Primelabs

Twingly Report Sweden that is released today shows that the humorous blog Tjuvlyssnat.se is the most linked blog in Sweden. The Report also reveals some previous unknown facts about the blogosphere. The purpose of the Report is to share knowledge and generate interest in the blogosphere. The Report is available at www.primelabs.se/twingly (only in Swedish though), where you also find the data that the Report is based on.

We have analyzed how blogs are linking to each other and what they write about. We have within several categories measured the influence the blogs have and can therefore present the most influential blog in each category. Interesting to see is that current Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs Carl Bildt does not only have great influential in political issues in Sweden, but has also the most influential political blog in the Swedish blogosphere.

We have also covered what people are blogging about and it reveals that Swedish bloggers love the spring, life and food, but hates funerals, snow and school.

Blogs have in a short while become an important medium with for instance great influence of the political scene. Up until now there hasn’t been that much knowledge available about the blogosphere. But with our blog search engine Twingly we can basically extract any kind of data from the blogosphere. What would you like to know about your blogosphere?

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 newspaper’s 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 newspaper’s 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.