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Twingly and Gymgrossisten launch blog competition

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Gymgrossisten

As you maybe did notice, we at Twingly have developed a fascination for fitness lately. A few weeks ago we published the Twingly Report Fitness giving insights into the Swedish fitness blogosphere, and we also went to the Swedish Fitness Festival to present Twingly and how it can help companies from the fitness industry in reaching out to blogs.

Today, we continue that trend by announcing a cooperation with Gymgrossisten, the leading e-commerce site for fitness and supplements in the Nordic countries. With the help of Twingly, Gymgrossisten launches a blog competition where bloggers can win prizes with a total value of 31.000 SEK. The 20 top scoring bloggers will be guaranteed a prize.

In order to participate, we want bloggers to write about their New Year’s resolution or their fitness goal for 2013. By doing that, they not only can win fantastic prizes provided by Gymgrossisten, but also find additional motivation to push themselves to reach their goals.

The blog post needs to contain at least one link to a product from Gymgrossisten.com which the blogger uses to accomplish his or her goal. By linking to the product page at Gymgrossisten.com, the blog will appear and be linked back to on Gymgrossisten.com. After the blog post is published, participants can collect votes from the Bloggportalen.se community and all their friends.

From the 20 blog posts with the highest number of votes on February 6 when the competition ends, Gymgrossisten will decide who has come up with the best New Year’s resolution or fitness goal. The winner will get prizes from Gymgrossisten with a total value of 20.000 SEK. The other 19 top scorers will each get products for about 600 SEK from Gymgrossisten.

We wish everybody participating lots of votes and look forward to see the results!

Twingly Team Interviews: “I want to know if a new technology can make my life easier”

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Recently we could welcome a new developer to our team: Magnus Hörberg. And as it is our tradition with new employees, we did an interview with him to tell you a bit more about him.

Hi Magnus. Tell us about about you.
I am 24 years old, and I grew up in a small Swedish village called Dillnäsby, south of Stockholm. I recently joined Twingly as a developer, before that I worked at a consulting firm. During the past weeks I have made myself familiar with the different IT systems that Twingly needs for its operations to run.

magnusWhen and why did you learn to code?
All my life my family had computers at home. My father worked as a traveling sales man when I was young, but he didn’t enjoy that too much. So he taught himself how to create simple computer programs. Eventually he was able to quit his job and start his own consulting business. Seeing what was possible with programming skills I got inspired. After the military service back in 2008 I myself began to code.

How did you learn it? By experimenting?
Yes, reading, testing and evaluation. I learned the basics during my studies of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering, but personally I think our current school system isn’t really suited to teach full scale application development. Too much is happening too fast for the education system to keep up. You can learn the basics in school, but not enough time is devoted to the subject. At least not at my program. So basicaly you have to sit at home at night and develop your own projects to grow as a developer.

And you are never finished learning, right? Today’s programming knowledge will probably be outdated in a couple of years. How do you keep yourself updated?
Absolutly, it’s very easy to become lazy and start to think “I know enough to do my job, I don’t need to learn that new thing.” But if you meet up with other developers over a few beers and discuss problems you have in your projects, almost always someone will have read an article of a new solution that you can discuss and try out. Also, Hackernews is a great source for new stuff and general thougths on software development. Basicly I think it comes down to curiosity. I want to know if a new technology can make my life easier.

Do you remember you first coding project?
I’m not sure. It could have been a photo album application for one of the student associations I’m a member of. But I never finished that. The first project I finished calculated the inbreeding coefficient of a individual given its family tree.

What is the most exciting part of developing for Twingly?
I would say it’s the amount of data and the amount of development the company currently is going through. And the challenges in renewing an old technology stack. All code always has a debt coupled with it.

What’s the best approach in your eyes to solve that? Rewriting everything? Or just fixing the parts that need to be renewed?
Small incrementing steps. You can never and should never try to fix all problems at once
but if you continually do small improvements you will evolve.

You mentioned the amount of data. There is a lot of talk about big data, many say it’s one of the biggest trends right now. Do you agree?
Absolutely, when storage is so cheap there is no excuse not to store information. You never know when it might come handy.

Apart from big data, which other trends do you see for the near future regarding web technology and trends in development? Is there anything you are especially looking forward to?
Well it’s a couple of things. One is the new mobile OS that Mozilla is developing, the other is the WebRTC effort. Enabeling a developer with relative ease to develop video chat application and stuff like that is really exciting. Also companies as Github and Heroku make a huge impact on how we develop software.

On a Friday evening, do you already look forward getting back to coding on Monday?
Absolutely. But I don’t even need to wait until Monday since I have some own projects I am working on during the weekend.

A Twingly Year in Review – 2012

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Every beginning of a new year, we look back on what happened at Twingly in the previous 12 month. 2012 has certainly been a very exciting time for Twingly, with both a new CEO and a stronger focus than ever on our business to business offerings. So let’s dive into last year’s most important projects, news and events at and from around Twingly.

January
2012 began great with the announcements of Yves Rocher and Nelly.com as new Twingly partners. Yves Rocher, the renowned global cosmetics and beauty brand, uses the Blogstream widget to show incoming links from blogs to its product pages in the four Nordic countries. Nelly.com, one of the largest online fashion stores in Northern Europe, also connects through Twingly with the blogosphere. In the end of January, we had completed the move from Bloggportalen to our servers after the acquisition from Aftonbladet in December 2011. We also revealed a redesign of the Bloggportalen.

February
In February we got the chance to speak with Björn Hedensjö, Head of Digital at leading Swedish Newspaper Dagens Nyheter. The company has been one of the first partners to integrate our widget solution, back in 2007, so it was pretty interesting to hear Björns thoughts on that. Days later we presented a list of the most discussed books on Swedish blogs during 2011.

Martin Källström
Martin Källström

March
After six years on duty, Twingly co-founder Martin Källström announced his decision to leave the position as CEO, and introduced his successor Peter Bláha. Martin and a bunch of others are now working on Memoto, a new exciting product you already might have heard about.

Peter Bláha (to the left)
Peter Bláha (to the left)

Meanwhile, Peter told a bit about himself and his goals in this interview. In other news, for the second time, the Webciety conference, part of the digital industry’s biggest international event CeBIT, used our Twingly Live tool to show reactions from Twitter on its live streaming website. And Medienbewachen.de, our German Wiki informing about social media monitoring tools for the German-speaking market, reached close to 100 listings.

April
Twingly and Stena Line, one of the largest ferry operators in the world, launched a blogging campaign.

May
As in the year before, Twingly attended the NEXT Berlin conference.

June
Another leading clothing store from Sweden became Twingly e-commerce partner by enabling our eTrade widget on its product pages: MQ.

July
FACIT.com, Sweden’s first independent guide for everybody who’s looking for a new car, joined the list of Twingly partners and integrated the Blogwatch widget.

September
We did an interview with Tomas Wennström, one of the two founders of popular unconference Sweden Social Web Camp – which Twingly has been a supporter of for many years. A couple of weeks later we released Twingly Report Books, based on data from Twingly Search and Bloggportalen. Furthermore, we teamed up with media and PR service provider Cision to help companies reach out to bloggers, and we worked together with Sweden’s oldest publishing house Norstedts during the release phase of the Swedish version of the bestselling book “Fifty Shades of Grey”.

NovemberTwingly TV/radio report
After the Twingly Report Books followed the Twingly TV/radio report, including an analysis of which of the media websites are being linked to from blogs the most. In the end of November, we proudly announced that the CDON Group, one of the leading e-commerce companies in the Nordic countries, has decided to use Twingly eTrade for all of its e-commerce brands.

December
Before everybody could enjoy a well-deserved Christmas and New Year’s break, December was a busy month for Twingly. The Swedish Armed Forces relaunched their blog portal supported by Twingly, we described the improvements we made to our blog data lately, we published the Twingly Report Fitness and went to the Swedish Fitness Festival 2012 to introduce Twingly’s solutions to the Fitness industry. It became quite a success.

Success at the Swedish Fitness Festival 2012

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Last week, the number one event for the Scandinavian fitness market, the “Swedish Fitness Festival 2012” (Fitnessfestivalen), took place in the Swedish city of Gothenburg. About 20.000 people gathered at the 3 day event, among them club owners, personal trainers and active people from all over the Scandinavian countries. Twingly was there, too!

As in most sectors, even the Fitness market is affected by the changes caused by the Internet and social media. For all businesses in the fitness sector, from studios to retailers for equipment and food, new ways of interacting and communicating with their target group create lots of potential to grow, to improve and to understand the customers’ needs.

Twingly CEO Peter Bláha, himself a big and active fan of sports and fitness, and Twingly CMO Anton Johansson, introduced the audience during a presentation to what social media can do for their fitness-related business. They explained the differences between Facebook fans – which often already are customers – and Twitter followers as well as blog readers who might act as great multiplicators, give feedback, discuss issues and could become potential customers in the future. And of course they highlighted how Twingly’s eTrade and Blogwatch solution are a great tools to connect fitness-related businesses and websites to the blogosphere.

Peter FF tal3And since we released our Twingly Report Fitness right in time for the festival, Peter and Anton had proof enough to show how big the fitness blogosphere in Sweden actually is, and how much impact it can have on brands and companies. The two brought about 50 printed reports to their presentation, which didn’t last long since apparently everybody in the audience wanted to get hold of a copy.

Speaking about the report: It got some great response from many fitness bloggers. Here is a list of posts from the past days referring to it:

http://erdoderdo.com/2012/12/07/mest-lankade-fitnessbloggarna-enligt-twingly-report-och-jag-ar-med
http://blogg.loppi.se/linda/2012/12/07/pa-24-e-plats
http://emliscious.blogspot.se/2012/12/en-av-sveriges-25-maktigaste.html
http://sparkibaken.se/tag/twingly
http://trendotraning.se/2012/12/07/1777846
http://www.finest.se/userBlog/entry.php?uid=31205&beid=2300384
http://blogg.piggelina.se/2012/12/sveriges-mktigaste-trningsbloggar
http://uppochhoppa.se/2012/12/07/sveriges-maktigaste-traningsbloggar
http://blogg.veckorevyn.com/ptfia/2012/12/07/stolthet
http://fitnessochhalsa.blogspot.se/2012/12/lankkarlek.html

It’s great to see so many bloggers and fitness-oriented people engaging with our report, both online and at the Fitness Festival in Gothenburg.

In case you haven’t seen the report yet, you can get it here as bilingual PDF. And if you wonder anything about how Twingly can help your business to become more engaged with bloggers from around the web, drop us a line. We love to hear from you: info@twingly.com.

Our blog data becomes even better

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A few weeks ago we published an overview about all the things Twingly can do for your business. As you can read there, our main focus is and has always been to help websites such as online shops or media outlets to open up to the blogosphere and to connect with blogs in order to increase their reach and to offer additional context and information to their visitors. But in the past years, a second field of activity has been gaining importance for us: Providing media monitoring companies and other organisations with data from the blogosphere.

We figured that if we index the blogosphere for our blog search engine and our widget solutions connecting websites and blogs, we could use this data in order to enhance and improve companies’ knowledge about what’s hot and trending in blogs. So we launched our API offerings. Last year we explained in detail our offerings to media monitoring companies which comprises of three different APIs.

Our goal is to have the best blog data in Europe in terms of coverage, quality and immediacy.

So what are the aspects we are working on to provide our API clients with even more compelling and complete insights into the world of the blogosphere?

For one, in terms of overall coverage, we are since a couple of months back building new providers for local blog hosts in Europe with focus on the Nordic countries. In the graph below you can for example see that we deployed a provider for a Norwegian blog host in the beginning of October. We have also deployed one for Finland last week and you can spot that the Finnish data is about to increase.

Both in the above graph, for the Nordic countries, and in the graph below for Total, Swedish and English data you can see a big bump in the beginning of September. This is due to deployment of other different providers. They usually find, for us, unknown blogs and index them back in time and therefore the temporary increase of data. Apart from providers we have also built other indexing robots, which together with the providers widen our coverage over all. In the graph below for Total, Swedish and English data you can see that the average total amount of blog posts per day has increased from just above 500.000 per day to over 600.000 per day.

Another improvement has to do with immediacy. A lot of our customers desire to get new posts as soon as possible after being published. Therefore we have built a new indexing algorithm that looks at how often a blog publishes, categorizing it in different indexing cycles ranging from being indexed every 10 minutes to once every month. In this way we can index new blog posts much more efficiently. The glitch in the indexing in the beginning of November is due to deployment of this algorithm.

Having a closer look on the aggregated blog data also means that we at Twingly have lots of insights about different industries, areas of interest and trends. In order to show the potential of our data, we recently published two reports, one about the power of bloggers in the book e-commerce market, one about the power of bloggers within broadcasting and one about how blogging engages the fitness world. All were featured in different media outlets and blogs and can be downloaded here: twingly.com/reports

More than ever, data quality is our focus. We’re constantly adding new features, initiatives and providers to ensure that we are the best blog data service in Europe, and the world. Our product development is all based on customer feedback so if you have thoughts, ideas or a problem – please let us know. And if you aren’t being provided with blog data from Twingly yet, we would love to hear from you: info@twingly.com.

The Swedish Armed Forces relaunch their blog portal supported by Twingly

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blogg.forsvarsmakten.se

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A few days ago, Försvarsmakten, The Swedish Armed Forces, relaunched their blog portal blogg.forsvarsmakten.se where members of the Armes Forces blog about their everyday life at work – both in Sweden an abroad. For the new version, Försvarsmakten decided to use Twingly technology in order to find blogs from around the web that discuss topics related to the Swedish Armes Forces and their assignments.

The new blogg platform looks extremely neat, and the Twingly technology working in the background makes for a great user experience for visitors of blogg.forsvarsmakten.se who want to learn about related issues discussed by bloggers around the web.

You can see that in action when going to blogg.forsvarsmakten.se/omvarldsbevakning. What you see is a pretty cool monitoring section which shows content from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, internal blogs and external blogs that is related to the Swedish Armed Forces. If you uncheck all the boxes on top except “Externa Bloggar”, you are being presented with the latest blog posts from the blogosphere relevant to those who have an interest in the Armed Forces.

We are proud that Försvarsmakten trusts Twingly as the provider of complete blog data in order to make the global blogosphere accessible to everyone interested in topics related to the Armed Forces.

Twingly is looking for a Marketing & Relationship Manager

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We are not only looking for skilled, enthusiastic Account Managers (if that could be you, read on here!), but also for a driven, social and communicative person that wants to join Twingly as Marketing & Relationship Manager.

If you love communication, have experience in the field of PR, Marketing and Sales, prefered from medium-sized or big companies, you might be the perfect candidate for us. Post-secondary education, special language skills and a background in the technology and web industry are a plus. To fit into the role, you should have excellent social competence and be an high-performing indiviudal with a genuine interest in business and marketing strategies. We are looking for a “doer” who doesn’t hesitate to take initiative and who would like to drive Twinglys international expansion forward.

Your Tasks include:

– Working with development of business and partnerships
– Creating marketing and business strategies
– Bringing Twingly into new markets
– Handling public relations together with our PR agency
– Holding presentations at seminars and conferences
– Participating in preparations for and planing of fairs, events and conferences
– Being the visible face of Twingly together with the CEO
– Working with and giving guidance to writers, designers and external service providers
– Being in charge of social media, search engine marketing and Twingly’s bloggers
– Handling Twingly’s client communication, such as the newsletter

If that’s sounds exciting and if you like to work in a young, growing Internet company with great, knowledgeable colleagues and ideal possibilities to grow and to develep, we would love to hear from you. Interviews are being conducted on an ongoing basis.

The role will be based at our headquarter in Linköping and includes some travel and work time spent in Stockholm.

Send your application including your CV to Peter Bláha (jobs@twingly.com). If you have questions, don’t hesitate to call Peter at 0733-707773.

Join the leading blog data company in Europe

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Do you enjoying working at a young, dynamic web company with a great culture and spirit? A company where you get lots of freedom and room to develop? A company where you can be creative and really take initiative? Then you should read on and get in touch with us!

We’d love you to join Twingly, the leading blog data company in Europe.

Twingly is currently looking for driven, enthusiastic Account Managers who want to help us grow even bigger and provide even more Swedish and international companies and organisations with excellent insights into the blogosphere.

As an Account Manager at Twingly you help existing and future clients to increase their knowledge about the latest trends in the blogosphere and to connect with blogs. We offer a variety of cutting-edge services and tools for smaller and bigger, national and international businesses that are of high value to every organisation that wants to benefit from blogs and leverage blogs as a major part of Social Media.

Some of the companies currently working with us are Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, Nelly, Stadium, Halens, Lindex and more. Even though our main focus is on the Nordics, we are also targeting other markets. Overall, we have clients in 15 different countries.

As an Account Manager at Twingly, you work closely with our existing client base as well as with helping more companies from the e-commerce and media industry to implement Twingly services. In addition, you collect feedback from clients for future product development, make sure new clients can get started with their Twingly services and improve and update product and sales material.

The ideal person we are looking for:

– Is driven, high-performing and result-oriented.
– Loves to create great client relations.
– Has at least 1 to 2 years of experience within sales or account management.
– Is interested in account management and has a desire to grow in that area.
– Is structured, takes responsibility and enjoys working in a team.
– Is likely between 20 and 30 years old, post-secondary education is a plus.
– We offer a great place to work and a competitive base salary with a realistic budget, an excellent commission system as well as bonus.

You will be working at our headquarter in central Linköping.

If you think you and Twingly are a perfect match, don’t wait contacting us. Interviews are being conducted on an ongoing basis.

Send your application including your CV to Peter Bláha (jobs@twingly.com). If you have questions, don’t hesitate to call Peter at 0733-707773.

Twingly TV/radio report: Public broadcasting gets linked the most from blogs

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There is lots of talk about the so called “second screen” these days, meaning that viewers of live TV use their smartphones and tablets for interacting with other people watching the same show or movie, via Twitter, Facebook or dedicated second screen apps.

People want to engage with the content they consume, and they want to tell others about it. Thus, it is no surprise that many blog posts discuss current or upcoming TV shows, and often in a more comprehensive way than what’s possible in 140 characters.

For us at Twingly that was reason enough to analyse which of the websites and TV stations are being linked to from blogs the most. We published the results as a PDF report last week. For everybody who doesn’t understand the Swedish language, here is a summary of the results:

During the last 4 month, we found 18.000 links from blogs to Swedish TV and radio websites, with Public broadcasting service being the clear winner in regards to engaging the blogosphere.

81 percent of all links to the websites of Swedish TV channels referred to the Swedish public broadcasting TV SVT, with privately run free TV station TV4 capturing 9 percent of the links from blogs. SVT’s coverage from the Olympic Games in London turned out to be the most engaging TV content in the blogosphere during the past 4 month.

Even when looking at the various video-on-demand services available in Sweden run by TV stations and dedicated video services, SVT gets the lion’s share of the links with svtplay.se (54 percent), with tv4play.se coming second (31 percent). Newly launched Netflix hasn’t gotten too much of the Swedish blogosphere’s attention yet, although that might change in the future.

Among links to Swedish radio stations, an impressive 99 percent go to sverigesradio.se, the website of the Swedish public broadcasting radio.

We also had a look at the websites of international TV stations and how much their content is being discussed in the global blogosphere. With 66.147 links from blogs in the past 4 month, BCC.com ranks highest among the major TV stations, followed by CNN.com with 55.896 links and foxnews.com with 17.118.

If you want to see a detailed visual ranking for the different categories we examined, have a look at the 8 page report (PDF).

What Twingly can do for your business

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When Twingly first launched in 2006, we provided users with a great way to search through the global blogosphere. Over the years we’ve added a variety of products and services targeted at businesses, to make use of the vast blog data that we are indexing permanently, and to enable companies to get insights into the blogosphere, to understand what bloggers are writing about, and to identify trends as they evolve.

Recently we’ve launched a new homepage to give you a better overview about our different services and products. But since we haven’t published a complete list of what Twingly can do for your business in a blog post and lots of things have changed since the early days, here’s a compact overview about our services, categorized by your industry:

How Twingly helps news & media sites

For news and media sites, opening up to the blogosphere has at least two major advantages. By linking to blog posts, media outlets can offer their readers additional information, opinions and point of views from bloggers around the country or even the world. Second, by encouraging bloggers to link to news sites, online newspapers receive additional traffic and benefit from improved search engine rankings.

Twingly has 2 solutions to help news & media sites to accomplish this:

Blogstream: Media sites can embed our Blogstream widget on their pages, showing incoming links from the blogosphere. It’s added value for the readers, and it gives bloggers a clear reason to engage with the content and link to it, because they want to be shown inside the widget, which sends traffic back to them. Read more about Blogstream, and find some examples here.

Blogwatch: The Blogwatch widget is similar to Blogstream, but with the difference that it doesn’t show content with incoming links, but content based on specific, pre-defined keywords. It’s a great way for news & media sites to add additional, relevant content from external sites by linking to it. Read more about Blogwatch and find some examples here.

In case you want to learn more about Blogstream and Blogwatch and how it can help you, we’d love to hear from you.

How Twingly helps e-commerce sites

What’s one of the major ways e-commerce sites can attract new customers without the need of high marketing investments? By giving bloggers who write about products a good reason to link to specific product pages on shopping sites. Twingly has the tools for that!

eTrade: This is our version of Blogstream especially made for e-commerce sites. By embedding the eTrade widget on product pages, every time a blogger links to this specific product page, the link is shown within the widget. Because of that, bloggers really have a reason to link as much as possible to a specific e-commerce site, sending lots of potential new customers. More on eTrade.

Blogwatch: Of course, our Blogwatch widget isn’t only suited for news & media sites. If you run an e-commerce site and want to give your existing and future customers additional context on the products and services sold, why not link to relevant blog posts from across the web? Th Blogwatch widget enables you to do exactly that. Read more about Blogwatch

In case you want to learn more about eTrade and Blogwatch and how it can help you, we’d love to hear from you.

How Twingly helps media monitoring companies

For media monitoring companies, data is what powers them. Lots of data. Fortunately, Twingly can provide you with exactly that: data from the international blogosphere. With Twingly, your monitoring service can get access to over 54 million blogs in 30 languages, easily and conveniently through our API, as a monthly subscription without any hidden fees, all tech support included.

We offer three different data API’s:

Livefeed: Customers get all complete blog data in real time.
Analytics: Commercial search of our blog search engine on Twingly.com/search
RSS-feed: RSS-feed for commercial use

In case you want to try one of those API services, we offer a 2-week free trial period. For more information, have a look at this extensive FAQ for our API services. And don’t hesitate to get in touch with us for all questions and inquiries.