for the The Guardian and New Media Age magazine, among others. Email me if you fall into that category and want to meet up. Likewise if you are in Helsinki – where I’ll be from Friday to Tuesday, or Tallinn (Estonia) on Wednesday… I’ve already had a great meeting tonight with Henrik Torstensson of Torstensson.com.
A lot of the discussion about the so-called new wave of “Web 2.0” has centred around technology. But what effect is this new era going to have on marketing? “Web 2.0” as a phrase first appeared in the title of an O’Reilly conference in 2004. It was obviously boosterish, and took advanatge of the new wave of web companies doing strange new things with RSS and the like. Web 2.0
It’s not said often enough – especially by me – that John Handelaar is one OK bloke. Way back, I met John during the unbelievably bad Internet slump of 2002 when to say you’d been involved in the boom was a little like admitting you’d been rigging UN aid funds to Las Vegas during Live 8. John helped me put mbites.com together, hung around and helped when times were tough
Tim Berners Lee has started a blog and his first post had 455 comments! (And it appears to be in Drupal which also powers mbites.com)
“I’m a dinosaur, part of a shrinking generation of daily print newspaper readers who likely will disappear in a few decades. And we’re being replaced by folks who “consume media” through the use of RSS feeders, Web portals and blogs.”
Evan Williams calls content generated by ordinary people ‘casual content’ but I don’t see anything casual about stuff like Moblog.co.uk’s pictures of the Buncefield oil clouds.
MSNBC’s plans to flood the Internet with ads for its new shows is, well, really stupid. Sure, they are advertising on blogs via BlogAds. That’s very, well, nice. However, they’d be far better off using a blog network to provide direct links rather than trackable ad links – those would give them better search engine rankings. If they have targetted the right blogs, it may work. But since they’ve included
As my article in The Guardian today shows, putting the full content of your site into the RSS feed is a tricky business. The main problem is from unsavoury characters taking feeds and using them on splogs. Personally I think even full feeds, with adverts, still won’t cut it against the sploggers – they’ll just rip out the ads – and the audience for RSS is still not really that
It’s always nice to write about a company that has the potential to genuinely do some good. The Starsight Project is just such a company. It has come up with an ingenious system for providing solar power, Internet access and street-lighting (and potentially a lot more) all from a network of lamp posts in developing cities. The first trial will be in Cameroon. My article for the Financial Times about