Swedish blog experience Twingly goes live tomorrow

Written on 11th June 2008                                                                                                              3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Swedish start-up Twingly sent out an email yesterday to its 3000 private beta testers that their blog search engine goes live on Thursday. This is not just an engine in the line of Google Blogsearch or Technorati, since it offers spam-free results. Every blogger can ping the service, but the people behind Twingly only select the high-quality ones. The engine also has a 3.0 touch to it, as users can ‘like’ posts – which will affect the search results positively.

Twingly at the Next Web conference

It doesn’t stop here though, as CEO Martin Källström and his team want to use their search engine as the basis for developing “kick-ass products”. A fine example is the Twingly Blogstream, a service that aimes to connect mainstream media with bloggers. This objective is close to my heart, as I believe that the majority of media consumers miss out on all the blog fun.

Connecting mainstream and blogs

Right now, Twingly offers a related blogposts widget to fourteen newspapers from all over Europe and one from South-Africa. On top of that, a bunch of Swedish magazines use the services of Twingly. So when a reader of these publications reads an article about the weak dollar, Twingly also suggests some posts from the blogosphere covering the same topic. This is a subtle and valuable way of introducing people to that oh so special world of blogs as the content is really relevant to them.

From a search engine to fun apps

To prove that the blogosphere really is a special world, Twingly has also developed a fun product: the Twingly Screensaver. This program shows a fancy visual representation of the state of the blogosphere, which looks like this:

First we conquer Europe

I think products like this spectacular screensaver are developed to let Twingly go viral. I’m pretty sure the guys from Twingly won’t deny this, as they tend not to hide their ambitions. Their eventual goal is “nothing short of world dominance”. In order to reach that, Twingly is currently focusing its efforts on European blogs. Smart move, as it will be hard enough to get engines like Blogsearch and Technorati out of people’s minds. When they’ve charmed Europe with their fun apps, spam free results, and a clear promise that they’re specifically focusing on this continent, the Swedes will probably head for the United States. This tactic might pay off, as Twingly really creates an unique blog experience.

blog search, screensaver, search, spam free, sweden, Twingly

3 Comments »

Trendpedia.com; discover keyword trends in blogs

Written on 23rd April 2008                                                                                                              5 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Attentio is a market intelligence company based in Brussels. I met its CEO Simon McDermott a few months ago at Plugg. They launched a new service yesterday called Trendpedia. It is a basic search engine that looks for trends in blog posts and generates cool looking graphs with the results.

In this example query we look for “carla bruni” and “nicolas sarkozy” to see how these names are connected:

Clicking on the graph gets you blogposts from that period so you can see why spikes occur.

Although this IS a blog search that description doesn’t quite catch the benefits of Trendpedia. The Social media monitoring, buzz tracking and brand measurement (mentioned in the Window Title) is much more interesting. Simple Blog Search is handled well enough by Google Blogsearch and Technorati. I see it as a perfect companion to Google Alerts to anyone who is passionate about his brand and wants to know the trends surrounding your brand names.

blog search, brands, buzz, Simon McDermott, Trendpedia, web20expo

5 Comments »