[Updated: 74% of Swedish dailies lack social bookmarks. Previous version of this blog post said 79%]
On Monday morning this week I attended a breakfast seminar at SNS where writer Bengt Wahlström presented his new book, a guide to the virtual society. During a panel discussion, Internetworld’s Fredik Wass mentioned that social objects will become more and more important and if you are going to build a site then the content needs to be in a format that can be shared and commented upon.
A very easy way to let readers share your content with others is to add social bookmarks, which is basically just a link that allows a reader to export and add the article to sites like Digg or Facebook.
I ran a check late last week (hopefully this is still accurate) of 66 webpages of Swedish dailies, taken from a list at TU, the Swedish Newspaper Publishers’ Association, with the addition of a few others.
We can see that out of the 66 sites, only 12 (18%) have added a feature where readers can add content to Facebook.
Only 9 sites (13%) show incoming links from blogs, 8 via Twingly, 1 via Bloggportalen. [UPDATED: new graph]
4 sites (6%) let readers add content to Swedish bookmarking site Pusha.
3 sites (5%) have a Digg social bookmarking link.
3 (5%) have a del.icio.us social bookmarking link.
1 site (2%) has a Stumbleupon social bookmarking link.
1 site (2%) has a Ma.gnolia social bookmarking link.
Out of the 66 sites, 49 (74%) did not have any of the above mentioned features. [UPDATED]
The only site in my little survey that had all the features above was Svenska Dagbladet’s site Svd.se and is therefore dubbed the most social bookmarking friendly site by a Swedish daily. Svd.se was also awarded Sweden’s best media site by Internetworld this week.
Footnote: Background data here. Please feel free to build on this data if you wish. In retrospect, I should probably have excluded www.ingress.se which is the joint site for Sala Allehanda, Fagersta-Posten, Bärgslagsbladet/Arboga Tidning and Avesta Tidning since the site does not have any other news than the front page as an image file.
Tags: social media, digg, social bookmarks, sociala medier, pusha, svd. Ping.