Twingly Blog

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)

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!

Dagbladet.no is the first Norwegian website to use Twingly to link back to blogposts that is linking to their articles. They have used our widget at some articles for a while now but since yesterday it’s used at the whole site, to our and the bloggers delight.

This means that we’ve got Twingly Partners in the whole Scandinavia! Yeey!

More:
Dagbladet.no - Vi linker till alla som blogger om oss (in Norwegian)

The daily newspaper Politiken was the first in Denmark to join the Twinglysphere, when they yesterday launched Twingly to link back to bloggers.

-With Twingly we hope that bloggers should add interesting comments to our editorial content, says Michael Arreboe, head of new media at Politiken. It is a part of our long term online strategy.

The reaction from the launch has been very positive in the national blogosphere where we currently index about 55,000 blogs.

Here is a sample of how Twingly look at Politiken (under the article): http://www.politiken.dk/tjek/digitalt/article467920.ece

With conferences and seminars taking place worldwide, Ifra is currently the leading international organization for newspapers and media. Recently there was Newsroom 2007, a conference dealing exclusively with the news desk. The lesson from this conference: traditional systems no longer work in news desks – what’s required now are systems integrating web and print for efficiency and synergy purposes.

The speakers of the conference touched upon many different subject areas. Among the speakers was Henrik PÃ¥lsson from Ericsson who spoke about the mobile phone as a new form of media. He ended his talk with a remark about paper-based news not having any place in the future:

Finally, when taking questions, Pålsson observed that of all the teenagers in focus groups in Sweden he knows none for whom paper is an important medium, and he doesn’t see that changing as they reach their 20s. In a reference to the Long Tail theory he noted that paper has its place in the long tail part of the equation (i.e. dealing with niche interests) but doesn’t see its future as being in the head (mass consumption).

Murdoch MacLennan (CEO, Telegraph Media Group) talked about four head-challenges for the future mediaactors: practice, branding, copyright and constitution. When he talked about practice he noticed blogs and podcasts as a key component.

Lamenting the traditional lack of attention paid to training journalists, MacLennan noted that blogs and podcasts are now key ingredients for correspondents following stories both far afield and close to home; hence a familiarity with the new media landscape is essential for editors

Ifra.com

The Washington Post and The New York Times have established a strong relationship with bloggers by linking back to posts linking to their articles. This strategy has created a wealth of new values for both bloggers and the newspapers and has been easily integrated with other new media strategies without any compromises being made in terms of quality or reader value. The advantages for bloggers receiving traffic from newspapers have been numerous:

• Bloggers receive more attention and traffic.
• New bloggers writing about serious subjects get more readers from day one.
• The blogging phenomenon as such receives more attention.
• The widespread but erroneous public image of blogs as inward looking diaries rapidly disappears.
• The general interest in citizen journalism increases and more people are given the opportunity to take part in the public debate.

The advantages for newspapers linking back to bloggers are equally plentiful:

• Editorial value: the newspapers readers can take part in vastly more interesting and relevant discussions than those normally present in discussion forums and article comment systems.
• Articles continue to be read long after they have trickled off the first page of the newspaper’s web site, thereby substantially increasing their lifespan.
• Bloggers have a much stronger incitement to link to a newspaper linking back to them than to competitors not doing the same thing.
• The newspaper establishes its brand towards a dynamic and hard-to-reach market segment.

The increased number of links to the newspapers articles substantially increases its search engine ranking, thereby drawing additional readers.

• It creates a strong community around the newspapers web site without shutting the door on established blog writers with an established reader base by forcing them to migrate to a proprietary blogging platform.
• If newspapers are to remain important to journalism in the future as they have been in the past, they will need to position themselves accordingly in social media today.

Swedish and Scandinavian news sites are well aware of all of the above and are working in the right direction. Newspapers know that they can no longer exist in a vacuum and that they have all to gain from intermeshing with the blogosphere.

Primelabs recently launched the blog search engine Twingly, which provides a robust technical solution for indexing all blogs linking to newspapers. Twingly is a full-scale blogosphere indexing solution. It is therefore able to apply robust spam filtering and authority analysis in ensuring data quality. Twingly exposes a web based API which makes it easy to integrate the service into any web publication system. Twingly does not filter results, but provides tools for preventing abuse to our customers.

In early February 2007, the two largest Swedish dailies (DN, SvD) started using Twingly, thereby becoming the first European dailies linking back to the blogosphere.