Internationally, it seems that the most popular blogs are about gadgets, technology, politics and weird web finds, at least if we can trust Technorati’s ranking list. In Norway, the most popular blogs are written by teenaged girls, like 14-year-old “Voe“, who’s the subject of a long and interesting article about the phenomenon in Aftenposten (if you can’t read Norwegian, you can get an idea of the content using Google Translate) Another extremely popular teenaged blogger is Lars Tangen, a sixteen year old who writes about makeup and the lifestyle of a gay, teenaged blogger.
I’m not sure why these blogs are so extremely popular in Norway. Voe apparently has 60,000 readers a day, which in a country of about 4.5 million people is astounding. There must be some kind of critical mass that builds and suddenly, hey presto, that’s what people in this culture think blogging is about. There has been a lot of media hype about the phenomenon too, and especially about how much money teens can (occasionally) make from product placement, ads and sponsorship agreements. I’m sure many teens are attracted by that possibility, no matter that most bloggers make nothing.
I love this quote from Lars Tangen in the Aftenposten article:
Det meste av det jeg skriver, er sant, men jeg forbedrer og raffinerer litt. En gang tok jeg p meg en bukse fra H&M og skrev at den var fra Gucci. Folk elsker  lese om noen som er bedre enn dem. Det er jo ikke jeg, men jeg later som. (“Most of what I write is true, but I improve and refine it a little. Once I put on a pair of trousers from H&M and wrote that they were from Gucci. People love to read about someone who’s better than them. I’m not, but I pretend to be.”)
In 2008, the Norwegian Bureau of Statistics found that 18% of 16-24 year olds had published their own blog in the last three months. That’s pretty amazing.
Johan
Sorry if this is slightly off topic, but I’ve followed your blog for a few years, and as I’m now about to move to Norway, I figure you’re the right person to ask how to navigate the Norwegian blogosphere. Are there any equivalents to, say, this side of Kˆlen’s Knuff.se or other aggregator services for Norwegian blogs?
Jill Walker Rettberg
Welcome to Norway! Try sonitus.org for hand-picked, high-quality Norwegian blog posts. Bloggurat.net supposedly lists the most popular blogs and so on, but I suspect a heavy bias towards blogs hosted by blogg.no. Tvitre.no is a catalog of Norwegians on Twitter, sorted by category and number of followers. Quite useful. There may be other good ones, I’m not sure?
Omer Rosenbaum
Sweden is similar to Norway in that modablogg phenomena. I guess they are so successful because they are the “onlinezation” of girl talks. I see nothing wrong with that but Sweden is a country where conformism adn the will to be like the other is very common, so you see hundreds of girls/women blogs that has the same graphic format and handle the same topic (mostly fashion and make up).
For me it is the opposite of the spirit of social media. It is just a chunk of look alike blogs.
Lesem??nster i endring? « Maktens pluttifikasjon
[…] “in Norway teenaged girls are the most-read bloggers“¬† Internationally, it seems that the most popular blogs are about gadgets, technology, politics and weird web finds, at least if we can trust Technorati‚Äôs ranking list. In Norway, the most popular blogs are written by teenaged girls, like 14-year-old ‚ÄúVoe‚Äú, who‚Äôs the subject of a long and interesting article about the phenomenon in Aftenposten (if you can‚Äôt read Norwegian, you can get an idea of the content using Google Translate) Another extremely popular teenaged blogger is Lars Tangen, a sixteen year old who writes about makeup and the lifestyle of a gay, teenaged blogger. les mer: Posted by maktenspluttifikasjon Filed in Uncategorized Leave a Comment » […]
jill/txt » ethics and guidelines for personal bloggers: advertising, privacy and honesty
[…] Quite often I receive emails from high school students writing papers about blogging who have long lists of questions they’d like me to answer. Unfortunately I don’t often have time to answer ten questions in detail, but I do try to send some general suggestions and references. This morning’s questions were about guidelines for blogging and how some of Norway’s most popular bloggers follow them. The student plans to look specifically at the blogs of Regine Stokke (she’s the 18-year-old who recently died of cancer and wrote about her illness, bringing me to tears) and Voe (the fourteen-year-old I wrote about last week). […]
Johan
Thanks! I have already found a handful of Norwegian blogs to follow through your suggestions.