Twingly Blog

Hier könnt ihr das Interview auf Deutsch lesen.

The German crime drama series Tatort (German for “crime scene”) is the most discussed TV show among Twitter users in Germany. A while ago Stefanie Assmann and Nicole Greiner started to analyse the Twitter feedback on a couple of episodes. In our interview, Stefanie explains how that happened, what it is that gets the tweeting audience excited as well as what the next step could look like.

Tell us a bit about you.
My name is Stefanie Assmann, @miss_assmann on Twitter. I’m working as a consultant at Vico Research, a German full-service agency for social media, dealing mainly with monitoring and social media. About two years ago I learned about social media monitoring for the first time while writing my Master thesis. Back then there wasn’t too much literature on that topic, which made me eventually launch a blog about it. It’s fascinating to see how users discuss brands and products. Analysing their comments always leads to interesting insights.

You have started to look closer at what Twitter users say about Tatort episodes and to publish the results on your blog. Why?
On Mondays at the office we usually discuss the latest episode of Tatort (which is always broadcasted on Sunday evenings), and we found it impressive how many people were doing the same on Twitter during the show. Nicole and I thought it might be fun to use those tweets by people watching Tatort to re-tell the story of the episode. Eventually, that led to a couple of blog posts where we evaluated the Tatort-buzz on Twitter. Unfortunately, we don’t have the time to do that regularly.

Why is Tatort the single regular TV show in Germany getting that much attention on Twitter?
Good question and food for another analysis. Many of my friends usually watch Tatort on Sunday evenings. It’s quite a popular series. And as it is the case for many social media enthusiasts, they can’t stop using their smartphone, even while doing something else like watching TV. So they started to tweet about Tatort. Now that has become some kind of “tradition” on Twitter. I remember that Tatort was the first TV show that appeared in my Twitter timeline.

Which tools do you use for your analysis?
We started with the Twitter search, and we also used a tool from VICO, my employer, to create a tag cloud. Recently Twingly was so kind to provide us with a Liveboard that helps to get a quick overview about the amount and type of Tatort tweets.

Are there any typical patterns or reactions that you observe?
Since we don’t cover each Tatort episode it’s a bit hard to say. But my impression is that usually the feedback is rather varied, with both positive and negative comments. So some people love an episode while others hate it. Often, the actual plot isn’t what engages users in the online discussion. Instead it’s specific details that make people tweet. If the audience perceives a detail as unrealistic or absurd, that would usually lead to a lot of complaining on Twitter.

You think Tatort will be an exception regarding its Twitter buzz, or will other German TV shows become equally popular on Twitter?
Tatort was definitely the first show in Germany to create this kind of engagement among Twitter users. But nowadays there are other TV shows as well that get lots of tweets. I think there is a lot of potential in “social tv”, and specific web services are popping up to build on that and to connect traditional TV with the web.

Do you plan to extend your analysis to other shows?
I would love to, but I have yet to find a show which excites me enough to invest the time. A US show would be fun, since there the stations themselves already actively use social media.

Yves Rocher has recently started to use the Twinly Blogstream widget to show incoming links from blogs to its product pages in the four Nordic countries. We are excited to have this renowned global cosmetics and beauty brand as a partner! Curious to get to know more about the role that blogs and social media play for the company, we spoke to Maiju Romppanen, project manager for social media at Yves Rocher.

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.

Happy New Year to all of you! We hope that you are as excited as we to see what 2012 will have in store. If the upcoming next months will only be half as eventful as 2011, there really won’t be a shortage of news! Let’s do a quick recap about what happened during the past year at and around Twingly.

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!

With 2012 looming ahead and it’s pending tinfoil-hat apocalypse, it is time to review our predictions for 2011 from one year ago!

As it turns out, we had 5 hits and only 2 misses, of which one was a close miss. Not a bad score at all! Stick around for our upcoming predictions for 2012!

Google buys MySpace
Nope. Nu-uh. Well, kind of close. MySpace was acquired, just as we predicted. But not by Google but by a small ad network called Specific Media with Justin Timberlake as one of the financiers. For a meager €35M, setting NewsCorp back just over half a billion dollars compared to what they bought the website for in 2005. Although in between, they did sign an advertising deal with Google worth $900M, so perhaps it ended up about even.

Everything goes mobile and local
Nailed it! It is even so obvious that our reaction to this now was “huh? was that really a prediction for 2011, it feels as if it happened waaay earlier.” Everything will keep going more mobile and more location based. Facebook check-ins are now mainstream, and all the big Internet companies are thinking mobile first in their strategies. It is not without cause. According to our upcoming predictions, smartphone adoption will be the strongest driving force for Internet penetration all over the world in 2012 and beyond.

Tablet newspapers will find success if they include content from several newspapers
Well, no. The experimenting goes on although straight-out success is hard earned. So far we haven’t seen anyone really nail the right format for reading newspapers on the iPad. Er, sorry, tablets. It’s easy to forget there are multiple vendors in the tablet space, you don’t see many others around as of yet. Galaxy Note is the sexier one among the iPad competitors with a very slim form factor and capable feature set.

Facebook launches Facebook phone
Nailed it! Even though it has not yet seen the light of day, Facebook is leaning so heavily towards mobile that they are even planning to release their own hardware.

Facebook watches LinkedIn IPO
Nailed it! Also, 2011 became the most intense IPO year in a long time. And yes, Facebook is getting there real soon.

Realtime commenting will be everywhere
Nailed it! Facebook comments are now everywhere, realtime and social. When we comment in many blogs and newspapers, the comments are also displayed in our timelines inside of Facebook, driving our friends to the content we commented on. But also moving the conversation into Facebook and with that much of the pageviews/ad revenue otherwise generated by users refreshing comment threads.

Gowalla pivots like crazy to try to catch up with Foursquare
Nailed it! Gowalla was reborn in September 2011. Sad to say, the pivot really didn’t help anything but the companies downward spiral. The founders decided to shut down the company and accept gratuitous employment offers from Facebook.

With as much as five bulls-eye hits, one close miss and only one completely failed prediction, we are all out happy with the results! Let’s hope we can do as good for 2012!

Image credit: tibchris (CC BY 2.0)

The Twingly Blogstream and Blogwatch widget is used by many leading news and e-commerce sites, but that doesn’t mean that other kind of online projects don’t benefit from it. One example are websites of local municipalities, which Twingly enables to highlight and show the discussion about local matters, issues and projects on blogs to visitors and citizens.

The Swedish municipalities Strängnäs, Borås and Tranemo have chosen to put the Blogwatch widget on their site in order to do exactly that. We asked Strängnäs and Borås a couple of questions about their thoughts on connecting their municipality’s website with the blogosphere.

Twingly integration on Strängnäs municipality's website

Sofia Lacik works with the communication team at Strängnäs municipality.

Hello Sofia. What’s the story behind the Twingly integration on Strängnäs municipality’s website?
I had used Twingly in the past at another organisation. Then at SSCW I met Twingly CEO Martin Källström and we discussed whether Twingly would be a useful solution for Strängnäs municipality.

How was the feedback when you launched the integration?
When we announced that we would show blog posts about Strängnäs, we only got positive reactions. For us it’s a great way to keep tabs on what’s being written about the municipality, and personally, I feel I’m better informed about topics, opinions and thoughts relevant for Strängnäs that are appearing on blogs.

How much time do you invest into working with social media?
It varies, but usually about 15 hours a week. That includes creating and following up on the strategy and various social media activities, answering questions, replying to comments, publishing news and monitoring the different channels. I also quite often meet with colleagues who need help or support regarding using social media. The communication department spends a couple of more hours a week mainly on monitoring as well as publishing and encouraging other colleagues to try using the social web for their work.

And what’s the next step?
Our goal is to increasingly leverage social media for our work at the municipality, and to make other offices and departments aware of the potential this has for the communication with those interested and those living in and around Strängnäs.

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Twingly integration on Borås municipality's website

Marie Ingvarsson is the head of marketing and communication at Borås municipality.

Hello Marie. Tell us why Borås benefits from Twingly.
When we launched our social media activities we realized quickly the advantages of  Twingly’s tools for our monitoring. Apart from showing the Twingly widget with links to blogs mentioning Borås, we also have used Twingly Live and Liveboard, for example during conferences, to show the latest developments and comments in real time. Of course it also helps that Twingly is a Sweden-based company and that the team has always been helpful and quick to reply to our questions.

Do your social media activities require a lot of time?
That depends. We publish quite a lot on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Bambuser, but then this content has been published through other channels as well, so it doesn’t need to be created from scratch. Our monitoring feeds are updating automatically which makes it easy for us to keep an eye on everything that’s being written about Borås. The setup of the whole work flow and of the accounts has taken a while, and naturally replying to questions and participating in the discussions might require some time – let’s not forget that social media is about communicating and interacting.

Will you integrate Twingly even more on your site?
We are thinking about embedding the Twingly Blogstream widget on all of our sites to show incoming links from blogs. Since the content on some of our less regularly updated pages probably isn’t being discussed a lot on blogs, it’s possible that there wouldn’t be a lot of incoming links, so we aren’t sure yet how to do it. In the end, it simply might be a question of being as transparent as possible, which is what we strive for.

What else is on your road-map?
One of the things we are planning to launch are e-petitions, a tool which enables citizens to make suggestions about issues concerning the municipality, to discuss them and to collaborate on them.

Not even two weeks left until Christmas Eve. Maybe some of you bloggers out there would like to show your readers the presents that you are hoping to find under the Christmas tree, and at the same time get traffic from a huge e-commerce site?

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.

Today we bring you our 8th Twingly Team Interview – an article series where we chat with Twingly employees about their time with us as well as about the past, current and future state of the web and blogging. This time we interviewed Kristoffer Forsgren, 28 years old, who is Interface Developer at Twingly.

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.

UNICEF/Pelle Bergström

Every year, 21.000 children under the age of five die, mainly because of malnutrition, diarrhea or other diseases. The Swedish division of UNICEF has launched a blog campaign aiming at raising awareness about this silent disaster and providing help to those who really need it.

If you have a blog and would like to support this cause, UNICEF asks you to publish a post about it, including some text snippets, photos and videos that they provide here (this campaign is targeted at bloggers writing in Swedish).

It’s the most important blog post you could write this year. And in addition to that you help raising awareness about this misery, re:member has partnered up with UNICEF and agreed to donate 6 bags Nutriset per published blog post. Nutriset is an oil-based paste of peanuts which is used to treat children with severe acute malnutrition (you can read more about it here).

After you have published your blog posts and included the text and media provided on this site, it is important that you ping Twingly about your blog posts (here is an explanation how to do that). By doing so, your post will appear in the blog feed on UNICEF’s campaign blog and become part of the campaign.

Let’s make sure that as many people as possible join the campaign and help the children around the world!

Last week we introduced you to “Pay a Blogger Day”, a commendable initiative by our friends over att Flattr which has the goal to encourage those who love to read blogs to show some support to their favourite bloggers.

Today is Pay a Blogger Day!

If you – like us at Twingly – can’t (or don’t want to) imagine an Internet without blogs, today is your chance to give something back to the millions of people publishing news, thoughts, observations and other kind of content on blogs, creating a more interesting, diverse and information-rich web.

Let’s all make sure that today, bloggers around the world will feel especially appreciated, by – for example – clicking their Flattr buttons (if you have a Flattr account), looking for a donation button and giving a little gift, buying books or merchandise promoted on their websites, or by spreading the word about Pay a Blogger Day on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms.

In case you wonder about which big news sites and blogs have covered Pay a Blogger Day, here is a list of selected articles encouraging readers to show their support for blogs today:

The Telegraph: ‘Pay a blogger day’ launches next week

Mashable: Pay a Blogger Day Hopes You’ll Pay for the Content You Love

GigaOm: Can ‘Pay a Blogger Day’ help Flattr gain velocity?

Articstartup: Flattr Hopes To Get ‘Pay A Blogger Day’ Rolling

Twingy loves blogs, and we’d like nothing more than to see the blogosphere grow and flourish. That’s why we fully support the latest initiative of our friends at Flattr. The startup offering a social micropayments service for content producers and creative people has come up with the clever idea of a “Pay a Blogger Day”, a day when everybody is encouraged to support bloggers and to show them their appreciation.

Before you continue to read, please mark November 29 as “Pay A Blogger Day” in your calender.

We spoke to Andrus Purde from the Flattr team about how they came up with the idea and in which ways we all are encouraged to support bloggers on November 29.

Hi Andrus. Pay a Blogger Day is an initiative by Flattr, supported by a couple of other companies who are friends of Bloggers (among them Twingly). Can you explain how and why you came up with the idea?
We at Flattr are always looking for ways to make our service more useful for bloggers. In one brainstorming session we talked about that to really make a difference we need both, the “chicken and the egg”, so providing good tools as well as encouraging people to use them. From there it was a small and logical step to an awareness campaign that is now Pay a Blogger Day.

How exactly does it work, what do you want people around the web to do on November 29?
We want to inspire people to look for ways they can support their favourite bloggers: Look for the donation or Flattr button, buy an e-book or something via an affiliate link. At first on November 29, but in the future, why not every day?!

How are you going to raise awareness during the days leading to the 29th? Any ideas how you could make big news sites cover your campaign?
The payablogger.org minisite has some viral features built into it which have worked rather well. We’re also happy to have Twingly and other partners aboard that do spread the word. But perhaps the most important thing is that feedback from bloggers has been great, and they’ve been instrumental in getting the word out. That in a way is much more important than what big news sites say.

How many people do you think will participate globally? Do you have any figure in mind (even though of course this can’t be measured)?
If we see bloggers post or tweet that there were more donations and purchases on November 29, this has been a successful cause/campaign. And of course the more bloggers, the better.

It’s not a coincidence that Flattr is the company behind Pay a Blogger Day, since bloggers have been a main target group of Flattr from day one. Can you tell us a bit about what’s going on at Flattr? Any new features that you are going to release or ideas you are working on?
Pay a Blogger Day is not pure altruism. If more bloggers are successful in being supported by their communities, there’s a bigger market for Flattr to operate in. So it’s a win-win. Besides raising awareness about the need to give back to bloggers we are making it easier to discover flattrable content. We also want to make using Flattr become an even more social experience, and we have just released new partner tools, so adding Flattr buttons on community sites is now very easy.