Having been down to the Channel 4 Education event earlier in the week which I have to say was an outstanding event.  It left a lot of food for thought and got me thinking.  As a result I’m looking into what we should be putting into an Education category and have just created a Moodle channel which is starting to fill out with content.

I’m hoping that this will become a useful resource for those in education or other areas that will find the content useful.  If anyone can think of any other channels then do let me know…

We never rest on our laurels here at TweetMeme HQ and have been beavering away on a range of improvements. I wanted to give you a sneak peak at a few new buttons launching next week.

Firstly one big change we have already made is to remove the (via @tweetmeme) from the end of any retweets. This will give a little more room at the end of tweets to be retweeted again.

Image Button

The current retweet button is a clever little thing – it can redirect you to Twitter to retweet but also if your logged into TweetMeme (via OAuth) it sends the tweet behind the scenes and leaves you on the site you were currently browsing, this we call ‘one-click retweeting’. The downside is that Javascript can only live in certain places on the web, i.e. in a web browser.

We think there are lots of other places you may want to get retweeted from so we have come up with ‘image buttons’. These look identical to the current retweet button (an example is on the right) with the same live-retweet count, the big difference is that it is rendered as a image which means you can put it anywhere that you can put a normal image. Here are some ideas we had for using it,

• RSS Feeds – JavaScript does not work inside RSS (most RSS readers strip it out because of XSS security issues) so the button is perfect to allow your users to read your article and then retweet it.
• Emails – You can embed it into an HTML email to promote any link you like.
• WordPress.com – Some sites like wordpress.com do not allow you to embed Javascript, but you can use this button instead.

Domain Count

We wanted a way that sites could show off how much they are getting retweeted beyond just the individual story retweet counts. So we came up with the ‘Weekly Retweet’ chicklet, it shows the weekly total number of retweets for your whole website. The counter re-calculates every 24 hours and the colour can be customized (examples on the right).

Analytics

Lastly we will be soon launching a much more detailed analytics package for website owners. You can already use TweetMeme to track the trend of a particular story (example here) and get the list of people who retweeted the story.

Websites can already track their weekly trends of retweets using TweetMeme (Example here) this is useful, but we wanted to give much more detail. The new package is aimed at fully understanding how your story spread and how you may adapt future story releases to take best advantage of Twitter and its amazing viral nature.

So I’ve been going through adding a couple of new TweetMeme channels today and the two key ones of the day are the San Diego Comic Con Channel and the Tour De France channel.

The Tour De France starts tomorrow so it’s already starting to fill with stories around the competitiors and the locations. Keep an eye on it if you’re a cycling fan! I’m sure it will be an interesting one for anyone who likes this sort of thing.

The San Diego Comic Con Channel is one that I personally have a big interest in as I really enjoyed my time there a few years back. To me it was the best Comic Con that I’ve ever been to. It’s full or amazing artists and some of the rarest comic collections around. There are some great auctions that go on there as well!

The results sticker competition of the sticker competition are in, and for such a short competition (less than 24 hours) we did get a lot of entries and some really great ideas, so thanks to those who spent time thinking these up and to those who obviously had nothing better to do at work that day (cough @amykate) we salute you all.

Results

We voted via a process of sticks, score cards, hand raising, Google docs spreadsheet (we are geeks remember!) each team member having between 1 and 5 points to assign to their top five favorite entries.

First Prize

Number: 404
Quote: Tweet Not Found
Submitted By: Sampicli (multiple people did submit this but Sampicli was first)

This was by far the clear winner, and being a very geeky reference I am sure will be very popular. For those non-geeks 404 refers to a missing webpage. The winner will receive 50 of the stickers.

Second Prize

Number: 69
Quote: Tweeting me, Tweeting you
Submitted By: holytshirt

Second place goes to the smutty minded, and if you don’t understand the reference I suggest you go ask mummy to explain the birds and the bees. The winner will receive 25 of the stickers.

Third Prize

Number: 1
Quote: to rule them all
Submitted By: Laura.2mdc

This is actually my personal favorite and I will be getting some t-shirts done up with this design as well. The reference refers to The Lord of the Rings and the One Ring that Sauran made for himself to have dominion over everyone else (very apt I thought). The winner will receive 10 of the stickers.

Honourable Mentions

There were so many others that got voted on but did not make it into the top 3 – so I have listed them below, if you want to see the full list of submissions check out the comments on the original blog post.

• 707 tweets – iz in ur button memeing ur tweet – by asmitter
• 2001 tweets – Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave? – by onemilliommonkeys
• 99999 tweets – And all I got was this tweetin’ t-shirt! – by mjwysocki1975
• 300 tweets – Tonight we tweet in hell – by onemilliommonkeys
• 747 tweets – Jumbo Tweet – by @markabaker
• 123 tweets – Easy as ABC – by benheymink

Thanks again to everyone who took part has been a lot of fun.

Earlier today we launched a Sticker Competition to help us come up with ideas for stickers that represent our Retweet Button (example on the right).

The Prizes

A quick reminder of the prizes on offer for the best ideas.

• First Prize – 50 stickers (with the relevant retweet count + text they suggested)
• Second Prize – 25 stickers
• Third Prize – 10 stickers

Poll

We have had some fantastic submissions already and I wanted to share some of the best (chosen by me) and allow you to vote on them, this is only for fun and the final decision will still be judged by the TweetMeme team.

Earlier in the week we had a chat with Guy Kawasaki about integration of the TweetMeme content and button into AllTop and as a result TweetMeme is now on Alltop.com http://tweetmeme.alltop.com/.

As you may have already noticed Alltop is a great new way to read all our different feeds and in terms of our content it takes the top stories and aggregates them to give you a quick and simple view of what we have on our site.  Feel free to take a peak and let us and Guy know what you think.

Our thanks on this one to @guykawasaki and his team for getting it all sorted out it looks great and we look forward to seeing what happens next with it.

We are currently looking to put a case forward to WordPress.com to get our TweetMeme button plugin into WordPress.com as part of this effort we need to gather statistics on how many people are asking for our button to be integrated into WordPress.com.  So rather than just sitting back and waiting for the requests to come in we thought the easiest way to do this was to ask everyone who is interested in having our Re-Tweet button on their wordpress.com hosted blogs to re-tweet this article.  This way we can count the number of requests for the feature we are getting.  We’re going to class each re-tweet as a request for integration!  If you want this feature added in but don’t yet have a twitter account then do leave us a comment to let us know you want us to count you in!

By re-tweeting all your followers and friends on Twitter will also hear about this and hopefully those followers of yours who use wordpress.com will re-tweet the article and therefore help with the request count.  If you also want to blog about it then that’s fine with us too!  The wider the spread the more feedback we should have and hopefully the higher the likelihood that we get the information that is needed for wordpress.com.

We look forward to hearing from everyone!

To celebrate the continued spread of our Retweet Button we are having stickers made in the shape of the button. We think the button is now quite iconic but we wanted to have a bit of fun with them as well, we decided to come up with some phrases that go along with each ‘retweet’ count. So for instance 666 is ‘The Devil made me Tweet it’.

Competition

We thought it would be a lot more interesting if we ran a competition that allowed you all to suggest ideas. So the rules are thus,

• Pick a number, between 1 and 99999
• Come up with a quote that is funny, thought provoking, geeky, etc.
• The quote does have to fit on the button, so the longer it is the smaller font that will have to be used. (which would upset @dtsn)
• You have until 9am 3rd July (GMT) to submit your entry via the comments on this blog post

The Prizes

We will potentially use any of the ideas you come up with, but the top 3 ideas we will give a prize to.

• First Prize – 50 stickers (with the relevant retweet count + text they suggested)
• Second Prize – 25 stickers
• Third Prize – 10 stickers

Judging

The TweetMeme team will be judging the entries, and will be looking for originality, humour, idioicy, geekyness, and deliberate obscureness. The judges decisions is final (blah blah). We will put up a blog post tomorrow announcing the winners and linking to their twitter profile (you dont have one? what?)

Lastly please share this post (via the retweet button! btw – the big button is not clickable )

UPDATE: We have put up a poll for some of the best suggestions so far.

UPDATE 2: Competition is now CLOSED – will post the results soon.

Today we got a really great e-mail into our inbox!  Lee Turner who is part of the B2Evolution community has created a B2Evolution Plugin that does the equivalent to our wordpress plugin but for the B2Evolution blog engine.  This means that those users who have been asking about how to integrate our button with B2Evolution can now have a nice simple way to do so.  You’ll find all the information on how to install and use this plugin over on Lee’s TweetMeme plugin page.

Please direct any feedback of bug reports that you have back to Lee.  This still leaves us with TypePad and better Blogger integration to go.  We’re also looking into getting our plugin into WordPress.com but we will be needing the help of the community for that one as we need to know how many of our users are wanting to install it into their WordPress.com sites!  We’ll come back soon with a post for you to register your interest in the WordPress.com integration!