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Archive for Inger

You’re going cycling?!

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If you listen in on the Swedish Twitter flow these days, you’ll see the hashtag #sswc in every third tweet. So what is that? Single Speed World Championship? Swedish Starwars Collectors?

Well, you’re on to something, but the above nerds don’t really use social media as much as the people attending Sweden Social Web Camp at Tjärö this weekend.

SSWC started out as a question thrown into cyberspace: ”What about meeting up around a camp fire and a few beers and discuss the web?” and ended up in 300 something web nerds on an island in the south of Sweden. 2011 sees the third consecutive camp and there are about 400 people attending this year. Tjärö is a small island outside Karlshamn and is normally hosting a hostel, a small harbour and a lot of sheep. Some Highland cattle, as well. And a weekend a year there is an unconference as well.

Web people from all over Sweden will be arriving by ferry on Thursday and most of them will be sleeping in tents. Thursday will see welcoming speeches and then the fire, of course, and some dancing. Friday is the start of the conference and the Grid is almost full, already. You can join in on sessions about WordPress, Using Haskell for Real, Why we check in, Gamification and Crowdfunding, just to name a few.

The grid for Saturday will be filled on the spot, and I expect it to be crammed with tons of interesting topics. Actually, the biggest thing with SSWC is not really the sessions, it’s about meeting all these people that you follow on Twitter or G+ or whose blogs you read, in person. So I’m up for Saturday evening with food, music and a lot of socializing. This is where you want to be if you want to know what’s happening on the web and the social media in Sweden.

I consider adding one topic to the Saturday grid myself:

”How do we catch the moment, stay mindful and still update on Facebook and Twitter?”

I already have one participant, I found her on Twitter. Of course.

Inger

August 10, 2011

Social media and crocheted cats

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In my part of Sweden’s social media world people are talking about Hjärtekatter, “Heart cats”.

HjärtekattWhat is a heart cat? It’s a crocheted cat, an amigurumi, with a scar right across the heart.

Why is there a scar? Well, sometimes life takes an unexpected turn and a baby is born with a heart defect. The baby has to live its first few weeks or even months in a hospital. And when you’re little, insecure and scared, what is better than to have something to hold on to?

One mom wanted to give her child something that would be a reminder of the stay in Queen Silvia Children’s Hospital in Gothenburg, a stuffed animal with the same scar as the child and a friend made her a heart cat.

Then they thought, what if they could give all the kids with heart problems a heart cat to take home? Maybe if they asked around and started a Facebook page, there could be … say 100 cats crocheted until the end of the year? A lot of cats! Would it be possible?

Today, one month later, they have collected 314 cats! The cats are crocheted all over Sweden, almost every crochet or knit blog has made or is making a cat. People are crocheting several cats in different colors and then take pictures of them before they send them away. Look at Marias Garn, Kaffebönan or Garnsligt for example. There are groups on the knitting community Ravelry and the Swedish Knitting association, Sticka has challenged all its members to make a cat. The project has been a total success and now Lund University Hospital can also give away heart cats.

More heart cats

Then the moms thought, what about the siblings of the sick children? Not only do their lives fall apart because another child arrives and gets all the attention that a newborn little brother or sister would, but also this new baby is sick and has to stay in the hospital and mom and dad are worried and don’t have any time for them. What if we can gave these siblings a little stuffed toy as well? A new challenge is made!

Do you want to crochet something? Contact Hjärtekatten at hjartekatten@gmail.com. If you can’t crochet, you can donate 75 SEK (about 8 Euro), choose a color and a name and someone else will crochet a cat or another toy for you!

Heart cat pattern

Heart cat blog (in Swedish only)

Inger

May 27, 2011

Social media in Sweden – what’s going on?

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I sat in front of my computer at work yesterday following Disruptive Change, a conference arranged by Disruptive Media. It was streamed live to all of us who couldn’t sit there in person. Twitter was full of buzz on #dchange and a lot of interesting things were said.

My favorite speaker was Mark Comerford, @markmedia, a social media guru who is always fun to listen to. I tweeted a few things he said and here are the essentials:

You will never reach me if you don’t reach my network and you don’t lose an individual, you lose a network.

The color of shit = If content is king, context is empress. Theres no such thing as too much information. Something that is uninteresting to you might be today’s best for me. Information overload is not a problem of consumption but of filter failures. If your network gives you shit, it is your fault – you have chosen the wrong network.

You can see the conference at Livestream if you are interested in the meta debate about social media in Sweden right now. http://www.livestream.com/disruptivemedia/

Searching for #dchange at twitter will also give you a hint on what was going on. A lot of it is in Swedish but there’s almost as much in English, from those of us that cannot translate and tweet at the same time.

Inger

May 25, 2011