Björn Jeffery

Last Friday was the official re-launch of Citykollen.se, the social calendar that we built for Stockholm City. It’s still a bit shaky in places (a Beta!) but a thousand times better than last time. We got a lot of criticism last time concerning both the technical structure and launching such an un-finished site. Some of it was fair and square (and helped us a lot), some wasn’t really applicable in the real world of client work in that time frame that we had. But it got me thinking.

I thought I’d write a bit about how client work differs from making your own web app. I find it difficult to find the right level of transparency when working with information and plans that are crucial to the company’s business. When we launched the site the first time we knew that it was far from finished. The main reason for still doing it was that we had information that a competitor was about to launch something similar. And as they would have had more resources it was decided that we needed all the advantages we could get. Being the first mover, for example. As it happened the competitor never did launch a new site, but that’s beside the point.

Anyway, to try and make the most of the early start Stockholm City decided to only market the site towards to a chosen few, i.e the people actually arranging the events that we wanted to have in the system. Adrian, responsible for the newspapers current event calendar, spoke to them regularly in order to make sure that the new version was built the way that they wished. But in order to let them have something to comment on we had to release something.

Private beta you might say? Well, with the information that we had that wasn’t really an option. And even if it was, why always hide everything until it works? The amount of people in Sweden knowledgeable about these matters are quite few, and I reckoned that the site would reach them one way or another. I also knew that they would come with valuable comments, though harsh in places. But in the spirit of openness and transparency, shouldn’t it be encouraged to open projects up for _everyone to comment, not just the chosen few of a private beta?

The combination of opening sites up prematurely combined with having to hold information back that was crucial to our decisions made us look like, well, idiots. I still can’t tell you everything today. It’s a hard nut to crack and if you have any ideas on how to approach it I’d be more that happy to read them.

tags bloggar.se: transparens, strategi

A short note just to mention that my article about social media was published today. Swedish only I’m afraid.

technorati tags: media

Andra bloggar om: media

I’ll have to return to the subject of Citykollen.se tomorrow. Sweden’s largest daily newspaper, DN, got their new Editor in Chief today – Thorbjörn Larsson. For those of you not to familiar with Swedish media it is suffice to say that he is a giant in the business. He was onboard ship when Aftonbladet passed Expressen as the most popular tabloid and is a member of the board of many large media companies. Those of you fluent in Swedish will find a good career summary over at Martin Jönsson and the competing newspaper SvD.

His analysis on the other hand is somewhat lacking in my opinion. The arguments for his return to editorial duty seem to be focused on him being a strong leader with a lot of publishing experience. That is of course true, but the most interesting factor here must be that Bonnier Newspapers have four Editors in Chief that actually get along and could work together. Larsson was Stockholm City’s chairman of the board and has started the paper together with Mikael Nestius. Otto Sjöberg is Larssons old protégé, and finally Peter Melin at Sydsvenskan was appointed by him.

In order to match Schibsted (that is rumoured to be releasing a free newspaper in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö very soon) some sort of co-operation will be necessary. This is not the current tradition of Bonnier in any way – their titles have always been independent and self steering. But matching both Metro and Schibsted one by one will be expensive. And newspapers in general aren’t doing very well financially at the moment, as we all know.

I think Thorbjörn Larsson was the obvious choice for DN, and one of the few that could take the job on as well. But the most interesting news must be that the chances of Bonnier Newspapers joining forces are better than ever. It probably won’t happen straight away, but there is definite potential. This autumn is going to be very interesting to follow.

Disclaimer: I work as a consultant for two Bonnier Newspapers – Sydsvenskan and Stockholm City. My work has nothing to do with these issues and the information above is based on my own thoughts concerning Swedish media, not internal gossip.

Andra bloggar om: DN, thorbjörn larsson, media, tidningar, Bonnier

We rolled out our second Good Old blog the other day. It will be written by our programmer Hugo Wetterberg who seems to have fallen in love with the Dojo. Fine by me – Dojo and I don’t really understand each other as well as I might have hoped, but we get along well. Citykollen.se is the first project that we’ve used it for. It is a social calendar for Stockholm, made for the free newspaper Stockholm City. I’ll write more about how we planned the site and why it works the way it does in my next post. Right now I have to finish a debate article about social media for Sydsvenskan – in print tomorrow some time this weekend.

Anyway, the blog is called Good Old Tech and is ment for the tech-savvy folks interested in web development.

I had (somehow) managed to disable the comments when I set the blog up. Very strange, I can’t imagine how that happened. There back to stay anyway – you didn’t think I was going to have one of those blogs did you? Please feel free to comment on the last post if you wish.

My good friend Henrik Torstensson wrote a few wise (Swedish) words in May last year that stuck with me. In short, his thesis was that it is cheaper to aggregate content than to produce it. Very simple one might think, but looking at Swedish publishers web strategies it’s obvious that everyone’s not onboard the train.

I’ll give you the latest example. VeckoRevyn is one of the largest magazines for women between 18 and 25 in Sweden. Their Editor in Chief, Ebba von Sydow, is known as the fashion princess of this northern country through numerous appearances in media and a successful career at the tabloid Expressen. One of the main features on VeckoRevyn´s site is von Sydow´s blog. So far so good. But then it goes wrong.

After re-launching the site the other day VeckoRevyn invited their readers to start their own blogs, hosted by VR. This had been a good idea, had it come a year ago. By now, the Swedish blogosphere is already (literally) swamped with girls posting their daily outfits and best shopping tips (visit top-blogger Eleonore for the best one). The chances of all these bloggers moving to VRs site are pretty slim.

In my opinion, VeckoRevyn should have built an aggregator for Swedish fashion blogs instead. That way the transition of information had been automatic and they would have added a new, sought after, service and made VeckoRevyn the hub of all fashion blogs in Sweden instead of yet another blog hosting clone. Easier as well, as they wouldn’t have to take care of 200 15 year olds that want to change their usernames every other week.

So actually, when trying to enter an satiated information market, it not only is it cheaper – it is essential – to consider aggregating options. Owning the information is no longer top priority. Make sure that your site has updated content, and care less about who actually owns the content or where it is coming from.

(this is my first post, so bear with me while we try to get the design and everything in check 🙂