A wake-up call for bloggers

Super-popular blogger Jason Kottke, is in trouble with Sony for posting first an audio file of a Jeopardy show with serial winner Ken Jennings, then a transcript from the same show that revealed the outcome of his record long winning streak.

Kottke says:

“I can’t say too much about it (soon perhaps), but it sure has had a chilling effect on my enthusiasm for continuing to maintain kottke.org.”

One wonders if Washington Post recieved the same treatment. But regardless if you think Sony is right or overreacting, it seems incredibly naive to think that your blog somehow makes you immune to rules and regulations that are present elsewhere in the world – moral, ethical or otherwise. Of course that is not the case. I have no opinion on if Sony or Kottke are the moral winners in this story, but the incident should serve as a wake-up call for bloggers who are aiming for scoops or are just posting controversial information in general.

Microsoft launches blog tool

I sent an email yesterday to tip Internetworld about the rumour that Microsoft would be launching a blog service this week. And today it turns out that Microsoft now have rolled out MSN Spaces during the night. MSN Spaces lets the user:

* Create blog posts

* Search other blogs for information

* Transfer photos from your mobile to your blog

* Create and manage your page from your mobile

I was right, Urban 😉

Bloglines goes multi-lingual

News aggregator Bloglines yesterday launched a new internationalized site in six new languages.

* English

* Spanish

* Japanese

* Chinese (Traditional)

* French

* German

* Portuguese

They also reached the milestone of 200 million articles indexed. The first 100 million took one year, and less than 4 months to reach the double amount.

Journalists interview journalists

The discussion on Swedish Television this morning about blogs is a perfect example of why we need blogs to increase the diversity of voices. In today’s society, media has almost a monopoly on filtering and interpreting information, deciding on what stories will be passed on to us citizens. Incidents that don’t fit in that framework will be left out. What media often does, take a look for example on the news on TV4 and SVT, is that they let journalists interview other journalists about a certain topic. Why bother bringing in an outside expert when you can grab one of your colleagues to do the job? So when SVT want to discuss blogs they let Fredrik Belfrage (journalist) interview PJ Anders Linder (journalist) and Nicklas Mattsson (former journalist) about blogs. There are hundred of bloggers out there, why choose Nicklas Mattsson who to my knowledge doesn’t even have a blog? It is because it is easy to make a (former) journalist into an expert. It is not that I have a problem with anything that PJ and Nicklas said this morning, rather it is just very typical of how media work. In the light of that discussion, it was a relief to view the exact opposite last night when Chadie and Malte were interviewed on K2 on SVT24. Oh wait, I remember that Malte said he was a freelance writer for Expressen. See what I mean?

UPDATE: Another thing, on K2 they claimed that the first mention of blogs in Swedish press was in Svenska Dagbladet on 29 July 2002, which is incorrect. The first mention was in this article in Ny Teknik on 2 May 2002.

Ziggy at Rival

In his grandiose farewell on his blog, Per Gudmundson wrote about David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust and the last ever concert on Hammersmith Odeon. In a freakish coincidence there is a documentary about that concert tonight at Cinemateket/Rival in Stockholm at 7 PM.