Sourze vs Weblogs.se

May 15, 2003

It sounds like a dotcom business plan from the summer of 1997: "Let's make a vanity publishing website, where people pay us to post their content. $13 for a single rant, $40 a month for unlimited rants. Then we give them a small portion of the money back in prizes: $450 for the month's most popular post, $450 for our favorite post, and $5,500 to a 'writer of the year'."

I've been baffled by Sourze [Swedish] ever since Anna showed it to me after I explained blogging to her. "Oh, you mean like Sourze?" she said. No, not like Sourze. I have no idea how this site continues to function in the age of blogs. Sourze's motto: "Everyone has something to tell. Tell it."Sourze posts usually don't make it past 200 reads, well below most blogs' stats. And why should we trust the opinions of people who have been snookered into paying for their thoughts? Figure out the free blog already, get it listed on weblogs.se and sweblogs.com, and you will be guaranteed a sympathetic Swedish readershipGoogling Sourze, I find I'm not the only one questioning their business model..

I finally figured out tonight what it was that Sourze reminded me of: the $100,000 Porsche you could win at Dubai airport by buying one of a thousand $1,000 lottery tickets. You'd think that if you can afford a ticket at such odds, you'd probably already own the car, but evidently enough people have more money than sense.

Perhaps Sourze still exists because blogging has yet to reach a critical mass in Sweden. Its 9 million inhabitants boast some 170 self-reported weblogs, compared to 2148 self-reported blogs for a similar population in New York City.New York is a special case, granted. People who move there tend to come out as bloggers at an alarming rate. Unlike in New York, mentioning blogging in a casual conversation here still draws blank stares. The blogging meme likely needs another year before it perks the ears of mainstream Swedish media. But when it does, it will be a beautiful thing; A Swedish diplomat friend was complaining today that writing reports for the foreign ministry was such a damn formal affair. Why can't they be more direct, more opinionated, more immediate, more inviting to dialogue, more like blogs? Why not indeed?

I'm debating whether I should translate this post into very bad Swedish, pay my $13, and post it on Sourze, as my small contribution to the coming Swedish blogging revolution...

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