This week we’ve added a range of new channels to the TweetMeme channels area!   The subject areas range from Ugg (the Australian boot brand) through to Xfactor – because we know you just can’t get enough of it -  to the Royal Engagement news sorrounding Prince William and Kate Middleton.

We really hope you like the channels and feel free to share them with your colleagues, friends and family!

• Royal Wedding – The Royal Engagement and Royal Wedding coverage of Prince William and Catherine (Kate) Middleton.
• Recipes – Recipies from around the world – think Thanksgiving if you’re in the States….
• Lyrics – Lyrics from songs shared on twitter.
• Hair & Makeup – Anything & everything about hair & makeup – for both women and men.
• How to – Anyone sharing a how to tip or hint.
• Yoga - Everything you could ever want to know about Yoga.
• Ugg – The brand, the boots and the Aussie company.
• Pregnancy – Everyone seems to be getting pregnant at the moment so you’ll find all those shared pregnancy tips in one place.
• Diwali – It’s coming up to the festival of light, so why not see what people are sharing in preperation for the event.
• Black Friday – With all the up & coming deals, offers being shared on Twitter.  Keeping you ahead of the shopping crowds.
• Election – So many elections around the world, be that on TV or at a political level, you’ll find all the details here.
• XFactor - We know how addicted to XFactor some people are so here’s your difinitive guide to top content relating to XFactor.

So there you have it, this week’s top new channels.  If you’ve got ideas for a channel or want a custom channel build for your brand or organization please do get in touch with us by leaving a comment or contacting our sales team directly.

Today we launched our Justin Bieber channel.  We’ve seen so many of your Bieber fans out there commenting on content on TweetMeme that you now have your very own Justin Bieber Channel full of fan and news content sorrounding Justin Bieber and his music.  We’re always looking to see what communities need channels of content and it certainly seems like the Justin Bieber fans need somewhere to share their support for the young star.

Key features of the channel are the ability to comment (and of course retweet that comment to your friends) and have conversations with those who have left comments. You can even put our little green retweet button on your own fan site by grabbing the embed code from here.

Today over on Building 43 Nick Halstead and Robert Scoble got together to bring you an interesting conversation about Twitter’s latest updates and in particular talk about the future of the Twitter ecosystem.  Nick focuses in this interview on the new Annotation feature that Twitter presented at their recent Chirp conference.

The conversation is well worth a listen to as it delves into how standards could be used to define the approach with annotations and the potential use cases for such meta data.

What do you think?  Is Nick right about how he thinks annotations will effect the ecosystem sorrounding Twitter?  What do you think of the feature and how would you like to see TweetMeme using it?

We are happy to announce that we have added two new Windows Live Writer Plugins to our offering with the help and support of the Live Writer developer community.  Our thanks go out to Scott Lovegrove who has carefully and lovingly created the Windows Live Writer TweetMeme plugin for WordPress.com along with the Windows Live Writer Follow Button Plugin.  Whilst he was on a role and doing these new plugins he also updated the much loved Windows Live Writer TweetMeme plugin to include support for hashtags.

We hope you like the plugins and if you are a developer and want to do cool stuff with our API’s then please do take a peak at our developer documents!  Tell us about your great creations and we’ll give you the spotlight!

TweetMeme has been chosen by a judging panel including Deborah Meaden and other leading entrepreneurs such as Bebo Founder Michael Birch as a winner of Smarta.com’s inaugural ‘Smarta 100’.

The Smarta 100 is the ultimate business accolade, recognizing the UK’s smartest small businesses. Smarta.com has uncovered remarkable companies who have gone the extra mile to differentiate themselves from the market or found clever ways to compete, from their marketing plan to their ethical stance. The result is a fascinating insight into the unique business ideas that are thriving in the current economic climate.

The finalists proved to the judges that they have what it takes to run a successful venture, from spotting a new opportunity to making it a reality. And the high-profile panel were delighted to see that ambitious people are saving hard and raising finances to turn their ideas into flourishing businesses.

Deborah Meaden commented:

“Discovering great new businesses is a passion of mine as is encouraging businesses to think and work better.  The Smarta 100 does both of these things – and celebrates the best of British business at the same time. I was delighted to see ambitious people saving hard and raising finances to turn their ideas into flourishing businesses ”

Smarta.com founder Sháá Wasmund said:

“Socially conscious, disruptive businesses that are not afraid to challenge the status quo are being set up in the four corners of the country. I founded Smarta to make sure these enterprises are supported at any stage of development. The results speak for themselves – the Smarta 100 list is a collection of remarkable success stories.”

The full results and details of the winning companies can be found at smarta.com/smarta100.

Recently we’ve been working hard adding a range of new TweetMeme channels to our site.  Since there’s always a lot of events on throughout the year we have been creating some for the big events of the year.  Here are some of the latest channels that we’ve created for current and upcoming events:

3 GSM – Providing the top stories from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona

The Brit Awards – Covering hte news, stories, nominations and winners of the Brit Awards 2010.

Winter Olympics – Picking up the top stories, news and medalists from this year’s winter Olympics in Vancouver.

The Oscars - The top stories, nominations and award winners due to be announced in March 2010.

Mother’s Day – Bringing together some great Mother’s Day ideas from across the Internet.

We will continue to add new channels including events channels throughout the year.  If you want your event to have it’s very own custom channel on TweetMeme or integrated with your own site then please do contact us to arrange this.

Yesterday we put together a shiny new TweetMeme Channel called UK Snow to track the top stories being linked to from Twitter.  Initially we created this for our own staff to keep a track of what was happening with the snow in and around Berkshire to know when we should all head home so that we could get back safely.  Well we are all back safely and the channel is still there with some great content around the snow and weather in the UK.

Over night last night  we set up the hosting of the channel to the url http://uk-snow.com so that you can all find it nice and easily.  The channel contains all the latest information and news on the snow situation within the UK.  Reports of news are coming from both traditional and community sources, along with the latest forecast information from the MetOffice and other weather sources within the UK.

We hope that this will help you find interesting news about the snow and weather conditions as well as provide you with the latest information on the severe weather warnings and advisory notices.  The bit I find most interesting is the images as you can see across the country the extent of the snow!

Please help us spread the word so that others may find this useful resource!

Over the past few months, at every event we’ve been to Nick and I have been taking a small quantity of TweetMeme t-shirts with us to hand out to people we know and who love to tweet!  On Thursday Kate and I will be at Social Media 09 and if those attending are lucky then we may just bring a few more with us to the event!

Here’s a few pics of the different designs.  The choice of descriptions actually came out of a sticker design competition we ran a while back, the details of our imaginative Twitter fans can be found here! We have male & female in a range of sizes so no one feels left out!

By pure chance today the top story over on TweetMeme has been this one about cool Geek T-shirts!  Maybe our ones will get in there when we give out more of them!  If you are wanting exposure at events and want to sponsor your logo on the next batch of our tshirts then do get in touch with us as we are looking into getting another batch printed soon.  This batch have our partners Dedipower and Sun StartUp Essentials on them!

Since the initial creation of the TweetMeme button we’ve been looking for interesting, useful & innovative ways to update it and to make it easier for you all to update your Twitter accounts with the most interesting content that you find on the internet and to share your own content with your followers. As such we’ve extended and slightly altered the way that the TweetMeme button now works.

Before I go on and show you how this will work and what it will look like please note that this functionality has not yet been put live and a such the images shown below may look slightly different to the final version but with no significant changes to the basic functionality.

We will have two different variants of our button. One for on our TweetMeme website, which we call our internal button. And one for on external websites. I explain this first because I don’t want anyone getting confused that they act very slightly differently.

The TweetMeme Button on the TweetMeme site

The image above is what you will see when you try to connect to TweetMeme for the first time. It is basically setting you up to connect us to TweetMeme using Twitter’s Oauth access. It will take you to Twitter and ask you to log in just like in the image below. It’s a bit like Facebook connect really but for Twitter.

Once you’ve done this you’ll then be able to re-tweet any content from our site by pressing the green part of our TweetMeme button without having to log into TweetMeme if you are already logged into Twitter. Instead you’ll just get an image like the one below! Note that you can now edit the content of the message to whatever you choose. What you cannot do is remove or replace the URL with a different one. This is to ensure that the content sent does really relate back to the original source. After all we wouldn’t want it to misguide people.

Now for on your own site!

External TweetMeme Buttons!

To ensure consistency and simplicity we use a very similar system to the internal one. So for the first time you log into the TweetMeme button you will see the following:

Once again it connects with Twitter just like Facebook connect for the first time. If you aren’t logged into Twitter you’ll be asked to log in as usual and then get passed back to the button. Where you can edit the content (excluding the URL) and read even more interesting content on the site. We don’t take you away from the site that you are reading to update your users.

If at any point you don’t like or want this functionality you can always log into TweetMeme and change your preferences so that all buttons act as they currently do with no content editing for your account and automatic retweeting of content when you press then button and are logged in. If for any reason you say no the the initial connection on an external site we will automatically revert back to the original log in and allow manual tweeting & editing of your tweet on your own Twitter account on Twitter.

We hope you enjoy the new functionality and if you are press and would like to find out more about the button or require additional information please don’t hesitate to get in contact.

On Tuesday we promised regular updates on who the top commenters are on our site that are getting re-tweeted for their comments in the TweetMeme Comment competition so here goes in most re-tweeted order!

1. @erickschonfeld

Comment: “working memory” is overrated anyway.

2. @virtuosoblogger

Comment:  These ipods will include cameras that is great!. I think that was much needed

3. @mimipoosh

Comment: spending time with psychologists will permanently impair human intelligence.

4. @msniqueew

Comment: On Joe Wilson: ‘You’ve Embarrassed The Nation’

5. @mirala90

Comment: 09/09/09 is the last set of repeating, single-digit dates that we’ll not see for almost a century

6. @ProudAtheists

Comment: I value and enjoy things. Belief is an overused word in the US.
Comment: For those who have not witnessed religious “nuttery” at it’s best, watch these videos.

7. @herdboy

Comment: Looking forward to that, hope its API related
Comment: II found this on the Twetmeme Blog . It basically means that if you are logged on here and happen to tweet from anywhere via the Tweetmeme buton, the tweet is posted automatically without intervention from you.

Quote follows:
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.

8. @thefranchiseca

Comment: We can finally announce our move!

9. @Jnicks

Comment: DOWNLOAD THIS SONG IF YOU LIKE AND GIVE IT TO YOUR FAV DJ

10. @codenamemax

Comment: Pretty Elzabeth Arden is the inspiration for the Make the World a Prettier place campaign http://codenamemax.com/

Curious about our competition and what you might win… (there are some pretty nice prizes so it’s worth taking a peak!)  You’ll find all the details in our Competition blog post.  Get Commenting and Get Re-Tweeting!