Twingly launched a new blog ranking tool yesterday. In a very modest way, the gentlemen from Sweden explain what’s it all about: “It’s like Google’s PageRank but only for blogs.” Plus, there’s a local touch, based on language. The largest blogs in Swedish gets BlogRank 10, the largest in Dutch get BlogRank 10 and the largest in English get BlogRank 10.
This new blog rank serves as the basis for a take on Technorati’s Top 100. Yes, Twingly is launching 12 different top 100 blogs lists (Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish). Anton Johansson: ” [This] makes it more fun for bloggers. It’s more cool to be a top notch Swedish blog and having a way to show it than to be no 7362 international.”
Twingly got mixed reactions. TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters celebrates his blog’s top position, Duncan Riley is pretty pissed off. We’re not happy either, but that’s our own fault. We’re too vain. We wanted that dot com domain. Thus we ditched TheNextWeb.org. Here’s the result:
What do you get when adding both results up? 10? We’ve the same problem at Technorati, check the results for the .com (authority 228) here, and the .org (authority 1087) here. Bear with us for a few months. After that you can tell anybody you’ve been a loyal reader of a Top 100 blog, even when they weren’t that famous yet.
Hans Allis, who runs Second Reality, the excellent hosting company which host TheNextWeb.com, simply set-up a new Domain name (the .COM version) as an Alias to our old domain name. After that we changed the Wordpress settings to reflect the new domain name. Wordpress does all the 301-redirects automatically so you don’t have to worry about that.
If you are moving to a new server you would need to set-up a .htaccess-file and a 301-redirect.php-file with the following content:
After that all we had to do is sit back and relax and wait for the world to catch up. Google took about 6 days to update their index which was very long as it generally takes them less than 15 minutes to find our newly published posts. Our PageRank updated perfectly to 6/10 after a few days too. The only thing that seems to be missing is the little links between our main domain if the search results. Hope these will reappear within a few days.
Feedburner also didn’t give us any problems. We simply logged in and changed our Feed url in the settings and we were done.
The only service that really gives us problems is Technorati. Unfortunately Technorati doesn’t allow you to change your domain name and refuses to update their database. That means that we dropped from a rank of 1,800 (The top 2000 sites of the world!) on TheNextWeb.ORG to a rank of 187,157 on TheNextWeb.COM. That just sucks and I can’t imagine we are the first blog to change its URL. Weird stuff.
Anyway, apart from Technorati, the whole thing went rather smooth and uneventful. Exactly what you would hope for with something as important as a change of domain names.
“Seriously, who’s still satisfied with Google here?”, Charles Leadbeater asked the audience of Picnic last week. The former advisor of Tony Blair told the crowd he was absolutely ecstatic when he first discovered Google in the nineties, but recently the search engine did nothing but disappoint him. One of the reasons he mentioned was the lack of context.
Had the team of Iterend been present at this presentation, they would have probably smiled since they’re developing a blog search engine which lets you search within certain time frames and categories. Isolated from each other, it’s not that interesting, but the combination leads to good results. Search in the category “Politician” and Iterend will return all articles mentioning a politician. You can then narrow down your search by clicking on the search tags left. There’s also the option to view related articles.
The idea of Iterend is good, but not original. The visual searching (tag clouds) are well executed by Quintura, Google Blogsearch uses the time aspect as well, and Technorati lets you search in related articles. Yet if you take the general function of an alternative search engine into account, Iterend does a good job with combining them and leading the way like a true pioneer.
But something tells me that the Luxembourg-based team wants to be more than just a bunch of pioneers. From their offices at the Technoport incubator in Esch s/Alzette, they probably want to build the next big search engine. I doubt whether they’ll succeed, simply because there are hundreds of developers trying to do the same. Together they’re showing Google the way, but on their own, their influence is limited.
It hasn’t appeared on the Technorati blog yet, but Michael Arrington broke the news: Technorati has acquired BlogCritics, a 6-year old blog network that draws around 1 million unique monthly visitors who watch 3 to 4 million pages.
In June, Technorati launched a blog advertising network called Technorati Media. CEO Richard Jalichandra wrote in the announcing blog post that “over the next several months, we’ll be adding blogs from the mid and long tail within those verticals.” Seems like he did just now, only in a slightly less orthodox way.
Where one would expect Technorati to focus on some sort of affiliate program, it just buys a network which gives them enough space and pageviews to place ads on. According to Crunchbase, BlogCritics has published 73,000 articles from 2,300 authors. Exactly, those bloggers are from the mid and long tail.
Jalichandra told Arrington that they will probably acquire more content sites soon. Well, truth be told, it’s a efficient way of building a solid blog ads network, that’s for sure. Although it does bring up an interesting question, is Technorati is a search company, or a media company? When choosing for the latter, who will guarantee me that Technorati search results aren’t biased?
One of the last sessions at Supernova 2008 was about “liquid conversations” – the discussions flow away from their original source to services like Friendfeed and Facebook. Dave McClure (500 Hats) moderated the panel of David Sifry (Technorati), Bret Taylor (FriendFeed), Matt Colebourne (CoComment), and Loic Le Meur (Seesmic). I’m not sure McClure knew in advance that this would be not easy as he thought it would be. Here’s what happened.
Each panelist introduced himself and the service he was representing. After some regular introductions by Sifry, Taylor, Colebourne, it was up to Le Meur. He decided to pitch Seesmic by showing a video about the… infamous g-spot. The video was compiled of video replies by Seesmic users from ten different countries and a sex expert – the hilarious type. Here’s the video.
The video was welcomed with several rounds of laughing, although I did noticed some people were a bit shocked. Yes, that’s what happens when the French arrive. Some prejudices are actually based on something.
Valleywag reporter Melissa Gira – “Reporter, Bad Girl, Sex Nerd For Hire” – asked a good question about the video – after answering a question about g-spots. She wondered why Seesmic invites an expert to the video, when the service is all about the conversations of their users. Loic didn’t really give an answer, so I will: It’s a great marketing tool to turn the comments into a show and spice it up with a typical weird sex expert.
Now over to the liquid conversations
Enough for the sex part now, as McClure raised an interesting question about online conversations. They’re flowing away from their original source to places like Facebook, Friendfeed, and Twitter. Friendfeed users aren’t commenting on a New York Times article on the site itself, but express their opinion in Friendfeed. They find like-minded friends there, instead of the railing crowd at the New York Times page. The same thing happens with discussions on blogs – to the discontent of some bloggers. (more…)
According to Technorati there are more than 120 million blogs, up from 100,000 in 2003. Starting a blog is easy but maintaining it is harder. Only 7 million are actively updated at least every 3 months.
“Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.”
As you know this blog is updated every day and 7 days a week since we officially launched on January 7, 2008 and it seems that we are doing a good job because today we entered the ‘top 5000′ of the most authoritative blogs in the world.
We still have a long way to go (our rank is Rank: 4,564 so there are still 4463 in front of us) until we make it to the top 100 blogs. But we can dream, right?
Some people say that blogging is soo two years ago, I dare to differ. Especially here in Europe, there are lot of opportunities. There still so much people who don’t even know what blog is. And that’s strange, considering the assumption that everybody has at least one hobby or passion. And somewhere, on the web, somebody is writing about that exact same hobby. Who wouldn’t want to read that?
Yet, blogs aren’t that user friendly for the not so web-minded people. How on earth do they find them? Let’s face it, Technorati is just too geeky for your 76-year old neighbor and the Google results are too cluttered. They just don’t even want to know what ‘tags’ or ‘trackbacks’ are.
Now there is Blogged.com, a clean-looking catalog for blogs. Mashable reports that ‘its primary topic is likely going to be the average web user that recognizes blogs too have a wealth of information across various topics’.
So imagine that your neighbor is into cooking, look how easy she can find some interesting blogs about this lovely activity:
Directories with easy interfaces that remind people of magazines and newspaper will the step to the digital world not too big, not even for the elderly. I believe initiatives like Blogged.com contribute to the revolution that is ahead of us. Namely the European mass adoption of the medium blog.
Written on 17th December 2008
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This new blog rank serves as the basis for a take on Technorati’s Top 100. Yes, Twingly is launching 12 different top 100 blogs lists (Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish). Anton Johansson: ” [This] makes it more fun for bloggers. It’s more cool to be a top notch Swedish blog and having a way to show it than to be no 7362 international.”
Written on 20th November 2008
On November 11 we switched our blogs domain name from 
According to Technorati there are more than 120 million blogs, up from 100,000 in 2003. Starting a blog is easy but maintaining it is harder. Only 7 million are actively updated at least every 3 months.
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
