Norwegian election coming up September 9

Only 39 days until the Norwegian election is here, exciting days for us researching internet politics, elections, political parties and social media!      As some of you know, I’m working on the SAC project at the University of Oslo (Social Media and Agenda Setting in Election Campaigns). In the next few weeks, the group … Continue reading →

The big picture – online Norwegians and changing media habits

This is how it looks like – the percentage of people accessing internet in Norway on a daily basis, represented by age groups from 2000-2012. Pretty amazing historic development, right? I created this graph via Statistics Norway, where you can create your own tables and graphs. Update: I just had to add this as well, the … Continue reading →

Norwegian researchers on social media

“Do you know if anyone has collected Norwegian research on social media?” That was a question I received on Twitter yesterday via a friend, and I’ve made a list to help.  For someone outside academia, it is hard to keep track of the research that exist, both because it is time-consuming to keep updated as … Continue reading →

Velgerne vant årets digitale valgkamp

Det er mye vi kan si om politikernes internettinnsats, men la oss glemme det nå. (Denne artikkelen står på trykk i dagens utgave av Morgenbladet. Fordi man ikke kan diskutere på Morgenbladets sider, legger jeg den ut for kommentarer her. Apology to my international readers, this is an article I’ve written for the weekly Morgenbladet … Continue reading →

Norway says – share, but don’t steal?

A new initiativ by 2300 Norwegian artists and 37 organizations called Dele – ikke stjele (Share –  Do not steal, more info in English at TorrentFreak) is creating new fuzz. And I’m asking myself: Does that mean upload, but don’t download? Their main argument is to respect the copyrights. Legal filesharing is good. Piracy is … Continue reading →

Europe’s struggle with piracy

All the kids I talked to this summer while on vacation in Norway, told me that they never paid for music. They found everything they needed online, and downloaded it for free. From Pirate Bay and other file sharing sites. (This blog post is also posted at the Personal Democracy Forum’s European blog) My very … Continue reading →

98 days before the Norwegian election – some social media tendencies

Social media is the big buzz word in the Norwegian election campaign. 2005 was the election year when the parties competed on having the coolest, flashiest website, 2009 is the year when the parties are competing about being everywhere (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Nettby, Origo, etc), communicating.  We’ve seen it on TV, read about … Continue reading →

Smell my Twitter farts or follow my campaign – different ways of using Twitter

What is the point of Twitter? To get updates when this guy farts? Or when the baby of this woman kicks? Okay, I laughed, that’s how simple I am. But seriously, this Eastern, Norwegian blogs have been filled with well-written posts about how Twitter can be useful, in a political context. All of these are … Continue reading →

Moltemyr skole and some very interesting social media cases

What does Internet Explorer 6, Moltemyr skole (school), Twestival and a couple of Norwegian bloggers who are testing political impact through social media have in common? Not much necessarily, except for mostly a Norway connection  and new digital tools. Well, I’ll give you the red thread. And I’ll start with the most recent case, Moltemyr … Continue reading →

March 12 Online Free Expression day – support Amnesty’s campaign

I do of course support it. Last year, Reporters without Borders launched the first Online Free Expression day on March 12. This year, Amnesty Norway has launched a huge freedom of speech-campaign (only Norwegian) and they give you a list of 12 different things you can do on March 12 (several of them social media … Continue reading →

The problems with “free” public data in Norway

To make a mashup of public data in Norway  sounds like a good idea, but in reality, it is much more complicated. I’ve been involved in an environmental internet project with Edda Media (a fairly large media company in Norway), as well as Sunnmørsposten (a regional newspaper on the west-coast of Norway), and the restricted … Continue reading →

Super duper calculations – the grids are coming

I wrote an article (in Norwegian) about CERN’s Grid (a super network of computers) for Forskning.no earlier this week. This Grid, which is probably the world largest, was built in order to handle and compute the incredible amounts of data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A short explanation – on the Internet, you can … Continue reading →

Did Iceland receive an ice cold shoulder?

It is chilly in Reykjavik, only 6 degrees right now. And as all of us know, the Icelandic economy has frozen up, badly. It is so bad that even the president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso sent out a statement regarding Iceland tonight (I can’t find it online yet, I got it through … Continue reading →

Help me update the list of Norwegian EU bloggers

These last few days, I’ve come across a few interesting Scandinavian EU blogs. Recently, Percy Westerlund (who is Swedish) , ambassador for the European Commission in Norway, started his own blog, which I think is a great idea. He writes in his first blog post (in Norwegian) that the blog is a way for him … Continue reading →

The Icelandic love for the Euro

When everyone is turning their eyes toward the global economic crisis unfolding with epicentre in the US, a little earthquake is shaking things up on Iceland. A warned earthquake, though. I’ve been interested in the euro/EU discussion on Iceland for quite some time, and now, new Euro events are getting attention on the saga island. … Continue reading →

Why there are no .eu domains in the “land of otherness” (Norway)

Last week, we could read that 300 000 .eu web domains were created in 2007, two years after the domain was created. According to the European Commission, .eu is the fourth most popular Top Level Domain (TLD) in Europe (after .de and .uk) and the ninth most popular TLD worldwide (after .com, .net, and .org, … Continue reading →

Report about EU’s ICT policy

I got myself some a nice piece of bureaucratic reading this evening. Today, the Norwegian EU Delegation published a report about EU’s ICT policy. I’ll get back when I’ve done some further reading – just one quick observation – why is this report published in Word, instead of PDF?

Innovation and PISA from a Norwegian perspective

I was playing around with some red threads yesterday, and it occurred to me that these two things are related – PISA and innovation. Yesterday, EU published a press release for the European Innovation scoreboard 2007 – a summary of the situation in the 27 member states. Guess what – Norway is doing quite badly … Continue reading →