DN was Twingly’s first client and integrated the widget in February 2007. What was the impact of that partnership and with what thoughts do you look back on 5 years of having incoming blog links showing next to your articles?
I started at DN in 2009, but the people working with digital there before me did a great job, and the Twingly partnership is a good example. The impact was big then and today we’re still a very natural environment for bloggers, and it’s important for us to put the incoming links in prominent positions on the site.

How has the role of the blogosphere changed for DN during the past years, and how important is it today?
I think it’s as important or more important today than it was a few years ago, despite the “competition” from microblogs and Facebook. I really feel blogs contribute in a unique way when they’re at their best, with in-depth coverage of current issues.

How much do you at DN actually work together with the blogosphere? What ways do you see for the future to leverage blogs even more for your site?
I wouldn’t say we work very actively with the blogosphere, but we link to blogs in articles when it’s relevant and of course all editors read loads of blogs. Also the Twingly partnership is important when it comes to tying us closer to the blogosphere. A senior editor of ours, Hasse Rosén, has recently started working with social and interactivity issues and eventually we’ll see some exciting results from that.

How valuable are reader comments for your web site?
Very important. Without them any news site get a certain, uncanny PDF feel.

If readers want to comment on one of your articles, they need to log in with Facebook, OpenID or a DN.se account. Do you find that to be the best solution to keep the quality of comments up?
It’s not the best solution, but it has proven to be a step in the right direction for us, I don’t think there are any easy or general solutions that fit all. We have plenty of ideas in the backlog, one being a rating or ‘like’ system, where users rate each others comments. That has been very successful on other news sites. Recently we also started working actively to encourage good comments by highlighting them, perhaps writing new articles based on them. But many things could be done to make it better.

How do you see DN develop in the future in regards to social media?
A closer Facebook integration is not an unlikely next step.

How will that look?
A little bit too early to say!

While there hardly seems to be anybody without a Facebook account nowadays, Twitter is still only a niche phenomenon in Sweden. Do you think that will change in the near future?
No, I think Twitter in Sweden is pretty much established as a meeting place for a tiny, influential minority. It hasn’t changed much since I got my Twitter account in 2008.

How much time do you personally spend with social media while at work?
Depends, if I have a not so busy day, which is rare, I allow myself to just enjoy them. Other days it’s strictly work, but I check Twitter and Facebook regularly.

What are the biggest trends in online journalism that you especially look forward to be able to work with at DN?
Open data services and quick, simple and direct ways to broadcast news. A colleague of mine recently shot, edited and published a very professional clip from a bus accident in minutes, all via his iPhone.

New design

Old design

New design

Både serverflytten och det nya utseendet är första initiativen för att skapa Sveriges bästa mötesplats för bloggare och bloggläsare.

Vad händer kring Bloggportalen under 2012?

För att skapa den bästa ingången till den svenska bloggosfären, kommer vi ge mer plats åt bloggare på förstasidan och kategorisidorna. Det är väldigt bra att ha tillgång till listor på mest bloggade nyheter, men vi tänker att på Bloggportalen ska bloggarna trots allt stå i centrum.

Vi kommer att skapa ett nyhetsbrev för de bloggare som finns registrerade på Bloggportalen och vi kommer att återuppliva Bloggvärldsbloggen där Anton Johansson (dvs jag =) ska blogga om allt som har med bloggande att göra. Jag har genom Twinglys och mina egna bloggar bevakat den svenska blogosfären och mediebranschen sedan jag vet inte hur länge och det ska bli roligt att få ta hand om Bloggvärldsbloggen.

I Twinglys kommande Bloggrapport för 2012 kommer vi även att inkludera resultatet av en undersökning som vi skickar ut till bloggare som registrerat sig på Bloggportalen. Det kommer vara frågor om hur, varför och när vi bloggar. Är det någon särskild fråga ni vill ha med i undersökningen är det bara att höra av sig i kommentarerna nedan eller på Twitter!

Kolla in det nya utseendet på Bloggportalen här när vi är klara med flytten!

The move to our servers and the redesign is the first step towards making Bloggportalen to the best meeting point for bloggers and blog readers in Sweden.

What’s happening around Bloggportalen during 2012?

To create the best entrance to the Swedish blogosphere, we’ll provide more space for bloggers on the frontpage and the category pages. An overview of the most blogged news articles is great as well but we think that the blogs should be in focus on Bloggportalen.

We will also start to send a newsletter to the registered bloggers at Bloggportalen and restart the Bloggvärldsbloggen where Anton Johansson (yes, that’s me!) will blog about all things related to blogging. I have been writing about the blogosphere and the media industry for years both for Twingly and on my personal blogs and I’m looking forward continue doing so in Bloggvärldsbloggen.

On the upcoming Twingly Blog Report for 2012 we will also include the results of a survey we will send out the registered bloggers at Bloggportalen. The survey will have questions about how, when and why we’re blogging. Is it any particular question you want us to have in the survey, let us know in the comments or tell us on Twitter!

Check out the new redesign of Bloggportalen here!

Nelly.com is one of the largest online fashion stores in Northern Europe, offering more than 750 brands throughout a growing number of countries, among them Germany , Austria and The Netherlands.

The integration of Twingly means that on each and every product page on Nelly.com, fashion shoppers can immediately see what bloggers have written about the specific piece of clothing (like here for example, in Swedish). They can click on the links to the blog to read the full post. For bloggers this is a great way of getting additional visitors by covering a product on Nelly.com, linking to it and pinging us. Instead of pinging us, bloggers can also add the link to their blog posts directly inside the widget on the product page.

The Twingly widget at the bottom to the right

Fashion blogs represent a significant chunk of the whole blogosphere, and fashion bloggers passionately and regularly write about clothes they love. Online fashion stores using our solution can leverage the power, expertise and feedback from the blogosphere and add value to their offerings.

Welcome, Nelly.com!

Der Tatort ist die in der deutschen Twittersphäre am meisten und intensivsten diskutierte Fernsehsendung. Stefanie Aßmann und Nicole Greiner haben vor einiger Zeit in einem Blog damit begonnen, die Twitter-Resonanz auf einzelne Episoden auszuwerten und zu analysieren. Im Interview erzählt Stefanie, wie es dazu kam, was twitternde Tatort-Fans bewegt und was als nächstes kommen könnte.

Wer bist du wieso bewegt dich das Thema Social-Media-Monitoring?
Meine Name ist Stefanie Aßmann, bei Twitter @miss_assmann. Ich arbeite bei VICO Research & Consulting als Consultant und beschäftige mich dort beruflich mit dem Thema Monitoring und Social Media. Vor zwei Jahren habe ich mich im Rahmen meiner Masterarbeit das erste Mal mit Social Media Monitoring auseinander gesetzt. Damals gab es nur wenig Literatur zum Thema. Für mich war das ein Grund, dies zu ändern und das Blog zum Thema ins Leben zu rufen. Außerdem finde ich es sehr spannend, wie die Nutzer online über Produkte und Marken diskutieren. Analysen zur Social Media Kommunikation ergeben immer sehr interessante Erkenntnisse.

Du befasst dich seit einiger Zeit damit, die Twitter-Reaktionen zum Tatort zu analysieren. Wie kam es dazu?
Wir haben auf der Arbeit montags über den Tatort gesprochen und uns darüber unterhalten, wie viele Leute doch auf Twitter darüber diskutieren. Da kam uns die Idee, das es lustig wäre, den Tatort anhand von Tweets nachzuerzählen. Mit Nicole habe ich die Idee einige Zeit später wieder aufgegriffen. Leider schaffen wir es zeitlich nur selten, den Tatort zu analysieren.

Wieso sorgt gerade der Tatort für ein derartig großes Echo bei Twitter?
Das ist eine gute Frage und ein gutes Thema für eine Analyse. In meinem Freundeskreis schauen sehr viele Leute sonntags Tatort. Da viele Freunde der Social-Media-Welt beim Fernsehen das Smartphone nicht aus der Hand legen können, haben sie wohl angefangen, den Tatort zu kommentieren. Das Ganze hat sich irgendwann verselbstständigt. In meiner Timeline ist mir der Tatort jedenfalls als erstes TV Format aufgefallen.

Welche Tools und Verfahren verwendest du für deine Analyse?
Angefangen haben wir mit der Twitter-Suche. Zwischendurch habe ich auch das Tool von VICO eingesetzt, um eine Tag Cloud zu erstellen. Anja von Twingly war nun so nett und hat mir ein Liveboard zum Tatort eingerichtet. Damit erhält man einen guten Überblick, wie viele User zu welchen Schlagworten zum Tatort twittern. Um die Tweets zu sammeln, nutzen wir aktuell die Twittersuche und Live von Twingly. Ideen für weitere Analysen habe ich genug. Mir fehlt nur die Zeit für die Umsetzung.

Welche Folge war bisher die mit den insgesamt positivsten Twitter-Kritiken und welche die mit den negativsten? 
Da wir nicht jeden Tatort analysieren, kann ich das gar nicht so genau sagen. Oft ist die Twitter-Tatort-Gemeinde zwiegespalten. Gerade der Tatort von Justus von Dohnanyi hat für viel Gesprächsstoff bei Twitter gesorgt. Entweder wurde der Tatort als Meisterstück gelobt, oder er wurde verrissen. Prinzipiell kann man auch sagen, dass bei manchen Tatorten der eigentlich Inhalt bei Twitter gar keine Rolle spielt. Manchmal sind gewisse Details im Tatort spannender als die Handlung selbst. Gerade wenn bestimmte Details im Film nicht logisch sind, wird gerne gemeckert.

Glaubst du, der Tatort wird immer eher eine Ausnahme bleiben, was das Social-Web-Engagement der Nutzer angeht? Oder werden künftig viele weitere Sendungen ähnlich viel Resonanz in den Social-Media-Kanälen erhalten?
Der Tatort war die erste Sendung mit so viel Resonanz bei Twitter. Mittlerweile wird alles mögliche – bespielsweise “Bauer sucht Frau” oder “The Voice of Germany” – bei Twitter diskutiert. In meinen Augen birgt Twitter bei der Analyse von TV-Formaten noch sehr viel Potential. Anbieter wie Couchfunk haben schon erkannt, dass man das klassische Fernsehen mit der Internetnutzung verknüpfen sollte.

Denkst du darüber nach, deine Analysen auf andere Sendungen auszuweiten?
Ja, da denke ich schon länger drüber nach. Allerdings habe ich noch kein Format gefunden, dass mich inhaltlich auch so interessiert. Mich würden hier generell amerikanische Serien reizen. Dort werden die verschiedenen Social-Media-Kanäle bereits jetzt schon verstärkt von den Sendern eingesetzt.

You have recently added Twingly to your online shop’s product pages. Tell us what you hope to achieve with showing which blogs have linked to your product pages.
To show links on the product pages is part of our SEO strategy. We hope to attract more links from bloggers when we link back to their blogs. We constantly strive to create interesting content to our product pages. A blog post could give some added value and it can often be the first step to try a new product. Many of the bloggers today have a strong influence on their readers.

What kind of importance does the blogosphere have for Yves Rocher?
Beauty is a hot topic in blogs. Majority of the blogosphere is touching either fashion or beauty. There is no question that being visible is important for any cosmetics brand. By being visible in blogosphere we are able to reach a target group of young females who are interested in beauty. Also, we get in contact with top influencers.

Apart from the Twingly widget – which other activities have you done in the past involving bloggers?
During the fall 2011 we launched a major campaign, The Waterproof Challenge, which involved the most prominent bloggers from each Nordic country. The campaign allowed users to test waterproof make up in a new, engaging and fun way with the help of some of the most popular bloggers in the Nordic countries. We believe that bloggers played a crucial role in this campaign. They are often role models for other girls and they give more credibility compared to traditional marketing methods. Another ongoing activity is the Yves Rocher Review project which involves selected bloggers who has a chance to test Yves Rocher products and review them in their blogs. It is important that the blogger can relate to Yves Rocher’s values and be a good ambassador of the brand.

When opening up to the blogosphere, that means becoming transparent and highlighting both positive feedback but also criticism. How do you prepare for that?
It is important for us to know what our customers think about our brand and products. That is why we are auditing, following and listening what is said and written about us in the social media. To be able to meet our customer’s questions, opinions and even criticism we have created internal processes to manage this effectively. Our goal is to be as transparent as possible towards our customers regarding information and ingredients. Transparency leads to credibility.

Which other social media channels do you use to reach your target group and which are the most important or effective ones?
The most important social media channel for us is definitely Facebook. It allows us to have a conversation with our customers in a totally new way. Today there are almost 300 000 people who are following Yves Rocher brand on Facebook globally. The Nordic Facebook pages were launched pretty recently, so we still have much more to do. However, we can already now see positive results from using social media as a media tool especially when it comes to conversion, viral effects and reaching a new target group.

The Twingly integration is available on your websites in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. Do you notice any significant differences between each country’s blogosphere?
The Swedish blogosphere is definitely more developed and larger in terms of the amount of bloggers compared to the other Nordic countries. We can also find more niched blogs in Sweden which is probably the result of the variety and the popularity of blogging in Sweden. However, we can see the same trend in the other Nordic countries that blogging is gaining popularity and interesting blogs are popping up continuously. One thing that for sure is common in all countries is that young girls are dominating!

Yves Rocher is a French company. How closely to you work together with the headquarter in France?
We get a lot of support from the French headquarters and many of the actions are synchronized all over the world. We meet our international colleagues regularly to change experiences and best practices, which is very helpful even though markets often have their differences.

January
We started the year with preparations of all the good things to come, with introducing a few websites within the public service and public sector that use Twingly as well as with a comprehensive overview about media monitoring companies from around the world that have partnered up with us (part 1, part 2).

February
We were happy to announce CisionWire as new Twingly partner. We also launched a new version of Twingly Channels that focused on group communication and microblogging. And journalisten.no, a Norwegian website covering the media industry, described how blogs have gained power in Sweden, mentioning Twingly as one of the reasons that supported this development.

March
Two trainees started to work at the Twingly office in Linköping, Charlotta Baltazar and Peter Lindblom. It was great to have both aboard during the two month they were staying with us. Meanwhile here in the blog, we published interviews showing how much e-commerce sites can benefit from the Twingly solutions.

April
Since April, the two largest e-commerce sites for books in Sweden, Adlibris and Bokus, are using Twingly Blogstream on their websites. It was great to see that kind of connection between the blogosphere and booksphere – and it still is! Another thing that made us happy were the great articles about Twingly by Thomas Dahlquist, Internetworld Sweden and The Next Web. And for all conference goers we posted this handy list of major tech and social media events in Europe.

May

Twingly celebrates its 5th birthday

As every year in May, we celebrated our birthday. This time it was the 5th – for an Internet startup that’s a very special number, which we honoured with an amazing party. Check out the photos here. We also traveled to the Next conference in Berlin, Europe’s new startup hotspot.

June
Beauty Planet, a leading Swedish online store for perfume, makeup, skin care and hair care, launched its Twingly integration, and we gave an overview about the APIs Twingly offers to media monitoring businesses.

July

TEDxAlmedalen 2011

We co-organized the TEDxAlmedalen 2011 event at the Swedish island of Gotland. Twingly was also part of the jury for the “Almedalens blogger of the year” award. Lena Lid Falkman won the price for her blog coverage of Almedalen Week, an important forum in Swedish politics.

August
For the third year in a row, we sponsored the Sweden Social Web Camp unconference and attended the popular event to mingle, discuss and be inspired. Meanwhile, the Swedish business website affarsliv.com published an interview with Twingly CEO Martin Källström, and we highlighted the top 7 most beautiful integrations of Twingly Blogstream.

September
The number of Twingly partners grew again by 3, and with the Cathedral of Lund we could welcome the first church to the Twingly family. Apart from that, we released a ranking (in Swedish) listing the 10 Swedish publishing houses that are getting the most links from bloggers.

October
At least in Sweden, the mobile app of the year 2011 was the Wordfeud, a scrabble-like game for iOS and Android. To help Wordfeud addicts to win and to animate them to donate some money to Doctors without Borders, we launched a little web app called Wordfeusk. And while Wordfeusk was hit by a lot of traffic, two members of the Twingly team attended conferences in October: Anja was at the Research & Results in Munich and Kristoffer went to London to visit the FOWA conference. You can read about his experience here.

November

Twingly Insight launched

November was a big month: We rolled out a new front page, launched Twingly Insight - blog analytics for professionals as well as a Wiki for German Social Media Monitoring Tools and announced that we together with Greenhill Relations will hold courses on how to do a blog analysis. We also supported Pay a Blogger day on November 29th and got some love by the SIME conference in Stockholm that used Twingly Live during the event. Media attention wasn’t bad either, with among others dagensmedia.se and feber.se covering our news. Also in November, Twingly was chosen by Internetworld as one of Sweden’s 100 best websites. And our partner Halens even won the prize as Sweden’s best website!

December
The time before Christmas is the best to do something good for others that are in need, which is why we encouraged you to help UNICEF help children around the world. We also welcomed another e-commerce partner (Ginza) and introduced you to two Swedish municipalities that connect to the blogosphere via Twingly. Last but not least, we announced that we acquired Bloggportalen.se from Aftonbladet, one of the largest newspaper brands in the Nordic region.

Thank you for a great year!

In this case we can announce that you now have the chance to do this with yet another online shop partnering up with Twingly to show incoming blog links on its site: Swedish media retailer Ginza.se.

Ginza.se with Twingly integration

On the front page and each and every product page, Ginza.se has placed the Twingly Blogstream widget in the right column, showing you the latest products bloggers have written about and linked to. For consumers it’s a great way to discover products on Ginza.se that are getting attention in the blogosphere. The benefit for bloggers is obvious as well: Visibility on a leading e-commerce site in the Nordics, and thus new visitors.

We welcome Ginza.se to the growing family of Twingly partners.

If you have a blog and want to give it a try, just write about a product available on Ginza.se, link to its product page and ping Twingly (very important!). And who knows, maybe one day you’ll have a nice little present from one of your readers in your mail.

When was your first contact with programming?
I think around the age of seven. At that time I discovered that the computer came with something magical called “Quick Basic” and a bunch of example games. Quite fast I started to investigate how I could modify parts of the code to get different kind of benefits. After following a few examples in a book my father had, I coded a program that allowed me to enter all the VHS movies we had and get them saved in a text file. To me it was very thrilling that it was possible to make the computer do basically whatever you wanted it to do. Then at the age of 11, I came across a “HTML school” in a computer magazine. The structure made a lot of sense to me, so I started to learn HTML straight away. My computer didn’t have a web browser, but I still enjoyed writing HTML. My interest grew even stronger a couple of years later when the family got an Internet connection, and since then I’ve been keeping on learning Javascript, CSS, PHP and so on. Later I decided to to study computer science and IT security among other things.

And when did you get in touch with Twingly?
Well, I guess it depends what you mean by “got in touch”. The first time I got to know about Twingly was as a blogger, a long time before I was hired. I joined Twingly back in 2008 thanks to a project called “Twingly Summer of Code“. We were a group of four people who set out on a journey to build a huge map tool to visualize the blogosphere. A bit like Google Maps, but with blogs instead of cities. When the project ended I was asked if I would like to stay. I said yes right away.

You say you heard about Twingly for the first time as a blogger. When did you start blogging?
That was in 2005. Originally I used a blog system I built from scratch, but after some time I made the switch to WordPress. To me the Twingly service was interesting, I liked the idea to connect bloggers and newspapers. That type of connections had been a standard among blog systems for a long time and it seemed like a natural thing to widen the areas where those connections could be made. Twingly seemed like a really nice company, and the Summer of Code project proved it to be that way.

Do you still blog today?
It’s been quite a while since I posted on my personal blog, and even longer since I wrote something on the blog I started back in 2005. I guess I really should sit down and get a few posts written, but it’s easy to prioritize other things. I do use Twitter, which is considered a microblog, so I guess you could say that I still blog… ; )

You are the Interface Developer at Twingly. What tasks does this role cover?
“Interface Developer” basically means that I code (and design) the front end stuff, the things you see in the web browser when you are visiting our site. That doesn’t exclude that I code other parts of our system as well, but mainly I’m coding away in the stuff our users see. Mainly I code HTML, CSS, JavaScript and C# / ASP.NET. But I do spend quite some time in Photoshop as well.

What have been the most fun projects for you during your time at Twingly?
It was a lot of fun to work with the Summer of Code project, we had a great time within the group and it was challenging to get things to work the way we wanted, partially because we where using early pre-release tools. Things could change and break as soon as we switched to a new version, which we had to in order to access a new feature we needed. It might have been a bit chaotic from time to time, but it never stopped being fun. Twingly Channels was also a really great project to develop, although it could get quite intense just before the release…

What are your thoughts on the future ob web interfaces? What kind of services or apps do impress you the most right now?
I believe that it will be more common that we’ll see web pages and services being built with a “mobile first” approach. Smartphones are basically becoming the standard phone, thanks to iPhone and Android. Since they have advanced web browsers it makes sense to make sure that web pages are as easy to use as possible when being viewed on such devices. I don’t think that it means the death of smartphone apps though, nor do I believe that desktop apps will be completely eliminated either.

Right now I’m pretty impressed by the growth of Instagram, but I do find it a bit odd that they still haven’t added any ability for users to browse their photos online. There are quite a few other web services for that, but I really do believe that Instagram should develop some way for users to interact through a web browser as well. Dropbox is also a service that amazes me. They have brought file syncing to the masses in a very user friendly way, and thanks to their API they have enabled sync opportunities to a lot of other apps. They managed to make my digital life far easier than it used to be.

If you could change two things of the digital world today with the snap of a finger, what would that be?
I’d like to see good export functions on all web services and apps. I want to be able to download my data (and have it in a sane format) at any given time. I would also add a unified API (yeah, utopia, I know) between different web services/apps. Imagine being able to connect your Flickr and 500px account to Facebook to have the photos being displayed in your photo album there, and at the same time having comments pushed back to the services you have connected.