Spam-Free Blog Search Comes to Europe

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Straight outta Sweden comes Twingly, a European start-up that hopes to take spam out of the blog search recipe.

Concentrating primarily on the European blogger market, Twingly uses an innovative anti-spam algorithm that only includes genuine blog posts.

According to Twingly, the number of spam blogs have exceeded the number of authentic blog posts on the Web. No surprise given the fact that spam long ago became responsible for the majority of content sitting in our inboxes.

The company contends that large search engines such as Google have their hands full with too many projects, thus allowing blog search to suffer.

Twingly also has a “social search,” where actions of individual users improve the search results of others.

Want to give Twingly a test drive? Well, you might have to wait a bit before you can peruse spam-free search results. The site is currently in private beta and you will need to request an invite here.

Twingly promises the best of the blogs…we hope they deliver.

bbPress 0.9 Is Out, Integrates With WordPress 2.5

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Good news for bbPress users, 0.9 is out and it features integration with WordPress 2.5. There are a bunch of news in this release as well, although most fixes and fine-tunings. Read more about that here, and nab the 0.9 version here.

That’s the good part. The bad part is that current bbPress users will have to go through a bit of extra work upgrading. I haven’t tried it on any of my installs yet, but it looks straight forward enough, if not as easy as I’d prefer. That’s the problem with using code that haven’t reached the critical 1.0 number yet, so who’s complaining?

Actually, I did whine a bit about bbPress recently, over at Devlounge. I think it still is pretty far from 1.0, check that post out if you’re interested in the forum sibling of WordPress.

40 Becomes 50 In This Year’s TechCrunch Startup Conference

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TechCrunch40 becomes TechCrunch50, sporting 50 startups as opposed to last year’s 40. More money, three days (September 8-10), and more exposure as well as venture capital I’d reckon. As usual, there are a bunch of high profile names sponsoring the even, including both Microsoft and Google this year. All details in a TechCrunch post of course.

The TechCrunch40 conference debuted last year, and the companies featured is said to have raised over $143 million in VC money, which is a whopping number for sure. The project is initiated and pushed by TechCrunch owner Michael Arrington, and blogosphere hotshot Jason Calacanis.

Who Will Buy DoubleClick’s SEO Services?

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The official Google blog announced that Google will sell the SEO wing of DoubleClick, since it clashes with what the company does.

It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business. Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Performics search marketing business to a third party. We believe this will allow us to maintain objectivity and the search marketing business to continue to grow and innovate and serve its customers.

Obviously. However, who would want to pick up the DoubleClick Performics business now, when DoubleClick has been bought by Google? Search marketing is a tricky business to begin with, and Performics will most certainly have their eyes on them, and the brand is perhaps not hurt by Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, but it is certainly a bit tousled up. But maybe the client stock and other assets are worth picking up, we’ll see.

The same blog post also states that the affiliate marketing part of DoubleClick will be intergrated into “existing Google operations”, which was pretty obvious to me.