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This evening whilst at a roller disco (don’t ask!) i heard the news that Michael Jackson had been taken to hospital and early reports were pronouncing him dead.

In order to keep up with the stories and what was becoming news I went back to the Michael Jackson channel that I creates to follow the news around his concerts. No surprise but it’s now starting to fill up with the latest confirmed and unconfirmed stories.

Keep up to date with it here: Michael Jackson Channel

We are on the hunt for intersting, unusual or useful places where you are finding our re-tweet button.  This week has been no exception, interestingly we found that we are now on the Sky Blogs site of all places.  So if you happen to read any of the sky blogs like “The Weather Girls” for example then you can now re-tweet whatever they are talking about!

As you may have already heard we are also on Governor Schwarznegger’s newsroom pages where you can read about his suggestion of replacing textbooks with digital books.  Interestingly that particular story was re-tweeted via our button a number of times and the news of his announcement was debated over on our local radio station BBC Radio Berkshire.  Personally I’m not so sure that completely doing away with paper books is the answer but a combined mix of online text and traditional books is the best solution for me.  I wonder if the local radio station knew that he uses our button too?!  It’s funny how stories end up travelling around the world and mix with local news too.

I’ll be watching the Sky Blogs and looking out for their stories and news popping up on our local radio station or in other random places!  You never quite know where the next hot story will come from these days and Twitter has proven that time and time again.

We’re constantly looking out for sites that are using our button… anything from the most bizarre, obscure or most amusing use of our button on a site!  Where have you seen the button in use?  Where are you finding it most useful?  Are you finding any sites where you wish they had the button?  If so tell us!  We love to hear your stories about the button!

(Random Fact:) 600 million TweetMeme buttons were served last month and we are possibly one of the largest growing re-tweet sites out there at the moment. Last month we grew 120% and we are now starting to see our button pop up all over the place.

Prior to today we had a restriction on the TweetMeme Button that all tweets were re-tweeted as RT @tweetmeme with the exception of those on the whitelist where they could do RT @their_twitter_account which allowed the re-tweet to be from a specific twitter account/ user.  We got lots of feedback from our users… especially those who weren’t on the whitelist via our Forums and listened to their shouts!  I bet they thought we were ignoring them! (but no, we were working away to ensure that the updates worked perfectly.)

So now everyone is whitelisted and you can change it to RT @[your twitter name]. We have updated the instructions on the Button page and we have also updated the WordPress Plugin so that you change the twitter account easily. Once you have the plugin installed, go to Settings, TweetMeme and then set the Source to your twitter name. (e.g. talktweetmeme in my case) Don’t include the @ otherwise it’ll be @@talktweetmeme which wouldn’t really work.

We hope you like the update and the power it gives you as a user to see who is re-tweeting your stories and articles.  It should also mean that you could create conversation around the stories online if you add those re-tweeting your stories as friends on twitter.  I’m sure people will come up with all sorts of useful ways of using this new and very much requested feature!

Please do give us feedback and new feature requests on our Forum.  We do read every request and we try to do those that are of value to many people as soon as we can!

Today we launched a shiny new feature called the TweetMeme Bar.  And I’m betting that you want to know what it does, how it does it and so on!  Well here’s the basic info… and when I manage to get Daniel in front of the video camera then I’ll also pop up a video of him going through all the cool ins and outs of the bar with you!  For now however you’ll have to cope with my geeky descriptions of it all!

As you can see from the image above (you’ll need to click on it to see it properly though) going from left to right… We have our logo, then the re-tweet button including the number of times the link has been retweeted the name of the link text and then the information view options of All, News, Images or Video’s.  Hit the re-tweet button and we’ll re-tweet the url that you are on.  Hit home and we take you back home to our site… or if you’re curious and just want to browse to any random re-tweet site then hit the shuffle button and off you go!

The Shuffle button opens up a bar above stories and allows you to ‘shuffle’ through stories that TweetMeme has found, this is gives you a unparalleled resource of interesting content. TweetMeme aggregates 200,000+ new links/stories/video/images every day and you have access to all of them. Just like the main site the bar lets you filter down by category and by the media type so you can discover things of interest to you.

We are very aware that some users do not like ‘framing’ of content and although the bar is ‘opt-out’ the first time you close the bar it prompts you immediately if you no longer wish to have the bar. It is also one click away on our settings pop-up to turn it on and off.

We think the logged in experience and tweetmeme bar make fantastic partners as you can shuffle through content and retweet what you like without leaving the page

We’re really excited about the TweetMeme bar and we do hope you like it.  We’re finding it really fun when browsing websites to find what sites have our re-tweet button on it.

Recently we have had a great uptake with our official TweetMeme Button being used on some widely read websites.  As a result we’ve seen our traffic and number of re-tweets increase. So we thought that we would share with you who the top re-tweeters are on our site this month.

The list consists of:

• @chrispirillo
• @mashable
• @zdnetblogs
• @phillyd
• @huddle
• @thenextweb
• @laughingsquid
• @rww

A big thank you to our top re-tweeters and those using our re-tweet button.  If you have a high volume blog site on WordPress and are using our plugin then do let us know.  We like to say thank you to our top re-tweeters!

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!