Happy Holidays to all of the people who we have been fortunate enough to work with in 2008. We had a terrific year thanks to the many bloggers and publishers who joined our network and provided great feedback. And to the many partners we had the good fortune to interface, we wish you a happy holiday season as well. Although times are a bit challenging for everyone, out there in the fog lies opportunity as we are excited to continue our growth in 2009. So to everyone we wish you a very happy holiday season and a happy, safe and exciting new year.
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.
We have had the distinct pleasure to work with the folks over at BoysLife.org, which is the online extension for the Boy Scouts of America's magazine titled Boy's Life. In conjunction with the team at BoysLife.org and the team at Auttomatic we are proud to power the ratings and personalized recommendations on their new platform as a Wordpress VIP. BoysLife will join the ranks of CNN, Time Inc., Dow Jones and many other premiere sites running on the VIP platform. The site is wildy popular with boys age 6-17, as they love to consume jokes, games and more. We know because they get loads of ratings on everything they publish. You can read more about the site from the WordPress Publisher Blog here.
