You know that strange phenomena some call synchronicity? I've had the number 13 pop up in nearly everything I've done today - from the amount of steps I've used in the stairs, to the amount of bread slices available, to strange wrong numbers calling, to email subjects and so on. Files submitted have had 13 in them. Someone even SMS:ed me "in a meeting, I'll ring back in 13 min."

Thirteen, thirteen thirteen - everywhere thirteen. What the heck?

And now, guess what place we're at on the ad age power150 adblogs? Yes, that's right, number thirteen.

Ain't that a hoot? (So we're number one in Europe and kicking tush while at it.)

I have no idea how we ended up there considering our less than great uptime this past week, but it cheered me up. :)

The article about Adland in Dagens Industri (a.k.a Sweden's pink paper) today focuses on the "Chinagate" affair. "Death threats from angry readers commonplace for Ad-blogger" reads the headline.

For those of you who missed it, the posts about the Swedish Red Cross Youth human rights campaign drew a lot of attention. One adgrunt, whole9yards, spotted that some photographs in the campaign depict police in Nepal rather than China - see Red Cross (Youth) pulls "Olympic" human rights campaign in Sweden - and voiced his concerns about this. Other commentators attracted to the posts weren't anywhere near as decent and well articulated as he was, and soon the comments became a regular flame-fest. What you see on here the site is not everything that was posted, since most of the comments were flagged as spam by the automatic spamtrap, but it will give you a general idea of what was being said. Emails directed to me personally were a hundred times worse, and it culminated in late night phone calls and even death threats if I did not remove the campaign and apologize for its existence. Not to mention the DOS-attacks, spambombings and google-bombings attempting to link Adland with the word prostitute. The Swedish Youth Red cross have had to endure the same, and several facebook groups were started rallying people to join in the hate for them.

For the record, I never remove campaigns submitted unless the creators of said campaign asks me to.

Links on anti-cnn regarding that campaign can be seen here: [本版提示] 瑞典青年红十字会借西藏炮制辱奥广告[广告已撤销!] and Unbelievable: The Red Cross——Hypocritical and misleading !.

Resume.se also had an article a few weeks ago about the threats I've received for publishing that campaign (and the note that the campaign was pulled). See : Adlands grundare hotas för OS-kritisk reklam. The anti-cnn sajt is created by students to expose what they call "Western Goebbels' Nazi media" - that is, Western media's biased coverage of unrest in Tibet. See news.com Australia: Chinese students launch 'Anti-CNN' website