outbrain

Exhibiting at Blog Expo World next week

We'll be exhibiting at the Blog World Expo on November 8-9th at the Las Vegas Convention Center. If you plan to be around, please visit us at booth #535 (when you enter the exhibit hall it should be on the hallway to your right).

Registration for the conference is $99, and you can register here.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Getting some blog love....

The newly released rating widget (available, for free, here), is getting some nice blog coverage today:

Amit Agarwal - "Blogs that are on Blogger, WordPress or TypePad can now add the wonderful outbrain star ratings widget to their blog posts."

Allen Stern of CenterNetworks - "The interesting part about Outbrain is that it finds people like you and shows you ratings for the group it places you in (along with the raw score)."

Lorie Marrero, Chief Executive Organizer of LivingOrder - "Wow, you guys really made it easy!  I was expecting that to take a little while to figure out.... I really love having the ability to be rated on my posts.  It’s good feedback for me about what my readers like."

Kyle Eslick - "As of today, adding a rating system to your blog has just gotten a lot easier. Whether you use Typepad, Blogger, or WordPress to do your blogging, you can now easily add a rating system to your blog through Outbrain."

Vikram over at Digital-Musings.com - "Among the ones I read about I found the Outbrain Rating Widget to be the best. Its simple compact look and quick response while rating makes it a must have for any blogger who wants to understand if the visitors like what they are reading."

[UPDATED... more reviews coming in!:]

Etienne - "I have been thinking whether i should use this rating bar instead of allowing comments, because there are a bunch of visitors who loves to read but do not like to leave long comments and in order to collect better stats, a simple way to collect instant feedback would be using a rating bar."

Secret Money Blog - "Most of the visitors who visits the blogs show laziness in commenting about the work, this widget is a cool thing for them to show their views about the Posts."

Personalization of rating scores

Earlier today we opened up our rating widget to the world. If you have a blog, go ahead and get it here.

One additional important feature we're releasing today is the addition of the personalization algorithm to our rating widget.

From now on, whenever we serve the ratings widget to a reader, we look at his/her rating history, find like-minded people automatically, and adjust the rating scores accordingly. This is what the widget looks like with personalization:

In other words – two people might be looking at the same blog post, but each will see vastly different scores based on each one’s personal rating history. The more each person rates, the better our recommendations will be specifically for him/her.

We think this is really important for two reasons:

1. When consuming content, personal tastes are waaaay more important than averages. Consider this example - The movie Pulp Fiction is probably loved and hated by an equal number of viewers. On average it would be rated say 3.5 stars (of 5). For potential Pulp Fiction lovers, this would be too average to rise above the noise. Many movies would probably fall in the 3ish range and therefore would not be recommended.
   On the other hand, potential Pulp Fiction haters might consider seeing the movie because 3.5 is after all a positive score.
   So with average ratings, no one really gets a meaningful recommendation experience. If your rating widget is limited to averages - it's definitely time to switch to outbrain.
2. The second reason we think personalization is so important is that it finally gives your readers a true personal incentive to rate stuff (and rate things honestly), as they get tangible, long term value from building a rating history.

Again - the outbrain rating widget is available, for free, here. No registration required.

Rating widget now available!

After long incubation, we've finally opened up our blog rating widget to the public. You can get the widget on your blog by going here:
http://www.outbrain.com/get/

A few points:

• No registration required
• Installation is super-easy... we adjust the widget's design to your blog's look&feel automatically
• It's absolutely FREE
   

We currently support the following blog platforms:

• Blogger.com blogs are supported with a 1-click install (blogs using the "classic" template - use these instructions)
  
  
• TypePad blogs are also supported with a 1-click install.
  
  
• WordPress *installed* blogs are supported via a plugin that's available here.
  (unfortunately, blogs that are hosted on WordPress.com are not allowed to install plugins...)

We've also opened a support forum here. If you're having any difficulty installing the widget, or any other feedback - please let us know!

Launching an outbrain forum

We've just started testing out a new service called Satisfaction. From their site:

"Satisfaction is part online discussion, part FAQ, and part social network for all your products and services. Anyone can ask a question, submit an idea or problem, or just talk. And it's all public, so anyone can answer—even the companies."

In short, the outbrain forum on Satisfaction is a great place to ask questions, find tips about our service and help other outbrain users.

We will be hanging out there as well, and will do our best to answer your outbrain-related questions quickly.

Sponsoring iDrink #7

In ~2 weeks we'll be sponsoring the 7th iDrink meetup in Israel. From the iDrink/Ning site:

iDrink is a gathering for people involved in the internet industry in Israel: VCs, entrepreneurs, employees, bloggers, journalists are welcome.

The 7th iDrink will happen on the 23rd of October. If you're in Israel and want to join us for a beer, register here!
 

Interview on Venture Capital Cafe

Eze Vidra who publishes the Venture Capital Cafe blog has just posted an interview with me (=Yaron). Read it here.