Grooveshark awarded CNET's Top 100 Webware Award

the application, though it had some good aspects, I just did not feel comfortable with the entire package. It was not long after that post that officials from Grooveshark contacted me for a dialogue encouraging me to take a look at the offerings again, highlighting features I had not really seen the first time around. In the year that I’ve had with Grooveshark, I’m impressed with the continued efforts it’s making to establish itself as a viable music service for users.

CNET was obviously impressed enough to award it the 2009 Webware Winner for Audio and Music. Grooveshark has indeed come a long way and its user base has grown significantly. With this announcement comes features that again make Grooveshark heads above the rest. For starters their partnership with Ping.fm to build Tinysong API, which allows users to take the code and develop webapps that provide access to Groovesharks extensive library of music. It will be interesting to see what developers come up with as we’ve seen with various other online applications, the opening of the API makes it easy for supplementary apps to proliferate the net.

The second feature that was announced deals specifically with the blogging community. Grooveshark has announced that is now has a WordPress plugin that allows integration into blog posts for users to set up their favorite songs for specific posts. You can set up just one song, or a playlist of songs for your readers on your site. An interesting option, at the very least you could create a small station of songs on your, possibly with a widget.

Grooveshark is definitely expanding its platform and appeal, and it should be interesting to see how much further they go in 2009!

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Music Provider GrooveShark Wins Top CNET Award originally appeared on: Crenk
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Enter, stage left, Twingly.com, a Swedish blog search engine founded by Martin Källström.

According to Twingly.com’s ‘about‘ section, the philosophy behind their search system is to produce “a blog search engine featuring a spam-free, faceted, social search for the global blogosphere”. Nice, but aren’t Technorati and URLFan doing the same thing? Twingly uses relationships, ie how well linked each blog and article is, to work out how relevant to your search they are. Key to the service is a blog’s ‘approval’. If a blog is not approved by the Twingly team (meet them here), it could potentially be spam. If you are the owner of a blog that comes up as not being approved, you can of course resolve that little issue by sending the Twingly team a swift e-mail.

You can express your opinion on the blogs Twingly finds via a fluorescent green ‘links/likes’ tab. This shows you how many people are linking to the page and it allows you, once you’ve signed up to the service, to vote on if the post is relevant or useful – it’s the equivalent of Technorati Favourites.

Where it gets really interesting though is the blog profile page. With some nifty “research”, we can compare Crenk’s ranking on Twingly, Technorati and URLFan.

Crenk is ranked 3/10 (10 being the highest) with 43 blogs registering as being linked to various articles on Twingly. Technorati claims 80 and URLFan says 45, with 199 other mentions. These are vastly differing numbers, and you have to wonder if Technorati is brilliantly accurate  or if it’s not omitting that nasty spam.

Some other nice touches from Twingly include the ability to search within a certain timeframe, <em>as mentioned</em> you can search by one of the 12 supported languages, and you can also look  for blogs that have been officially approved, thus weeding out any other possible spam.

Twingly have also released their top 100 blogs by ranking, and if you are proud of where your blog sits in their 1-10 scale, you can of course throw on that all important badge to show it off. One rather large omission however,  is the Huffington Post.

With this in mind it is safe to say that Twingly isn’t the most accurate blog search engine, yet. However, the layout is simple and practical,  and although the ‘likes/links’ updating isn’t instantaneous (it took about ten minutes to register), the future looks very bright for the Twingly team who are currently overseeing about 25 million searches per month.

Twingly has the potential to be a very good blog search engine. It looks good, is quick when pulling together results and the blog profiles, in relation to each other, are very useful; it even has some pleasant widgets to pop alongside your page ranking.

They are very much into their feedback in Sweden, and you can vote for your most wanted features at the Twingly Tech Plan page.

Try Twingly.com out for yourself and let us know what you think.

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Twingly: The Blog Search Engine That Is Actually Moving In The Right Direction originally appeared on: Crenk
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