outbrain

We're happy when bloggers are happy

Amit Agarwal over at Digital Inspiration wrote a great post about some of our new features - the FeedFlare support and blogger reports. Thanks Amit!

Most companies obsses about getting covered by CNET or TechCrunch or NY Times. We don't care about those, and don't spend a minute of our time trying to get any of their attention. What really gets us at outbrain excited is when a blogger 'gets' what we're doing and writes great things about our product. That makes our day!!

Brand and Distribute Your Own RSS Reader with Snarfer

Our friends over at Snarfer, just released an exciting new initiative where publishers of blogs, websites or rss feeds can create their own custom rss reader powered by Snarfer.  These custom readers can be distributed to audiences on behalf of the publishers at no cost.  Since publishers can specify which feeds ship in their custom reader it is an ideal way to keep your audience updated on the latest and greatest information via your rss feeds which are a spam-free, secure environment.  Snarfer and Outbrain are not new to each other, in fact Snarfer was the first rss reader to fully integrate Outbrain's rating service.  We are delighted to be a part of this new initiative as users of Snarfer's custom readers will also have the ability to rate each post.

The guys at Snarfer designed a custom reader for Robert Scoble which you can download here. Robert had a cool idea where he would use the custom reader to keep his Dad informed of his reading list.  Thinking along those lines, there are many applications where publishers can provide and control what their readers can see. 

In keeping with writing good clean software, this lightweight installer weighs in at a mere 450kb.  To learn more contact Snarfer for a password to access the demo directory.

MoveableType testers needed

We're starting to test our widget on the MoveableType platform. If you publish your blog on MT and want to be among the first to try the outbrain widgets on your blog, please drop Ori (our CTO) a note to: olahav [at] outbrain [dot] com

If you give us a hand, we promise you our eternal gratitude as well as some link love... ;-)

Rating widget now in multiple languages

This has to be one of the coolest things we're releasing in a while. As of this week, the outbrain rating widget is available in the following languages:

• Spanish
• Hebrew
• German
• French
• Polish
• ...and of course English

Here, for example, is the widget in French:

To get the widget in any of those languages, go to our super-simple installation page and select your preferred widget language. We do the rest for you.

Ori, our co-founder and CTO, wrote a great post about the translation process. I won't repeat everything here, but will just say that we're working with members of the outbrain community to translate the widget to many more languages in the near future. If you want to participate and help translate to your preferred language - please visit our internationalization wiki and take a stab. We already have 10+ new languages which are almost ready to launch.

A special thanks to all the folks who helped translate these versions: Or P (Hebrew), Danielle Mediouni & Ouriel Ohayon (French), Markus Tressl & Jean-Pierre Koenig (German), Jacek Wicinski & Amir Ferser (Polish) and Giorgio Saturno, TaYo & Leo Piccioli (Spanish). We love you!!

 

Get ratings on your FeedBurner feeds

One of the most frequently asked questions we get is: "Most of my audience reads my posts via RSS and not on my website. How can I get my RSS readers to also rate my content?"

As of today we're making our ratings available for integration within FeedBurner RSS feeds. We've used the FeedFlare API to provide you with an embedded rating link within all your posts.

Enabling the outbrain FeedFlare is super-easy. Simply follow these steps:

1. Login to your FeedBurner account.
2. Click on the 'Optimize' tab, and select the 'FeedFlare' option.
3. Scroll down to the section called "Personal FeedFlare" and paste the following URL into the text box: http://widgets.outbrain.com/FeedFlareUnit.xml
4. Click on the "Add New Flare" button, and check the '[x] feed' checkbox.
5. IMPORTANT: Don’t forget to click the 'Save' button at the bottom of the page. (or - the 'Activate' button if this is the first FeedFlare you are enabling)

That's it! It's important to note that FeedFlares may take a while to update with the freshest rating data. This is a FeedBurner limitation and there's little we can do about it.

If you have any feedback or comments or bugs to report, please post them on our support forum. 

Outbrain's First at Blogworld

We erected the first Outbrain booth at BlogworldExpo in Las Vegas last week. (Pictured left with Raanan Bar-Cohen, Automattic (blue shirt) and myself)  As with any firsts in a startup you prepare as best you can then hope for a good response. Thanks to so many enthusiastic bloggers we had a great show. From an exhibitor standpoint the traffic was consistent and for our purposes qualified. If you want to see how I dealt with an unexpected situation after the first day of the show take a quick jaunt over to my blog for a chuckle. For Outbrain, the best compliment we received was that many of the bloggers installed our rating widget onto their blogs right from the booth. Thanks to all of you who

made that effort. We look forward to having you in the Outbrain network.

The best part of this conference was meeting such a wide diversity of bloggers covering so many different subjects. For example, I met Anita Cohen-Williams from MySearchGuru, Joyce Chang from ShoeBlog, Greg Blandford at Investor Village and Larry Ward from Political Media.  Unfortunatley I did not catch many of the sessions (due to being busy with demos which was great) but I did catch the media mogul talk. Although the session was a bit repetitive, there were some real gems in the discussion such as Jeremy Wright's (CEO b5media) comments on the value of passionate bloggers operating in small niches.   Richard Jalichandra (CEO Technorati) shared some insight into where he and the team will be taking Technorati and Brad Hall (Programming Director for Weblogs Inc.) struck a chord with his distinction between journaling and journalism. Thanks to Rick Calvert and his team for putting on a good show. As for suggestions on how to improve the event, you can check out my comments here and Nate Westheimer's (CEO Bricabox) comments here. We will be posting a conference schedule on our site shortly, but we will be back next year. As for the other shows, if the bloggers are there, there is a good chance Outbrain will be there as well.

Help us internationalize the rating widget

With the outbrain rating widget catching fire with bloggers in so many countries, we're going to try and make it work well with as many languages as possible.

The outbrain magicians engineers are going to handle the technical side, but we need your help on the language side. We've setup a section on our wiki where anyone who's fluent with a language can help us translate and tweak the wording on our widget. It's really simple to contribute - follow the contribution instructions on the page to make changes or to add more languages.

Click here to access our language wiki and help us make our ratings work well in any language.

Thanks, Merci and Toda Raba!

More blogger love

Getting more great reviews:

r3fresh - "My absolute favorite part of the widget is that it’s just for rating. No ajaxy effects, advertisements, logos, and there isn’t a social networked tacked onto it. You don’t even have to register to get it."

Ouriel Ohayon[1] - "What i like about it is that you can install it in 1 Click and works on most major blog platforms. It is also very discreet and blends well in your blog. It is light and does not affect the load time of your page.
It looks simple but believe me, providing a good scalable rating system is not easy at all."

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[1] Disclosure - Ouriel is the manager of the LGiLab which has invested in outbrain.