Month: August 2007

The TV-show Idol attracts more attention with Twingly

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Today the global successful TV-show Idol (the Swedish equivalent of American Idol) started using Twingly at the official website at TV4.se. They are using the Twingly widget to link back to the blogs that are linking to their articles. Idol in Sweden is just as popular as the show is in many other countries and is one of the biggest TV-shows at TV4 this fall.

This is the first time Twingly is used on a niche and trend sensitive website to connect with the latest in the blogosphere.

We welcome TV4 to the Twinglysphere and wish the best of luck to all new Idols!

In the cut-and-paste-era the conversations follows the content to news channels

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This blog post can be read on this blog, through an RSS reader or perhaps even through somebody’s Facebook profile. If another blog writes about the same subject and links to this post it will be visible through that blogs RSS feed, somebody else’s profile and in hundreds of other RSS readers. Somebody comments this post. Someone else comments the same thing but on another blog that writes about the same thing. Content and conversation are being spread out in several places.

A VC writes about how content is no longer connected to a specific location but rather distributed through numerous different channels on the internet. Not only the content, but the whole of the conversation is available in other places than the comment field of the blog itself. Why shouldn’t it be possible to comment on a blog post directly in the RSS reader which then gets synchronized with the other comments?

We need to think of content as bits that can be created, assembled, re-assembled, anywhere at any time. Because that is, in fact, what digital content is. I am slowly but surely breaking the content I create up into parts and creating them in different places and then re-assembling them in various ways. The posts I write and the comments you and I create don’t have to be housed in the same system and they aren’t anymore.

Steve Rubel has similar thoughts: we need to stop thinking about web pages and start thinking about web services where everything is portable, like a big cut-and-paste table where you can assemble your favorite services in any way you see fit. What matters today are widgets; web site traffic has therefore lost some of it’s relevance.

Don’t wait. Start now to make everything on your website embeddable. Traffic is becoming something that happens elsewhere, not just on your site.

Union Square Ventures motivate their investment in Twitter

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Union Square Ventures were one of the participants in a newly completed round of financing of Twitter. They’re motivating their participating in an interesting article:

There is something really powerful about public, asynchronous text communications where a reply is not expected. A great example is blogging. You blog something and it’s out there on the Internet for public consumption. Others read it and they either comment or create their own blog post in reaction. Collectively, we engage in a discussion.
The asynchronous aspect of blogging is critical because “real time” conversations such as conference calls don’t scale past something like 20 people. Keeping the communication public is equally vital. When anything is made totally public with no limitations on who can participate, you create an open market for ideas, thoughts, and opinions.

Blogs and microblogging tools like Twitter and Jaiku are examples of how the Internet has created a wholly new form of communication that, by virtue of being asynchronous, allows dozens or hundreds of individuals to participate in a huge conversation without geographical limitations. It’s a possibility that’s not existed at any point earlier in world history.
Blogs and microblogs will keep evolving and remain an important feature of the online world for the foreseeable future. Having millions of people participating on equal terms in a conversation the size of the current blogosphere is something unique and as far from a passing fad as you could possibly go.