“Mash-Up, Hyperlocality & User-Generated Content” is a session from NMD07 starring Björn Jeffery, Swedish internet strategist and CEO of Good Old and Christian Lund, editor in chief at Berlingske Media’s online city guide, AOK.
Björn Jeffery tells about Sommar På Näset, a hyperlocal news-site he created for Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan as an experiment to gain readers’ attention during the 2007 summer holiday. In just 6 weeks Good Old and a handful of high school students mashed-up web services and edited local content to cater for the upper-class vacationers at holiday area, Näset, in the south of Sweden. Result: The newspaper doubled its sales in that particular area and the amount of visitors to the main website tripled.
Google Maps, Jaiku and Flickr all went in to making this first mash-up by a Swedish media company and Jeffery’s advice is clear: Do not fear! The experimental mash-up initiative was a success and shows that news and facts of local relevance attract huge interest. By the aid of new media technology it can be repackaged and served as a mash-up in no time and at little cost.
Christian Lund also looked to Google Maps when he last year supervised the launch of new AOK web services. The Copenhagen city guide, being one of the best known media brands in Denmark, wanted to stay on top of the competion and Lund had had good mash-up experience with a previous city guide project, KBH360.
The editorial goal of AOK is to be as nuanced a city guide as possible by giving each of the stakeholders, i.e. journalists, users and advertisers, equal opportunity to contribute with content, reviews and opinions. Every perspective then comes together in a Google Map feature, where Copenhagen’s favorites and horrors are displayed for easy navigation. Mobile is the next step, Christian Lund hints.
Post Session
The success of Björn Jeffery’s mash-up has probably inspired the current state of redesign that Sydsvenskan is undergoing right now. Asking the readers how they want the digital newspaper to be is part of the carefully planned process to reinvent the site. It’ll be interesting to see if any novel mash-ups result? If your Swedish is up to par, you can follow the progress on Sydsvenskans Redesign blog.
As far as I know AOK is still one of the best known websites in Denmark and apparently their mash-up efforts weren’t in vain: Recently Tip-Berlin, another city guide in the Mecom portfolio, bought the well-proven concept and technology from AOK for their own revamp in June 2008. If your German is up to par, this is the announcement from Tip.
Note on language skills: The video webcast is in Danish and Swedish, but the slides that go with it are in English. Jeffery’s slides can also be found at Slideshare.