Saturday, June 14, 2003

Blog your own news
Today an article (a "kronikk" which is supposed to be a popular but scholarly contribution to the public debate) which I wrote and submitted more than a month ago appeared in one of the larger Norwegian daily newspapers. The topic is blogging, and I am commenting on Dagbladet's weblogg, which started up April 25th. Because it's been delayed so long, things have changed since I wrote it - and some available infomation probably changed because of the article. Rune Røsten, who was originally only noted as "publisher", read the article, and afterwards the available information on him identified him as editor and administrating director.

But these are minor changes. The major change made by the editor is that Dagbladet has removed all mention of the connection between making money on newspapers through advertising and the expansion into blogs, blogging and offering free space for your personal blogs. I should have seen that one coming, after all Dagbladets weblog has been advertised not as a new business opportunity for Dagbladet, but as a democratic collective effort between the newspaper and its readers. The fact that blogging will make readers produce free content for the newspaper and thereby cheap opportunities to expose readers to advertising isn't worth mentioning. Well, at least not in the space where Dagbladet can do the editing...

Anyway: I am quite exited to see my article in such a prominent place in a widely spread newspaper. I have to go buy the paper version, to see if they have a good picture of me!

(Update Monday 16th: Just remembered: they did something else too, caused by the fact that Dagbladet.no is still just a paper medium available online. They removed all the hyperlinks from the original text. I had prepared it for web-publishing - they cleaned it for paper, and then published that version online.)

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