If Luke Skywalker blogged, he would want this...

Today we released a new feature that allows any outbrain publisher from beginning bloggers to our major media clients to have some control over the recommendations that show on your pages.  This powerful new feature is called the Link Zapper which enables a publisher to "zap" a recommended link from the site and in return get a new one.  As good as the outbrain recommendations are we know there are some times that publishers want a bit more control so now you have the power.

To get this power, you must be logged into your outbrain account.  Those of you that don't yet have an account can register and claim your blog here.  Registration is free and comes with several other benefits so it's a good thing to do.

Once logged into your outbrain account, you will see a small red [x] at the end of each recommended link on your blog.  If you would like to remove the recommendation just click the [x] and outbrain will zap that recommendation from the displayed links and replace it with a new one.  In the outside chance there isn't another recommendation that passes the "quality" test, we simply won't show one.  Further, upon zapping a recommendation, outbrain remembers your preference and will not show that recommendation again on your site.

To make "zapping" links even easier and faster, you can now login to your outbrain account directly from your blog by clicking the [?] in the widget.  The [?] is located at the end of the line that carries the rating stars.  See the screen shot above for reference.

So thanks to our hard working R&D and product teams for pushing this awesome new power out to our publishers.  Getting great recommendations automatically while having some degree of control over what's shown is powerful, and if Luke Skywalker were a blogger, he would be all over this.

Image credit from; StarsWarsNut

[UPDATE] We've created this Screencast so you can see the Zapper in action

Outbrain Tutorial: Using the Link Zapper from Outbrain on Vimeo.