blogs | Media Culpa

Almost 2 million Swedes read blogs

Following up on my previous post, I have now read through parts of the World Internet Institute’s new report about how Swedes use the internet.

Some of the more interesting findings are:

– 350,000 Swedes have a blog (estimate), or 6% of the online population.
– 1,900,000 Swedes read blogs (estimate), or 33% of the online population. That means that there are more than five times as many blog readers as there are bloggers. Possibly a good argument against the common view that “nobody reads blogs”.
– Young women between 16 and 25 years are frequent blog readers, see graph below. As many as 52% of all girls 16-18 years that are online, read blogs.

– There is a big difference in which types of communities that attract women and men. Women are more frequent users of social communities while men are more frequent users of hobby and professional communities, see graph below. In my BlogSweden 3 survey the responses indicated that women are more motivated by social interaction than men, which was also a result from a study by Kaye Trammell: “Female bloggers, however, were somewhat more motivated by social interaction (67.1%) than were their male counterparts (51.3%).”

Tags: sweden, wii, bloggar, tjejer. Ping. Följ min blogg med bloggkoll

Young girls more likely to blog than boys

During the Internetdagarna 08 conference in Stockholm today, the World Internet Institute released their new report on Swedes and their usage of internet. It seems that the survey confirms the findings from my BlogSweden 3 survey earlier this year, that young women are now dominating the Swedish blogosphere. Among 16-18 year-olds it is almost three times as common for girls to blog than it is for boys and in the 26-30 year age group it is even more than three times as common for women to blog.

I will update with more information once I get the entire report.

Tags: sweden, wii, bloggar, tjejer. Ping.

State of the blogosphere – with a Swedish twist

Technorati has just released its latest State of the Blogosphere 2008 report. Technorati now tracks 133 million blogs, but only 1.5 million of those blogs were updated during the last 7 days.

Here are some of the findings, with comments about the Swedish blogosphere as a comparison (from the BlogSweden 3 survey).

– 66% of the bloggers are male. 73% of European bloggers are male. (Swe: 76% are female)
– 50% are 18-34 years (Swe: 55% are 16-25 years)
– Female bloggers: only 9% are 18-24 years (Swe: a large portion, don’t have exact figures right now, are 16-20 years)
– Female bloggers: topics are more likely to be personal. 66% blog about personal musings (Swe: female blog readers like to read blogs about fasion and design (53%) and everyday life experiences (52%)).
– Women blog to stay connected and to make connections. (Swe: Female bloggers blog to a higher extent than male bloggers to get in touch with others and to stay in touch with friends and family)

Personal/lifestyle most popular blog topic.

Sweden: the most popular blog topics to read is “everyday life experiences”.

Self expression and sharing expertise are the top reasons for blogging.

Sweden: self expression (I like to write) most popular reason to blog.

Tags: technorati, blogosphere, statistics, bloggar, technorati. Ping.

Swedish footballer banned from blogging

Kalmar FF’s midfielder Viktor Elm has been chosen to play for the Swedish national team. Viktor and his two brothers Rasmus and David are part of the reason why Kalmar currently is the best football team in Sweden. But the trio are not only succesful on the pitch, they also have a very popular blog on the local newspaper Barometern’s site.

However, as the Swedish team meets to prepare for the first FIFA World Cup qualifier against Albania on Saturday, the Swedish team manager Lars Richt tells fotbollskanalen.se that Elm will not be able to blog while he is with the Swedish team.

– That is something that we don’t do when we meet and I will talk to him about it, says Lars Richt, and continues.

– I will talk to him and after that he will surely not blog.

The Elm brothers’ blog caused some commotion after the brothers blogged some negative comments about Henrik Larsson and how media portray him. Still, even if Viktor Elm is quite outspoken on his blog, it does seem that the Swedish national team should lighten up a bit about this command and control attitude towards media and everyone else, for that matter. Football is the sport that interests most Swedes and it wouldn’t be hard to use this commitment to get fans talking and discussing even more about football. A search for football on Twingly.com shows more than 4,000 Swedish blog posts during the last month. I think the Swedish Football Association is crazy not to participate in this discussion. Encourage your fans, let all players have a blog, invite bloggers to press conferences, build a social media press room on your site. There are many things you could do, and if you don’t know how, I can show you.

Tags: fotball, sweden, sport, kalmar, fotboll. Ping.

Aftonbladet has Sweden’s top fashion blog – not!

In his bestselling book The Long Tail, Chris Anderson writes that the U.S. is a country obsessed with watching top lists, a culture which basically is one big popularity contest. In many aspects, Sweden is not much different. Bloggers like to compete and just this morning I had to check my ranking among Europe’s top marketing bloggers (#49 based on traffic) so I’m as guilty as the next guy. In other words, it is not surprising that when a blog or newspaper rank high on a list, they want to share that information with others. But the least you can ask for is that the ‘bragging’ is based on the truth.

I probably shouldn’t have given this article any attention, but it is hard to resist. The Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet today writes that one of their blogs is the most visited Swedish fashion blog.

“Sofi writes the largest Swedish fashion blog.”

That can only be true if you don’t consider Blondinbella, Kenza and Stina-Lee’s blogs to be fashion blogs. All three, by most people and themselves labelled fashion blogs, have more visitors than Aftonbladet’s Sofi Fahrman.

Much can be said about the editiorial quality of blogs, but today a couple of teenage girls are more accurate than one of the largest Swedish mainstream media.

Footnote: Numbers in the graph are from Bloggportalen.se and states the number of visits per IP address and hour during the last 7 days.

Tags: fashion blog, fashion, blondinbella, kenza, bloggar, mode. Ping.

Marketers reach out to mommybloggers

The Swedish blogosphere is dominated by teenage girls with fashion blogs, but in the US another group of female bloggers are becoming a force to be reckoned with – mommybloggers. A few days ago some 1,000 women (60% of them moms) attended the BlogHer conference in San Francisco. Many companies have realized that reaching out to mommybloggers can have a positive impact on sales or brand recognition.

See for example the San Francisco Chronicle about mommybloggers here and Jeremiah Owyang’s photo of the goodie bags handed out to some bloggers at a pre BlogHer party with the purpose of getting positive publicity on their blogs.

Tags: mommybloggers, blogher, kvinnor, mammor, bloggar, usa. Ping.