Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » Twingly

Bild reaches out to blogosphere with Twingly

Laura Oliver — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 18:32:58 +0000

We’ve seen it picked up by newspapers elsewhere in Europe, but this week Germany’s Bild announced it will improve its connections with bloggers by introducing Twingly to its sport, entertainment, German premier league football and English-language site, Bild.com.

The Blogstream widget links back to bloggers who are linking to Bild content in an attempt to share some link love and let the paper see where its content is being picked up and talked about.

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Online Journalism Scandinavia: VG.no adds blog trackbacks to articles with Twingly

Kristine Lowe — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:31:51 +0000

Schibsted-owned VG.no has added a popular ‘trackback’ function, allowing the site to display what bloggers are saying about its articles.

Yesterday the site quietly opened its virtual doors for bloggers and started using Swedish blogsearch-engine Twingly to display links from bloggers below individual articles.

Previously the country’s second biggest tabloid Dagbladet had adopted the function for its news site, while the news sites of other influential Scandinavian newspapers, such as Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter in Sweden, and Politiken in Denmark, have been using it for some time now.

Several of these papers have seen Twingly as a way of building a bridge to the blogosphere.

“Twingly has built a solid position in the Nordic market, so it was a natural choice. We see it as a way to enrich our articles,” René Svendsen, deputy editor for VG.no, told Journalism.co.uk.

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Online Journalism Scandinavia: Here come the Web 2.0 docusoaps

Kristine Lowe — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:43:10 +0000

Swedes are getting so hooked on social media that for many web-crazy young things reality-TV has all but moved online.

Last night Twingly, the Swedish web company that supplies a blog trackback functionality to newspapers world-wide and last week launched its international spam free blog search engine Twingly.com, aired the first programme of its new reality-series on YouTube: The Summer of Code.

YouTube reality-show
“We have recruited four ambitious interns and given them six weeks to develop a visual search engine for blogs; Twingly Blogoscope,” said Martin Källström, CEO of Twingly.

“Everyone can follow what happens in the project via daily episodes on YouTube.”

The episodes will be uploaded Monday to Friday at 6 PM GMT (10 AM in San Francisco, 19:00 in Stockholm) and the first programme aired last night.

“Openness in this project is a way to show the daily life in the office,” said Källström.

“Generally people are not familiar with the stimulating working atmosphere in a start-up. Hopefully Twingly Summer of Code will inspire more people to join Twingly or other start-ups.”

Media increasingly about conversation
Last week, Twingly launched its search engine Twingly.com to track 30 million blogs all over the world.

Despite this global scope, Källström said Twingly will concentrate on being number one in Europe, working with several different European languages.

“Google has not improved its blog search for more than two years,” he told Journalism.co.uk.

The company has teamed up with newspapers in Spain, Portugal, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and South Africa, to show blog links to the news sites’ articles.

Källström added that his hope was for Twingly to be able to take on both Google and Technorati by providing more functionality and driving traffic to bloggers via its media partnerships.

“Media is more and more about the conversation between media and its readers. We see a very strong synergy between mainstream media and bloggers and try to provide a bridge that can improve this synergy,” he said.

Blogs have replaced docusoaps
Twingly’s target group for The Summer of Code will no doubt draw an audience of uber-geeks but a young Swedish reporter recently admitted she was addicted to a very different sort of ‘web docusoap’.

Madeleine Östlund, a reporter with the Swedish equivalent of Press Gazette, Dagens Media, claimed the country’s fashion blogs had replaced docusoaps (link in Swedish).

She confessed she found it increasingly difficult to live without her daily fix of intimate everyday details and gossip from the country’s high-profile fashion bloggers, a phenomenon Journalism.co.uk has described here.

“It is not their blogging about clothes that draws me in, rather it is the surprise and fascination with which I read about these young girls’ private lives. Surprise and fascination about how much they often reveal,” she wrote, citing posts about broken hearts, hospital stays, what they had for breakfast and descriptions of a caesarian birth.

Roll on the Web 2.0 docusoap about dashing media journalists, I say.

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