Swedes don’t read blogs

(Roughly translated from Swedish)

According to a study from the SOM Institute at University of Gothenburg only 10% had read a blog the last 12 months. Also only just 1% read political blogs regularly.

The most popular blogs are the private blogs, which approximately 3% read with some sort of regularity (3 times or more/week).

In the US a third of the populations read blogs. The main reason for the big difference is the strong tradition of newspapers in Sweden. Swedes still see newspapers as their main source for information.

The ones in Sweden who do read blogs are the so-called early adapters. They were first out with using the Internet and are now taking an active part of the Internet as a community.

I find this highly fascinating. Sweden often tops the list with the highest broadband penetration and Internet usage. Sweden was one of the first countries in the world where a non-state company became an Internet service provider. More than 60% of all Swedes do their banking over the Internet. To me all this is a sign of early adaptation. But how come they don’t read blogs and don’t see Internet as their primary source of information?

One of the major reasons, I think, is that Sweden is long and stretched out country. The majority of the population doesn’t actually live in a city area. And it is in the city areas were people have broadband connections and unlimited Internet access. Out in the countryside the phone poles still stand high and mighty. Most Internet users there are still using a modem and dial up line.

What makes me upset though is that the government loves to talk about how leading Sweden are when it comes to Internet usage, when we in fact aren’t. It’s been more than 10 years since the Swedish PM proudly declared "Broadband for everybody", but so far that have only happened in the big city areas. To install broadband in the rest of the country was too expensive. (Like they didn’t knew before that Sweden is a stretched out country and its inhabitants are spread all over it.) So if you live in the mountain or out in the woods too bad for you. The money is gone, even if the PM promised that everybody would get broadband. Yet, another promise that haven’t been kept...