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)

We have improved the Twinglywidget with a new filter that give more blogs attention from our partners. The filter is made so every blog can get only one link from each article. The latest relevant blog post from each blog is shown.

This brings attention to a larger number of blogs, but also deals with a previous error in the widget where the same blog post could happen to be shown duplicate times if it had been published under more than one URL. It also hinders some forms of abuse.

We would like to hear your opinion, leave a comment or trackback!

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.

Parallelly with our launch last week Martin and I (Anton) exhibited The Next Web in Amsterdam, one of Europes coolest web 2.0-conferences. With speakers like Robert Scoble, Kevin Rose and Chris Saad it was awesome. A lot of interesting people, talks, startups (like Twingly!) and Diggnation broadcasted direct from the scene. We are definitely happy with The Next Web visit. See you next year!

Tending to our trip to Amsterdam De Telegraaf, a large newspaper in the Netherlands, have launched Twingly on their site! They have one of the better implementations of the widget (if you ask me) and the blogosphere in Netherland seems to be pretty happy with it!

From Amsterdam with love

/Anton

Some pictures from The Next Web (you’ll find many more here):

Photo: ©Pieter Baert

Photo: Anne Helmond

Photo: Charles Nouÿrit

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.

Since yesterday Publico.pt, Portugals largest newspaper on the net and 4th site totally, use Twingly Blogstream to connect to the blogosphere. This means they’re first in Portugal to link back to blog posts that link to their articles.

Our search index contains 370 000 Portuguese blogs.

Publicos own article about Twingly (in Portuguese):
Notícias do PUBLICO.PT com ligação à blogosfera

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)

Our first month with Twingly has been intense, interesting and fun. The feedback has been overwhelming, and we’re thrilled by all the positive comments reaching us. We feel it’s time to sum up recent events and share our view of things to come.

Launch
Twingly was launched on February 6 by the largest Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter at DN.se. The immediate feedback was very positive and the following day the second largest daily Svenska Dagbladet launched their implementation of the service at Svd.se.

Twingly has created new opportunities and important changes both in the Swedish blogosphere and for the major news web sites. DN and SvD have, since launching Twingly, been overtaking all other news sites in terms of links coming from the blogosphere - an effect that we’re obviously thrilled by.

While launching Twingly at DN and SvD was a big event for us, we’ve also been up to other things.

Twingly Screensaver
In February we released our global blog activity 3D visualization into the public domain. Our two (very talented) students Malin and Linus did a really great job with it - it’s very cool, slightly useful (as a screensaver) but most importantly it shows a great overview of what’s going on in the blogosphere. Right now several thousand people are using it every day and our demo movie on Youtube has been watched by131,000 people.

Sunday Times in South Africa will be using Twingly
The largest weekly in South Africa, The Sunday Times, have chosen Primelabs and Twingly as their provider of blog data. We’re of course thrilled and hope to be able to announce even more international customers this spring.

The Future
We look ahead with great confidence and see a bright future for Twingly. Feedback from the blogosphere and media has been overwhelmingly positive, which gives us a lot of confidence now that we’ll move into international sales. Our vision is to evolve through the services we provider, so we’ll be continuously adding new functions and services. The Twingly website is currently just an embryo and will be developing both in terms of form and function.

Thank you!
So many things have happened in the few months since launch. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the bloggers, the media and everyone for the enthusiasm and energy you’ve contributed with. We had great expectations but had still not counted on getting such awesome feedback.

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.