Everyone I know knows someone, or knows of someone, who either died or survived when the cruise ship Estonia sank in September 1994. Everyone I know knows someone, or knows of someone, who was in Thailand when the tsunami struck on Boxing Day 2004. Swedes in general are empathetic. I’m not just saying that because I’m a Swede and proud of it – believe me, being empathetic can be a curse – but maybe that’s just it: there are so few of us that there’s always someone who knows someone.

Of course, this can be fun, too. Everyone I know knows someone who knows or has met a celebrity – and I’m not talking about passing Pernilla August or Alexander Skarsgård or Crown Princess Victoria on the street. Even I’ve done that. (Hell, I’ve even walked past Tony Blair.) I mean truly met. So if you’re tempted to become a news reporter, come to Sweden – you can get hold of anyone.

Back to the wonderful baby news, which I also knew was true because Swedes rarely lie. (If we do lie, we feel bad about it for weeks, until it eventually comes out on a drunken night out.) That’s why companies trust their employees to work from home and take flexible hours – called freedom under your own responsibility – because we DO work every minute we should so that we don’t feel guilty when we get that pay check at the end of the month.

Since I’m not a gossip girl, I kept my mouth shut about the baby news. Just passed it on to my closest friends – oops, just realized – and the rest of the world.

Congratulations Victoria and Daniel!

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.

What 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.

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)

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.

Royal Palace sprint in Stockholm

The snow has finally melted but they brought it back for the event. We swedes just can’t get enough of snow. Royal Palace sprint in Stockholm today. Part of the world cup and we get this prime view from our office window in Old town. Not bad?

Sweden is trying to brand itself as a “the new culinary nation.” Thinking about classic gastronomical countries like France and Italy, it may seem a bit far-fetched to think that Sweden will ever be able to compete on the global food scene.

But looking at the number of internationally successful Swedish chefs and the high standard of Swedish restaurants in general (roadside restaurants excepted), it may not be such a far-fetched idea after all. Especially if you also take into account the high-standard produce that Sweden has access to — from nature as well as from Swedish farms.

The idea behind “the new culinary nation” is to show the world the innovative Swedish cuisine, but having looked into the demand for information about Swedish food I’m not sure that innovative Swedish food is what people in general are interested in.

I had a look at the list of search terms that bring visitors to Sweden.se. Apart from various spellings of “Sweden” and the word for “weather” in different languages, some food terms are pretty high on the list. But it’s not exactly the most revolutionary dishes you find there: “köttbullar” is number 24, “kanelbullar” number 26 and “semla” number 37.

Köttbullar is Swedish for meatballs and they have for some strange reason become the typical example of Swedish food, although a quick look at Wikipedia shows just how many countries have their own types of meatballs.

On the other hand, kanelbullar are probably quite Swedish. It’s a wheat dough bun (bulle) filled with cinnamon (kanel), sugar and butter. But, then again, kanelbullar have been around for ages, so not very innovative either.

Lastly, semla is probably high on the search term list because it’s semla season right now. March 8 is THE semla day (called fettisdagen) this year, which means that it’s the last Tuesday before the 40-day period of fasting that precedes Easter in the Christian calendar. This is the excuse used to eat these sinfully delicious buns filled with almond paste and whipped cream. But — innovative? No, not exactly. It is claimed that semlor started to become popular in Sweden already in 1541.

I did, however, enjoy quite an innovative type of semla the other day. It was a strange hybrid between a kanelbulle and a semla. A kanelbulle was cut in two, and then filled with almond paste and whipped cream just like a normal semla. A bit over the top, if you ask me. So, if that’s innovative, I’ll stick with traditional — any day.

Let’s hope that Sweden’s innovative, new cuisine doesn’t lose track of what’s traditional and good. We found some favorites among Swedish–Ethiopian chef Marcus Samuelsson’s modernized traditional Swedish recipes. Hungry?

P.S. This is probably my last blog entry for quite some time. Next week I’m off on parental leave, and I’ll make sure to eat lots of semlor and use up a fair share of the 480 days off work that my husband and I are entitled to. So, until next time — all the best to all of you!

Talented illustrator Camilla Engman shares the world with us from her point of view with a lot of beautiful and playful pictures.

If you are looking for home styling inspiration, Emma Fexeus blog Emmas designblogg, is the one to pay a visit.

Antonia is the girl behind the blog Swedish Love Affair. Her blog is more from an everyday-life in-Sweden perspective but you can definitely tell her passion for fashion and photography by reading the blog.  

If you want even more insight into the everyday life in Sweden, why not check out Surviving in Sweden?

And if you want to read more about Swedish design I strongly recommend our new fact sheet on the topic.

Magazine rack Front Page by Front. (CC BY NC SA)

Have a nice weekend!

Sometimes KISS is the only way to go… Keep It Simple Stupid, so when we got involved in a fashion event in Berlin in January, Sweden.se webmaster Per brought a camera with him, handed the material over to colleague Rikard and voilà, a video summary of it all. A first camera job for Per and a first film editing job for Rikard. The result?

Sometimes it’s a frustrating job. We’ve noticed, for example, that a lot of the editorial content we published on Sweden.se during 2010 didn’t do at all as well as we thought it would. Why? Well, to be honest, we’re clueless. Increasing competition on the web? Not enough search engine optimization on the site? Or simply the wrong choice of topics?

On a happy note, our films seem to attract a fair number of viewers, which is really pleasing since we launched our film player, Watch, in 2010. And many people also found us on our Follow Sweden section (below, right) on The Local, Sweden’s news in English.

How can we make Sweden.se even better? What do you, our readers, want to know/see/hear?

The best thing for us would be if you could just tell us what you’d like to know about Sweden. More hard facts? More culture? More on how to move to Sweden? Do you like it when we divide the year into themes (like our current fashion theme)? Why not post a comment with your opinion below?

Another recurring question for the Sweden.se staff is what we can do, as in what we’re allowed to do as representatives of a Swedish public agency, the Swedish Institute. We can’t allow our content to be too controversial. Politics is strictly off-limits, for example, and foreign politics even more so.

This is a problem that especially concerns this staff blog. Our disclaimer says: “This blog is an outlet of individual opinion, and what is said here does not necessarily represent the views of the Swedish Institute.” — but that doesn’t entitle us to write whatever we like. No matter how personal we want to be in our tonality and content, the problem is that in this context we still act as representatives of the Swedish state. So we are told. And maybe that’s right.

As much as Sweden loves and promotes free speech, this blog may not be the right forum for content of a too sensitive nature. One real borderline case was my own post from the day after the election in September 2010. It passed, but only just. Sometimes edits have to be made. Sometimes posts are simply not published.

It’s just that I have a feeling that our readers are fairly critical and would actually like to be served some controversial opinions about Sweden every now and then rather than just being fed all the nice facts about our nice country. Don’t get me wrong — state-employed or not, I love Sweden, but that doesn’t mean that everything about the country is hunky dory. That would be weird. That’s why I think allowing some negative sides of Sweden to show just increases our credibility.

But that’s really for you to say. Please make your voices heard below, give us some guidance on what you’d like to see on Sweden.se and in this blog during 2011.