Björn Jeffery

I’m gone two days and another community has been bought! Hopeless. If your Swedish is decent you can read the newspaper VK´s own story, they are the ones buying. In short they paid 10 million SEK for half of a local youth community called Apberget.se. There’s been a lot of this going on lately, as you will have noticed if you follow my blog.

Personally, I think it’s an act of desperation. Not necessarily a mistake, but probably a decision made out of fear rather than foresight. Why? Well, a few years ago an online classifieds site called Blocket.se started to gain traction. A Swedish Craigslist if you wish, even if the two sites are radically different. The impact they made was pretty much the same.

Blocket.se basically killed the market for classified ads in print. And Swedish newspapers didn’t see it coming. Not one bit. Since then, they’ve been trying to make up for it through all manner of projects and sites. Some have been moderately successful, but nothing has even come close to Blocket.se.

I think Swedish newspapers today are scared that they will make the same mistake again. So scared in fact, that they’re willing to pay serious money just to make sure that they don’t.

Youth communites differ from online classifieds in one crucial aspect – the classifieds took money from the newspapers. These communities don’t, and can’t. They are aimed for a demographic that the newspapers never really had anyway. So worrying about making a new Blocket-mistake isn’t really relevant. It is, on the other hand, uplifting to see that newspapers are doing a sincere effort to reach people under 40. It’s was a long time since they did well in that arena.

tags bloggar.se: blocket, communities, craigslist, apberget, västerbottens-kuriren, eftertextannonsering

So it finally happened – the video site Bubblare.se has sold part of their company to Eniro. Anyone following the current web affairs in Sweden saw this coming a mile off.

As Jonas from LK9 points out, this doesn’t make it the right decision. Bubblare.se have had a lot of media hype, living well off the recent sale of YouTube. For journalists out of the loop, the easiest way to find the next big thing is to find the same thing, locally. But Bubblare.se is not YouTube.

Eniro had no video presence up until now. The interesting question is not why they bought Bubblare.se, but why they weren’t in the market already. And even if they missed the first train (intentionally or not), it’s far from too late to enter it now.

Video is here to stay. You just have to present it in a different way, or add on features that will enhance the experience. Revenue sharing, like Revver or Metacafe for instance. It’s just a matter of time before it’s implemented on a few of the larger sites. Add on innovation and leverage the current Eniro traffic and you’ll have a nice little video site of your own.

Buying hyped up sites like this when you’re a major player like Eniro is playing it safe. Perhaps it’s a Swedish thing – I just wish more companies went for their own projects instead of anxiously looking at the others.

Update: The exact figure is 48,1% with an option to buy the rest within 24 months. And here’s tons of interesting ways to use videos other than just playing them.

tags bloggar.se: eniro, bubblare, uppköp, video

Quality is hygiene these days: even TV sets and irons from obscure brands found at Wal-Mart work flawlessly. Another incentive to try out the unknown. And yes, to be less brand-loyal. A telling finding: only 26 percent of digital camera buyers say they would purchase the same camera brand in the future — down from 35 percent in 2005, according to the J.D. Power and Associates 2006 Digital Camera Satisfaction Study.

I read the quote above in the latest briefing on Trysumers from Trendwatching.com. It made me think. If quality is standard in the material world, is this also the case on the internet?

Take the old MySpace case for example. Quality? Hardly; at least not when it comes to uptime, functionality or design. But there’s definitely quality in the aspect that it works as a social binder for a lot of informal relationships. So the feeling of satisfaction is there, and it’s what makes people come back. As a matter of fact, it was so high that people could live with “unexpected errors” for long periods of time.

The Nordic gay community Qruiser had (has?) a similar situation. Users had to wait for up to 25 minutes – just to be able to login. Still, it didn’t deter them from the site. The experienced quality, once logged in, was greater than the lack of quality regarding the technical structure.

With these two cases in mind, it seems quality on the internet is much more about the complete user experience, rather than a fully functional site that is always up and running. Compared to the aforementioned examples with an iron or a TV, this is not the case. How many would perceive quality in a TV that only worked some of the time?

Please add a comment or two if you have any ideas on the subject. I’m not quite sure what I think at the moment.

tags bloggar.se: quality, myspace, qruiser.com

Piers is hosting an event in New York, and knowing what PSFK normally does, it’s probably going to be really good. If you’re around you should go. Click the picture!

Reminder: Tomorrow is the second meetup for Likemind in Malmö. Turn up at Solde after 9am, drink coffee sponsored by Anomaly, and meet good likeminded people. See you there! (next time we´ll be hosting in Copenhagen as well, if that suits you better)

tags bloggar.se: likemind, malmö

The launch of Sydsvenskan in Second Life is getting a few reactions that I want to address. One of them written in English is by Kristine Lowe (via Media Culpa). I left a comment there but decided that there was more to say. About hype, this awful word that plagues the internet (and everything else).

Second Life has been getting a lot of flack for being the ultimate money (and time) waster in this time and age. The amount of attention this virtual world is getting compared to it’s actual impact is vastly exaggerated, some say.

Admittedly, a lot of both time and money has been wasted in SL. But that fact alone doesn’t say anything about its importance, or the possibilities that it contains. The decisive factor is why one enters these types of projects. If it’s because of the hype, well, then you´re just adding to it. But simply writing off anyone joining Second Life (or any web 2.0-esque movement for that matter) without knowing their intent, is not the right way to go.

Hype often blocks the view of the interesting things that really are going on. Take the Boo.com example – this excellent blog post goes through loads of features that were way ahead of its time. Is this what we remember of Boo.com? The hype shaded the really interesting things that were going on.

The short lesson from this is: hype shouldn’t be your incentive to join anything, and it shouldn’t make you back off either.

Second Life is an epiphany of the new social arenas that are evolving. Starting an office there in order to get a few press releases out is joining the hype. Participating and adding value to an emerging community is not. In my opinion, it’s best to wait a while before calling anyone out to either side.

Today we launched an island in Second Life for the Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan. Since the Swedish Embassy announced their plans the Swedish buzz has increased considerably. Consequently, the time was right to enter and start something up.

The island is called Sydsverige which translates to “Southern Sweden”, which is the area of Sweden that Sydsvenskan covers. The plan is to create a place where Swedish people can meet, and create their own projects if they want to. The planning will take place together with the visitors that are interested.

Hype? Yes and no. Being active within digital media today is a hit and miss procedure. Just like in the real world. Good publishers have a failure rate of about 50% on their new magazines. And that’s in a market that they know extremely well.

Today, understanding the change in social behaviour is the most valuable lesson media companies can learn from the new internet. And the best way of learning is participating, listening and discussing. That is why we, and Sydsvenskan, are in Second Life.

tags bloggar.se: sydsvenskan, second life, dagstidningar

Click this link to get teleported to Sydsverige straight away.

* “Within a week or so” was somewhat of an understatement as Twingly officially launched today. The ping-address to include is http://rpc.twingly.com/

* We have rearranged our Good Old blogs, and now have four to show the world. This one, Good Old Tech, Good Old Design and Good Old Office. The latter will cover what we, as a company, are up to. Whatever that may be. I want to start a Good Old Robotics project for instance, that will be featured there if we get round to it.

* The next Likemind session will be at Solde Kaffebar, on Friday the 16th of February. And yes Måns, you’re invited.

tags bloggar.se: primelabs, twingly, likemind, goodold

The Swedish newspaper DN launched a new addition to their site today; the blog perspective, if you like. Basically it is the same idea that the Washington Post have done with Technorati for ages, but it’s an excellent initiative still the same (look at this article to get the picture).

DNs partner is the Linköping/Stockholm-based company Primelabs, with their product Twingly. The idea is to listen to bloggers and give them an incentive to link to DN rather than other newspapers, as they then get rewarded with a link back to their blog. Also, readers of the paper can follow the discussion as it continues out in the blog world.

In order to do this, Twingly must find these blogs. Today they have 12 000 Swedish blogs tracked, and CEO Martin Källström told me that they will launch their own ping site (referred to here) within a week or so in order to get a direct feed to the participating sites. Interesting! And worth following closely. Also, DNs main competitor SvD started using trackbacks on some of their articles yesterday.

tags bloggar.se: primelabs, twingly, dagstidningar, tidningar, media, blogg, ping, dn, svd