Mikael Palmstedt

From Good Old I found this refreshing link: http://www.theswedishmodel.org/

Also read, this article about why free istheshit.

In September 2007 a new initiative called Mindpark was initiated by a group of Swedish newspapers. The aim being to create sort of a thinktank and a mediacompany able to act on its own as well as supporting its owners in understanding, implementing and administer projects which will take their old media companies into the new media world. As far as I remember Mindpark got SEK 40 000 000 initial funding (a bit more than EUR4 000 000, by Swedish measurements a lot of money).

The initiative was praised both by the established media companies, the grassrot internet entrepeneurs and the Swedish blogosphere. I thought it was a great step by the newspapers, thinking of the Holtzbrinck e-lab who has been quite successful here in Germany.

Mindpark opened its doors by having one of the most frequently updated blogs in Sweden with regard to writing about new media and how the internet is reshaping people’s daily habits etc, great posts almost every day. One aim of Mindpark was to be a thinktank which they have accomplished I guess. With that said they now must have spent at least SEK1 500 000 of their money, that’s quite an expensive thinktank.

Another aim of Mindpark (which I hope is the main one) was to deliver nine “projects” per year, the scope of these projects I don’t know. It is now the end of March and as far as I know there’s just one project being officially released called Rubbet. Rubbet is quite a weak software platform that should not take a decent developer any amount of time to produce with a very poorly implemented GUI (hey tags are cool right?!?). A new version is apparently in the build-up though.

Mindpark is a very loud voice in the Swedish blogosphere, but their main mission is not to be a great blog and opinionmaker. Leading and managing a great development company is not about going to every conference there is but about actually getting sh#t done, the results will catch up with you eventually.

I hope there’s something great bubbling underneath Mindpark that they are not telling us (even though they say they are aiming to be 100% transparent), but until actual results are shown I’m sad to say that Mindpark seems to become just another one of those projects initiated by larger companies where money go in and nothing comes out except talk.

I’d suggest Mindpark start doing as the e-lab, less talking more doing … and start to deliver amazing concepts. Until that happens I hope they get a nice amount of bashing on the net.

Judging solely on my own sites and projects the onlinemarketing spend seems to be growing quite a lot, at least for such tiny publishers as myself. Last days the average adsense CPC on our german virtuelle Tiere site has been quite a bit over $3, a record for us. The eCPM is also record high on all our sites through most networks we use at the moment. Probably much due to many advertisers doing network wide CPM bids with a very low freq caps.

So this gigantic end of the world economic crisis everyone is talking about is yet to show its face, at least for us

Recently Bytelove AB (who runs istheshit.net) aquired istheshit.com through snapback. Just after the auction started we got this interesting e-mail:

Hello,

We acquired the domain istheshit.com recently.  It is now available at
the price of EUR 2500.

If you are interested in it, please let us know before 6:00 pm,
Sunday, Feb 24, 2008 CET. After that, this domain may not be available
anymore.

About the transition:
The transition of domain and payment can be finished through a trusted
third-party escrow service like sedo.com, afternic.com, etc,  so you
don't have to worry about the trust problems. If you don't get the
domain, we will not get paid.

NOTE: If the name is bought by other company or person, it may never
be available again.

Best regards,

Xxx Xxxxx

I’d assume this is some sort of automated or semiautomated process where the company checks all domains about to expire and the ones that has good traffic on another TLD they bid on. Must work seriously well. Unfortunately if you make a living this way you are a parasite.

We ended up paying around EUR300 for the domain in the snapback auction.