Rene Svendsen, managing editor at VG Nett, explains why the newspaper chooses to publish blog links on their web site:

“We believe that the articles on VG Nett enriches by showing links to good blog posts on same topic that the article deal with. There are many clever bloggers out there and we wish to give them more attention”

Now we have the two largest Norwegian newspapers as partners. Norway feels like a really good market for us at Twingly. Blogs understand how our service works and both VG.no and Dagbladet.no like it from their side too. From our Swedish experience, we also learnt that it is beneficial for all parties when two of the largest media sites within a country starts using Twingly. The bloggers learn how to use Twingly and can link to different sources. Therefore the linking increases in general and both the newspapers and the bloggers benefits from it.

Since launch we have improved the algorithm in numerous ways and now we are resetting the index to start over from scratch with the improvements in place. This means that for a period of time the spam-free index will be quite empty. It could take up to a couple of weeks before we hit the same numbers of approved blogs as before, so please be patient!

From then on, the index will grow to contain many more blogs than before. Approaching on the horizon is the point where the spam-free index provides enough coverage to make it the only available option for searching. The remake is one step closer to the end of the beta stage for the spam-free index.

If your blog was approved before it will “probably” be approved to the spam-free index in this update as well. Fact is, we’re going to index a lot more blogs this time so it’s a higher chance you’ll be approved. You can see if your blog is approved in your blog profile. If not, let us know!

Where? Düsseldorf - Bar Konvex Oberbilker Allee 26a 40215 Düsseldorf
When? 16th of September (Tuesday night) from 7.00pm
What? Nice and relaxed catch up over a couple of pints

We will definitely be there and are excited to meet YOU! “We” - that is Anton and Anja. Oh yes - there is a good opportunity to practise talking English with Anton and exchanging views and about the blogosphere, so that way we aim for truely adding to the increasing international character of the OMD.

As the venue we aim for might not take much more than around 100 people, please let us know if you intend to come round by leaving a comment here or on the OMD blogpost or simply email to Djure who is kindly organising the event together with Mario Sixtus.

Looking forward to see you around!

P.S.: More about this in German language you can find here and here.

2. You ping us. Many blog platforms can ping us automatically, otherwise fill in your blogs front page url here.

3. Pong! Our system look at your post and say “Nice! Let’s give it to our partner!” (Psst.. this is not the real servers, they’re in a safe server park… somewhere)

4. We automatically put a link to your blog post in the Twingly Blogstream-widget on the article you’ve linked to.

5. Woho! Your blog gets tons of attention and visitors!

Good to know: People can and may report spam or abuse which moderators at the partner could check out. If they find it is OK, they let it be but if they think it’s spam or similar - they ban the post. They can also ban the whole blog. So behave!

The demo lacks real-world data, with a full hierarchy of several hundred thousands or millions of blogs in place this is going to be huge.

Have a look at the video:

Follow the TSOC team in their blog at http://summer.twingly.com/

Please give them support in any way you can!

Mission statement: You and your fellow team mates are to embark on an epic mission. During six weeks, you are the focal point of our company. You get the best tools, the best technology, the best knowledge and a huge pile of blog data to play with.

Your objective is to push the edge of blog search into what was previously thought impossible. Think bigger, do better. Bring the entire breadth of the global blogosphere into one interface, placing any blog in the world a mouse click away. Allow the user to explore a universe rather than scroll a list of result. Make it visual, make it interactive. Bring the user to amazing discoveries.

Oh, and you get six weeks. You better start right away.

Regards,
Martin Källström
CEO Twingly

Follow the project on http://summer.twingly.com/. Starting from today, there will be a daily YouTube episode posted by the team at 6 PM GMT (10 AM in San Francisco, 19:00 in Stockholm).

This morning, Twingly is live to the public audience. I’m proud and awed by the effort put down by our team up to this point, as well as a good darn grateful to all the beta testers that have provided feedback during the beta period. More than 3500 people have participated.

Twingly.com now covers over 30 million blogs all over the world but we focus on being number one in Europe, both regarding spam control and working with several different languages.

Since we are going public we are finally able to make our widget platform available for bloggers. You can create a widget out of any search result or pick one from the new blog profile page, see for example the profile for Engadget. You access the profile page trough the search result or by hacking the url. Find the widgets from your own blog or use a widget for another blog if you like. You can actually hack any search query into the widget, which is truly powerful.

But this is only the beginning as we’ll make more and more kinds of widgets available. So please participate in working out the Tech plan!

BTW, there is some functionality that is only provided to registered users, but the registration is completely painless and instantaneous. More specifically:

- Participating in the Tech plan
- Voting up posts in the search result (liking posts)
- Sending feedback (so you wont have to enter your contact details every time)

The user registration will be the basis of a lot of things to come, claiming your blog will allow you to control how it is presented on Twingly. Please note that using the widgets does not require any kind of registration!

Key functionality on Twingly.com:

- Spam free search
- Social search. The users enhance the search results by voting on posts they like. Bloggers enhance the search results by linking to posts they like
- Subscribe to search results by RSS and alerts via email
- Language functionality: Translation of search results and filtering based on language
- Twingly widget platform. Parts of Twingly.com can be incorporated into blogs
- Hot Right Now. Overview on hot topics in the blogosphere
- User directed development through a tech plan open for voting.

All in all, thanks to all that have participated in the great effort leading up to this point.

Now, lets get to work with the next big thing in blog search.

Lots and lots of users gathered to bring our servers to their knees in the first Twingly Meltdown. Our tech team were quite sure that a group of regular users couldn’t do any damage to our servers. So towards the end of the Meltdown Hour I shared a small script with everyone on the Twingly Skype Chat that made it possible for all users to send thousands of simultaneous requests.

Before people started using the script, execution went flawless. Our database servers who are protected by caching did hardly show any load at all. On the web fronts the traffic produced visible CPU load. Some users in faraway countries experienced periods of slow searches. Overall, search was fast.

When the more aggressive load script was deployed by lots of users, the tune turned a little more hostile in the tech team chat. Since the script used the undocumented and far less tested json API, it managed to bring out a bug in the code. The web servers are put under much more strain when they have to deal with errors in execution. Technically, this is the difference between performance testing and stress testing. So this actually affected the experience of other users, who at times got an error message while searching.

Big thank you to all participants, hope you had a lot of fun trying to crash Twingly. It helped a lot to see how the system behaves under strain, real world traffic is really hard to simulate properly.

Top image is the web log stats from the day of the event. Clearly visible is the fact that by the end of the event, a lot less users managed to send a lot more searches.