The Swedish magazine Sköna hem is our latest Twingly Partner and the first in the nisch “design, decoration and home”. Design, decoration and home is a quite big part of in the Swedish blogosphere and hopefully Sköna hem could give the blogs in that segment a wider audience with Twingly.
Skonahem.com - “Sköna hem länkar till inredningsbloggar” (swedish)
Amazon reports that they served 1.8TB of data to Twingly widget viewers during April, up from 1.0TB in March. The heavy increase is due to several new newspapers around Europe starting to use Twingly to link back to blogs.
The data volume corresponds to about 180M views of the Twingly widget. The volume is bound to increase further as we add more newspapers to our partner list.
Our monthly Amazon S3 bill is now up to $1,447.45.
A new Swedish survey with blog readers on 33 blogs indicate that blogs influence their readers consumer behavior a lot. 58 procent of the blog readers have after a tip in a blog actually purchased the product later, but so much as 42 procent of them think that advertising reduce the trustworthiness of a blog. Another interesting statistic from the survey is that only 12 procent read blogs on their cell phones.
How weight the trustworthiness of a blog when it’s advertising on it?
Negativ trust - 42 %
Nothing, same trust - 42%
Positiv trust - 6%
Source: Internetworld
Today we launch a next-generation blog search engine at Twingly.com. Participate in the invite-only beta by getting invited or signing up at beta.twingly.com. So what’s cool with the new Twingly.com?
Spam free, social search
Twingly takes a zero-spam approach to blog search using an algorithmically expanding white list instead of the traditional blacklist. Powerful moderation tools allows us to win the fight against spam by one-click removal of clusters of tens of thousands of spam blogs. Fat tail manual moderation yields quality input to long tail algorithmic filtering.
Social search features allows users to share quality content with each other and the community as a whole.
Powerful search language and tech plan Digg
Twingly provides the world’s most powerful search language for blogs, where search filters can be combined in new ways.
But we’re not done by far! Participate in voting on our tech plan by signing up for the beta. JSON api? OPML import or APML export? Help us decide what’s next!
Europe, here we come! Another European newspaper have going live with Twingly Blogstream. This time is it the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia that started to use our widget to link back to blogs from their articles.
Since last week they’ve got it on the site and the response after the article about it have been really good. The Spanish blogosphere seems to be delighted with the feature and we are happier than ever!
Gracias, amigos!
Centerpartiet, one of four parties in the alliance government in Sweden, is the first political party to use Twingly for linking back to blogs. With Twingly they hope to be more open and continue having a good discussion with the blogosphere. The political blogosphere is very active in Sweden and many of the most influential bloggers are active political debaters.
We’ve already given the Swedish bloggers more attention with Twingly Blogstream on many of Sweden’s largest newspapers but with centerpartiet.se as Twingly Partner we hope it can be a new sort of hub for discussions about politics.
Since last year, the party leader for Centerpartiet Maud Olofsson also have her own blog where she publish photos.
OMG, we’ve been Techcrunched! Martin met Michael Arrington at the DLD conference this week and now there is a post about Twingly!
The post also contains some new information about the future of Twingly: Except the screenshot (see below) is there also an explanation how we gonna make our blog search engine spam-free!
Can you imagine a spam-free blog search engine? I promise we can, even though it’s quite hard to develop!
The search engine will be different from others, Källström says, in that it will be almost 100% spam free. How are they doing that? Instead of trying to index every blog in existence and then removing spam via black lists and other methods, they are limiting the blogs they monitor to those that are proven to be legitimate. They started with a small list of known blogs, and then spidered out from there based on links to other blogs. The assumption, which is fairly sound, is that good/real blogs will not link to spam blogs. The end result is a white list of real blogs that are indexed - everything else is ignored.
Martins transcription from the panel that discussed Humans Interupting Algorithms at the DLD conference was also published here. Martin, you rule! Links from both Read/WriteWeb and Techcrunch same week.
The popular microblogging service Jaiku was yesterday acquired by Google for a sum yet unknown. The founders, Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen, went public with the news on their microblog and blog yesterday to the surprise of many. On their FAQ about the acquisition they’re writing:
Q: What is Jaiku?
A. Jaiku is an activity stream and presence sharing service that works from the Web and mobile phones. Jaiku, Ltd. was founded in February, 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen from Finland. The service was released on the Web in July 2006. Jaiku is based in Helsinki.
Q: Why did Google acquire Jaiku?
A: Activity streams and mobile presence are important areas where we believe Google can add a lot of value for users. Jaiku’s technology and talented team are a great addition to Google’s current application and mobile teams.
Interesting enough Google decided to acquire Jaiku and not the more popular, and similar, Twitter, which is very popular in the US. Jaiku was cheaper and in many ways a better service. When Twitter focused on fast user growth Jaiku chose to focus on innovation.
tartups in the social networking genre really have two options if they want to be acquired. Either they have the largest user base or are the best innovators. Facebook has a large user base; Jaiku has an innovative service with a growing user base. Google has for a long time known that it is better to buy innovation than users. Judging from their acquisitions only YouTube and DoubleClick were market leaders in terms of users in their respective niches.
In the future I think it will be much more common for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other big actors to acquire early. Jaiku certainly had a user base but had not had any success similar to that of the other big recent acquisitions: YouTube, Del.icio.us or Flickr.
Congratulations to Jyri, Petteri et al! We wish you good luck with your new masters.
Union Square Ventures were one of the participants in a newly completed round of financing of Twitter. They’re motivating their participating in an interesting article:
There is something really powerful about public, asynchronous text communications where a reply is not expected. A great example is blogging. You blog something and it’s out there on the Internet for public consumption. Others read it and they either comment or create their own blog post in reaction. Collectively, we engage in a discussion.
The asynchronous aspect of blogging is critical because “real time†conversations such as conference calls don’t scale past something like 20 people. Keeping the communication public is equally vital. When anything is made totally public with no limitations on who can participate, you create an open market for ideas, thoughts, and opinions.
Blogs and microblogging tools like Twitter and Jaiku are examples of how the Internet has created a wholly new form of communication that, by virtue of being asynchronous, allows dozens or hundreds of individuals to participate in a huge conversation without geographical limitations. It’s a possibility that’s not existed at any point earlier in world history.
Blogs and microblogs will keep evolving and remain an important feature of the online world for the foreseeable future. Having millions of people participating on equal terms in a conversation the size of the current blogosphere is something unique and as far from a passing fad as you could possibly go.
BusinessWeek recently wrote about thirteen blogs making heaps of money. These blogs are making most if not all of their money from advertisement. We’re definitively seeing a bright future in blog advertising: it allows publishers to more accurately target their key audiences.
BoingBoing.net
Over $1M/year
ICanHazCheezBurger.com
€5600/month
3. ShoeMoney.com
$12000/month
4. OverHeardInNewYork.com
$8100/month
5. Kottke.org
$5300/month
6. TalkingPointsMemo.com
$45000/month
7. PerezHilton.com
$111000/month
8. Gothamist.com
Inkomster: $250 000 per månad
9. TechCrunch.com
Inkomster: $200 000 per månad
10. GoFugYourself.typepad.com
Inkomster: $6240 per månad
11. Mashable.com
Inkomster: $166 000 per månad
12. Problogger.net
Inkomster: “Över $100 000 per Ã¥râ€
13. Michellemalkin.com och HotAir.com
Inkomster: N/A
However, we believe that you’re not going to need a blog with hundreds of thousands of visitors to make money. “The Long Tail†means that the future is not to be found in the mainstream, but rather in precisely targeted audiences. Many advertisers will be better off putting their money in highly specialized blogs within their particular sector instead of paying for banners on mainstream media where only 0-2% of the audience has any genuine interest.
More:
Businessweeks article about blogs that make big business.
Businessweeks pictures of the bloggers.
New Study: Top 50k blogs had $500 million in 2006 Revenue (TechCrunch)