Before you wonder based upon all the pictures in our flickr stream below, it wasn’t all about the parties, the disco taxi’s and the drinking.  The content from the sessions at The Next Web was actually quite good.  The content from the sessions was really interesting and there was plenty of it.  There was also a girl there who did some brilliant sketch note taking of each of the sessions and you can find that in one of the video’s below.

Sketch notes by Esther Gons, aka Wilg/ Wilgengebroed

I had a great time talking with Esther when I was a the event and I have to say her drawings are so much better than my notes from the event as they totally catch the essence of the event.  The conversations the content, everything.  As such if you want to see the content then do click on the links below the video about her sketch notes.  Additional content on what the sessions were about has been done really well by the team running the event and you can find all the info about the event and the write up’s over on our thenextweb.tweetmeme.com category that we put up especially for the event!

Make video montages at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Do enjoy the video from the event… Also today Nick was over at Geek’n Rolla and I’m sure he’ll give us an update on how that all went when he gets back!

Thanks to Joomla Portal we now have a Re-Tweet button plug-in available for Joomla users.  So if you are using Joomla then do take a look below to see what it looks like!

If you want to use it yourself all you need to do is go here and download it, and install it in the same way as all those other plugin’s.  It really couldn’t be simpler.

Do give it a go!

So today Oprah Winfrey is going to be doing her very first live Tweet on her twitter account. Before even writing her first tweet she has over 70,000 followers. As such to see how popular she is and to follow how the conversation around her show evolves we are tracking the progress.

As Chris Sacca said today at The Next Web Twitter is growing faster than many viruses and cancers.  So we are curiously looking at how viral the Oprah campaign is going to be.  Even before she’s been on the show there are so many re-tweeted blog and websites…  The media frenzy is massive.

So if you’re curious to see how things are going to pan out then watch our Oprah TweetMeme feed here!  I’ve also embedded the Oprah video which you can get for your site here!  If you’re writing about Oprah and want your posts tracked then just incude oprah in your tweet and when it’s re-tweeted we’ll pick it up!

We are currently getting a lot of reports regarding the Tweetmeme button being inaccurate across different pages of a website.

By default the button will pick up the address of the page it is on, it will then work out the the tweet count for that URL. For example if you show a button on your home page and on the main story page, these pages have two separate URL’s and thus will gain two separate tweet counts. This also causes a problem if you append anything onto your URL such as page numbers, Facebook connect settings or comment numbering.

We also see issues with sites that include the button on each blog post and then have all the posts shown on the home page. In this case, unless action is taken, when viewing the home page each button will have the same tweet count, as it will  be using the URL for the homepage itself, not the indivual post URL.

You can easily solve this problem by specifying the URL for the correct page in JavaScript. An optional tweetmeme_url parameter is available, which overrides the buttons ability to pick up the URL of that page.

The best example of this is on the main Tweetmeme site. In the sidebar on every page we have the current number of tweets the URL http://tweetmeme.com has. We maintain a constant and accurate count by specifying the tweetmeme_url to be http://tweetmeme.com.

<script type="text/javascript">
	tweetmeme_url = 'http://tweetmeme.com';
</script>
<script src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js" type="text/javascript"/>

If your site is a blog, it may be possible to have the tweetmeme_url set automatically. This is the main purpose of our WordPress plugin, and we also have an example of how it can be setup on Blogger.

You can find more information on the button and how to fully implement the tweetmeme_url on the Tweetmeme help site. If you are still having problems please refer to the discussion on our forums.

So today is my first day as the community manager at TweetMeme and as such I thought it would be a good opportunity to introduce myself and what I’ll be doing here over the next few months.  So here goes…

First things first I’ll be looking over the comments from our current users and identifying any key areas where the site could be drastically improved so get your suggestions into us via the forum as I’ll be looking there to see what areas are your pain points and what features we are missing that should really be there.  I’m also into making things as simple and usable as possible so if I see usability issues I’ll be picking up on them to make your job easier!

Secondly I’ll be attending The Next Web conference and will have my laptop with me so that you can see TweetMeme in action and at it’s best.   As such do come and find me and I’ll show you what we can do with the site!  Honestly there’s more to it than just the front page… I wonder how many of you are using the tweetmeme wordpress plugin on your sites or the buttons.  Also if you’re a developer and are interested in working with our API then do take a look at it, we are looking for feedback on this as it’s something we are hoping for developers to get really into!

And finally some random facts about me…

Background: Formerly I worked at Cardinal Health as a software engineer doing a  lot of .net programming and software development in and around this area.  I’m also the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners and that is where my community experience comes from.  I’m known for being a little unconventional in my approach to things and have a passion for mobile devices… so thanks to Nick (aka the Boss) I am now fully connected with an IPhone!  So that means you can find me on Twitter a little more often than you used to!  If you want to find me on twitter my account is @girlygeekdom and I have a couple of blogs… my group blog is GirlyGeekdom and my personal one which I’ve not put much on recently is Flirting with the Future… I thought it was a fun name for a blog!  You’ll also find me blogging here and over on the Fav.or.it blog too! And yes I will be cross posting every now and again, but hopefully not too often!

We have been rather busy with all the updates to tweetmeme and so had not got round to looking at the daily statistics we collect on which URL shorteners get used the most on twitter. I peeked at the data tonight and was surprised at what I found. Firstly BIT.LY has gained nearly 3% market share in the space of 3 weeks (last time we reported was 23rd March). Also IS.GD gained 1% and now taken up 3rd place, overall this means TINYURL.COM has lost over 3%.

TINYURL is really only holding this because twitter uses it as it’s core shortening service – but does not have the features of some of its rivals, how long twitter keeps it this way is matter up for much debate.

We will be attending The Next Web Conference and pitching TweetMeme as part of the ‘Twitter ecosystem session’. It is one of the best European conferences attended by some of the biggest names on the scene and a fantastic opportunity to network with other developers. It is also a great place to meet European VC’s (and probably some US ones on the prowl this year.)

If you are attending and want a demo of TweetMeme or want to discuss any potential business come over to the Sun Startup Essentials stand who are kindly hosting us. (there is also likely free beer from them!)

What a month, since revamping TweetMeme at the end of February we have seen massive growth of the website, API and adoption of our widgets, such that we are now serving 5+ million requests a day and growing strongly every week.

We think twitter as a source of news is becoming ever more compelling but one limiting factor has been that the stories had no categorization and therefore the river of news contained anything from lolcats to pictures of Stephen Fry stuck in a lift. Today we have released our next major release which includes a whole raft of improvements including categorization of content.

We probably will still have many tweaks to make but we hope you like the changes, if you have feedback we have started a whole new forum and FAQ area under http://help.tweetmeme.com

Categories

We now have an interface for you to filter down the news into categories. At the same time we have introduced the ability to sort stories by the total retweet count over 7 days, this works alongside ‘recent stories’, and ‘Top in 24 Hours’. One last note – the categories and the filters we use to fill them are very much work-in-progress, and we welcome feedback on things it gets wrong.

Submit Stories

Not everyone has a twitter account but may want to get a story into the twitterverse so we have added a very simple way to submit a story. This pushes that story into our twitter account @tm_incoming which we hope others will follow and pick out the stories to retweet.

The Whole Story

We have a whole load of data about every link we store and wanted a useful way for users to look at that data. So besides every link there is now a ‘more..’ link that takes you to a range of details, such as excerpt of the story, a thumbnail plus a graph ‘Tweets Over Time’ – this gives you a 24 hour snapshot of when the retweeting occurred. Plus you can now embed that widget on your own blog to show your users.

Who Am I?

You can now click on the name of a twitter user who has submitted a story and get a full rundown on all the stories they have submitted and how many retweets they have gained. You can also just go to the user page and enter the name of any twitter user and see any stories they have recently tweeted.

Twitter Accounts

If you wish to follow a particular category of story we have now added a range of twitter accounts – these range from simple categories like @tm_technology to @tm_1000 that only tweets stories that hit 1000 retweets. We are likely to add more – and interested in any ideas people have.

Support & Feedback

We have also launched today a new site that will help support our growing community – this includes a knowledge base and a discussion board.

Thanks

Lastly a big thanks to both our sponsors. Sun Startup Essentials who have helped massively in getting us this far and our new Hosting company DediPower.

We have today noticed that twitter is moving to a new design and also a new URL for your homepage – this is now at http://twitter.com/timeline/home – like many other services we rely upon the fact that we can send a tweet into your box for you to retweet. For those who have the new redesign this currently does not work, due to the fact that twitter is redirecting but not carrying across the variable that contains the text.

We have raise this as an issue and are awaiting feedback on how to solve this and will update you all when a solution is found.

UPDATE: Very quick response back from twitter – this is a temporary problem, the new homepage will NOT be at /timeline/home – and the issue of the redirect will be resolved soon.