jill/txt

Last week a ring on the doorbell brought a parcel full of - six copies of Blogging! My book is out! And leafing through it I found that I still really like it - don’t you love that feeling when you reread something you wrote and you’re actually happy with it?

To celebrate, I’m giving one of my author copies to one of you readers - leave a comment on this post, and I’ll use a random number generator to select one of the commenters to send a book to. Make sure you leave an email address so I can contact you for your snail mail address!

Here’s the book description at Polity Press. You can order it now from amazon.co.uk or other European bookshops, but it’s still on its way to the US - apparently it takes 48 days for a shipment of books to get there. Eager Americans can order books from amazon.co.uk and have them sent by airmail.

Oh, and happily, you can leaf through its pages over at amazon.co.uk. Hooray!

• Swedish and Norwegian press have been fascinated by a Swedish teenager who reportedly “makes millions” off her blog.
• Kenza.se is the second most popular blog in Sweden. It’s written by another seventeen year old girl. This one’s a model, and told Dagens Media that she makes 30,000-40,000 SEK a month on income from her blog.
• Isabella Löwengrip says her advertisers buy “package deals”, where she’s paid a fixed sum for writing about the product or company a certain number of times on her blog and making sure she mentions it if she’s interviewed on television or by a newspaper. (När ett företag hör av sig till mig så brukar vi skriva ett avtal, om att den här månaden ska jag skriva så här många gånger om det företaget, jag nämner deras företag om jag är med i tv, eller blir intervjuad av tidningar.) The newspaper article mentions a company that she says paid her such a lump sum.
• Anna Bodin from the media bureau PHD says they like to use blogs to influence a target group without them knowing they’re being influenced (-Vi vill påverka målgruppen utan att den ska känna att de blir påverkade. Då kan en blogg vara bra, säger Anna Bodin på PHD.).
• WOMMA - the Word of Mouth Marketing Association - explicitly requires complete honesty in word of mouth marketing campaigns: “We stand against shill and undercover marketing, whereby people are paid to make recommendations without disclosing their relationship with the marketer.”
• Even PayPerPost now requires full disclosure that the blogger is being paid to write.
• It’s illegal by Swedish law to pay for editorial content without such content being marked as an advertisment. I think the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) guidelines in the US also ban this, though I don’t know what the legal status of this is. I presume it’s also illegal in Norway?
• There are lots of examples of dishonest blog marketing practices gone wrong - I link to a few in the summary of a talk I gave a while back (in Norwegian), and I discuss the issue pretty thoroughly in the “Blogging Brands” chapter of my book on Blogging.
• Apart from this one article, I haven’t found anything in the many enthusiastic articles about Swedish teens making money off blogging that even questions the deception involved - or its legality.
• So are Swedes - and Swedish and Norwegian journalists - simply accepting of covert advertising in blogs? Or are they all fooled by the sweet and authentic girls?

A journalist from Bergens Tidende called me this morning to talk about blogs, and in particular, fashion blogs and the money they can make off advertising. It seems there’s a Swedish blogger who makes “millions” of kroner off her blog. At least, Dagens Næringsliv thinks she makes millions. She won’t actually say what she makes, but admits to spending “10,000 kroner a month shopping”.

Anyway, the blog, which is apparently one of the most popular in Sweden, is called Blondinbella (blonde bella) and is written by Isabella Löwengrip, a seventeen year old high school student who started blogging to recruit members to the political party Moderatarne - but she discovered readers were far more interested in reading about what she was wearing. According to Dagens Næringsliv, the larger part of her income is not from the advertisements from big brandnames, but from covert product placement - she’s paid to write positive reviews about products. And she doesn’t mention this to her readers - nor does she think it’s dishonest. That’s not likely to go down too well - remember the debates about PayPerPost that led to their requiring bloggers to disclose that they were being paid?

The “earning millions” on her blog may be more a journalist’s over-hasty hype than reality. An article in Expressen that appears to be the source states that the blogging business was “valued as worth millions” by an accountant, thus allowing them to create an aksjeselskap (a stock based company) without having the required 100,000 kroner in cash. (En revisor värderade bloggen till flera miljoner, och det räckte som säkerhet.) Johan Kinnander, a board member of Löwengrip’s blog company previously with Swedish Google, states in the interview that he doubts that the blog is really worth that much. Since then, a journalist estimated that she makes five million kroner a year on ads. She does have 200,000 readers a week, apparently - and that’s the same as some newspaper sites, which must terrify the newspapers. Regardless, the blog does appear to be one of the most popular in Sweden. According to Löwengrip herself, that’s because she “cares about her readers and doesn’t scare them away with a site that looks like a homepage from the 1990s”, and because she’s open and shares stories and photos from her life - unlike Swedish politicians.

I’ve been reading craft blogs recently, and got all inspired to give it a go myself. Did you know that people actually doodle with embroidery? Takes some of the fear out of it, calling it doodling. And look at Soulemama’s hoops - a far cry from the old lady embroidery I’d seen before. I liked the peacocks that Lotta Jansdotter showed a photo of on her blog (no permalinks, entry for May 7), so I traced it onto fabric and started stitching, helped along the away by Purl Bee’s tutorial that usefully reminded me how simple embroidery stitches really are. It didn’t take long to finish the birds in scraps of time - sitting next to Jessica’s bed to pat her tummy when she needed me, falling asleep, or sitting on the couch watching her play on the floor. It was Mum who realised that my red-feathered peacocks must be firebirds, not peacocks. So much more interesting, don’t you think? Then it sat for weeks, untouched, until the other night when I stayed up late to stitch it all together into a doona cover for Jessie’s baby doona. And I love it! Now what more might I embroider?

A Norwegian version of the Creative Commons licences is finally ready - taking into consideration particularly Norwegian issues such as the collective royalty schemes (Kopinor and Tono). (via Eirik Newth)

My perhaps a little too simply enthusiastic link to Clay Shirky’s recent talk garnered criticism from Mark Bernstein, who questioned the historical accuracy of Clay Shirky’s claims that the newly urban populations of the 19th century drank gin for a generation before managing to build libraries, schools and other civil structures, and from Melissa Gregg, who took umbrage with Clay Shirky’s dismissal of television as a energy-sucker as bad as gin. Today Axel Bruns provides a useful summary of much of the discussion around Clay Shirky’s post, complete with the context of cultural studies’ argument about television not being a passive medium, and he ends up with a conclusion that I agree with - and as the baby’s crying that’s all I have time to say. Sorry…

I should be an expert at pushing our World of Warcraft anthology online, after all, I’m a totally passionate blogger, right? Or at least, I am when I’m not more focused on looking after darling little Jessica (who’s now six weeks old and smiles!) Unfortunately it turns out that posting about the book feels kind of a bit dirty - I’m one of those pathetic academics who doesn’t want to get her hands dirty by actually “selling” something or presenting her research in a clear soundbite (”What was the most startling thing you found in your research on World of Warcraft?”). Of course, not wanting to sully one’s blog with anything commercial is a classic old-school blogger hangup that most of the pioneers and A-listers have got over by now (see my other book, Blogging, coming soon from Polity Press, pages ), so in between nappy changes I’ve been spending a few minutes here and there at least thinking of the many ways I could leverage web 2.0 to get the entire world reading our book. Because of course, everyone should be interested in it, don’t you think?

While I’m procrastinating about the whole thing, let me instead show you a YouTube video addressing similar issues.

Have you played pong as a choose-your-own adventure game yet? As the blurb says, “No batteries required, and safe from any aliens’ attacks via EMP, you get to “play” these classics through an amazingly primitive UI of page flipping, making you long for the convenience of the antiquated goto statement.” Matt Kirschenbaum also notes the pedagogical potential.