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Silicon Alley Insider Job Board Delivers

Thanks to Julie Hansen and Henry Blodget over at Silicon Alley Insider for helping us fill our New York based Account Manager position quickly.  While in a meeting with Julie our open position came up and she suggested that I post the job on SAI's job board.  Honestly I didn't know what to expect but I took Julie's advice and posted the job on SAI with the intention of posting the job on other blogs and sites.  But to my pleasant surprise, I didn't need to post elsewhere as the resumes started coming in immediately.  Many were qualified and further had experience or relevance in the business of blogging.  If you have positions coming open, I do recommend posting on SAI and some of the other NY tech blogs as they definitely have the right audience.  Next up for Outbrain will be (2) business development positions - look for the details on SAI's job board or shoot me an email @ john (at) outbrain (dot) com if interested to learn more.

Expected downtime for maintenance

Hey bloggers and publishers.
On July 11, 2008, between 12am and 1am EDT our Data Center facility is planning to preform a pre scheduled maintenance and upgrade one of the network devices.
There might be some network glitches to our servers during this hour.
Our Graceful Degradation mechanism should take care of such glitches so no harm is expected to your blogs.

If you encounter any unexpected problems please contact us on our support forum and we will come to the rescue.

The outbrain team

Do you drink a cup of Java every morning?

Do you drink a cup of Java every morning?
Are you having the same feeling of addiction when you don't get your Java cup very often?
Are you eager to get cool things done with this Java injection you get?

If so... I guess you found a new home.

We (outbrain) are looking for talented engineers in the Java zone.
Those who care about the product they produce. Those who are software quality maniacs but also super motivated to deliver their (software) goods on time.
We are looking for those who will not be shy to state their mind about the product and will be their own product users.
Those that we will have fun working with and will contribute their voice to this development harmony.

If you are one of that kind (And located in Israel) don't hesitate to send your CV to jobs [at] outbrain [dot] com

Looking forward meeting you.
The outbrain team.

Switching from Amazon S3 to a CDN

Scaling our service and ensuring that our widgets are served quickly and reliably has been a top priority for us. We're bloggers too, and we know how annoying it is when a blog hangs due to a widget that fails to serve quickly... urgh!!

To ensure that our servers never hang your blog, we've been using Amazon's S3 service to serve all of the static files in our widget - images, JavaScripts and the CSS files. We've also designed our widget to degrade gracefully if there's any service glitch after the scripts are served from Amazon so that your blog readers would never notice and degradation in the user experience.

Every service goes down occasionally, but it's been paramount to us to make sure we don't break (or slow down) your blog if ours does.

In the past couple of weeks, we've been experiencing very poor performance from the Amazon S3 service (especially outside of the US), which has caused some bloggers to see unacceptable load times of our widget. Amazon has not been communicating much about this, and so we don't know if this was a temporary issue caused by last week's DoS attacks on them, or whether this is a more permanent issue related to scaling.

As we scale our network, it's important for us to make sure that bloggers are absolutely comfortable with our ability to serve our widgets quickly and reliably. Therefore we've moved our widgets off of Amazon, and over to Panther - a proper CDN which we hope should significantly improve the speed in which our widgets show up around the world.

If you still encounter any issues relating to the widget's serving performance, please do let us know asap on our support forum.

Live in 4 new languages

We've just released the outbrain ratings & recommendations widget in 4 new languages:

• Swedish
• Estonian
• Czech
• Malay

You can get the widget for your blog here. It's free, and it could get you more traffic and page views.

We now support 24 languages, including: Arabic, Catalan, Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, English, Farsi / Persian, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Malayalam, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukranian.

As usual, we did this with the help of a handful of great bloggers who used our translation wiki and offered their suggested translations. We'd like to thank these folks: Elina, Farid Iqbal Ibrahim (blankqo), and several others who contributed.

Thanks (or - Terima Kasih, Díky, Tänan, Tack )  - we love you!!

Mashable has the best pretzels

Aside from the 300+ people, internet celebrities like Pete Cashmore and Obama Girl, top bloggers like Allen Stern from CenterNetworks & Tamar Weinberg of Techipedia, social media mavens like Matt Zarzecki from CafeMom and of course the double punch of Adam H. and Adam O of Mashable, tonight's Mash Exhibit Hall was rocking' as usual.  I had a great time so thanks guys for the party.

But one unlikely standout had to be the pretzels.  When they came out the first time, I was pushed aside from no less than 10 guys edging for the best position when the server dropped the bin.  These pretzels were hot and the mustard to boot was smooth at first, then came around for a reach around smack once you took the first bite.  For those that like this kind of treatment, it was wonderful.  So kudos to the Mash crew again for not only putting on a great party but also for serving some great party pretzels to keep the wheels turning.

Seeking an Account Manager to help manage growth

Outbrain has a wonderful position open for the right individual.  We are in need of a New York based Account Manager that will play a key role helping to grow our business.  The Account Manager will work closely with Business Development as well as liaise with the R&D team to support and engage the growing Outbrain community of bloggers, top tier publishers and partners.  If you are interested to join a group of accomplished, passionate people pushing the edge on blogging, widgets and online publishing - and think the concept of discovery is as important as we do for the future of the internet-  then we want to talk to you.  As with any Outbrain employee, we're looking for someone who is resourceful, bright, proactive, a go-getter, works well independently and as part of a team, and who will be passionate about what she or he does.

The ideal candidate will have the following skills and experience;

Have a blog.

Working knowledge of blogging platforms such as WordPress, Typepad, Blogger.   The ideal candidate will know how to create posts, edit posts, add widgets, manipulate templates and have a basic understanding of html, rss and java-script.

Preferred active and working knowledge of social media applications such as Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed to:

      Listen and monitor the conversation around Outbrain and related topics.

      Join the conversation around Outbrain and related topics with the proper etiquette.

Possess the technical aptitude and desire to learn the intricacies of the Outbrain system and to leverage that knowledge to help clients with support issues.

Serve as a key liaison with the R&D team to continually increase our ability to provide superior support to our client base.

Proven ability and desire to interface with clients both remotely and face to face to provide timely, consistent and accurate support and account management.

Work closely with business development on client integrations, on-going support and general account maintenance.

Take the lead on key accounts for account maintenance, upgrades and overall support.

Familiar with and the desire to work with partners such as media companies, rss readers, newspapers, and magazines.

Analytical ability to monitor and identify trends in performance metrics and data.

Desire to attend topical conferences and meetups as an Outbrain evangelist and community manager.

Based in New York, competitive salary, equity and benefits.           Travel estimated @ 10%

If you are interested or know someone who would be perfect for this position please send an email to:  john(at)outbrain(dot)com.

We couldn't have said it better...

Duncan Riley over at Inquisitr gets it. From a post titled "The Outbrain Challenge: How Social Are You?":

"...here’s my challenge: if you are using Outbrain use the social features.

The reasons: it’s a value add to your readers, but more importantly if you are on the Outbrain network you’re getting links from sites who are being social. You’re taking from others and not giving back….and that’s in part greedy, in part just not very cool."

We couldn't have said it better. While we do allow bloggers to decide whether network recommendations are enabled or disabled, we strongly encourage you to leave network recommendations on. Not only are you being more social by doing that, but you'd also be providing your readers with a much better service.

The notion of 'keeping my users on my site' is fairly false (unless you are Yahoo). Readers are going to be clicking away shortly after they visit your site. Might as well use that opportunity to delight them with personalized, recommended links.

Want the rating/recommendation widget on your blog? Get it here.

Sponsoring Mashable's Tel-Aviv "MashBash"

We are excited to support Mashable and their upcoming event in Tel-Aviv.  As an Israeli company, it's wonderful to see top blogs like Mashable recognize the efforts and talents happening across the pond in Israel.  We are proud to be one of the sponsors and will be present in force at the party June 11th.  But we won't be alone, as the Mashable crew have attracted some 800 fans to the event - and it's sold out - for the third time I do believe.  No surprise there, as the last couple Mash parties have also been ringers so no reason to think Tel-Aviv will be any different right? In the near future keep an eye out as Adam & the crew from Mashable will be coming out with some great posts on the tech scene in Israel and some other surprises that are under wraps for now. 

Live With Recommendations & New Site

Today we are proud to unveil a new web site and the launch of personalized recommendations as part of our rating widget.  Now bloggers and publishers of all kinds can install ratings and content recommendations easily and free.  This is a great way to increase page views on your blog, add a level of interactivity via ratings and to delight your readers with true content discovery.

A special thanks goes out to our R&D team in Israel that worked in overdrive to get the site and recommendations ready for the public. 

Allen Stern from CenterNetworks gave us a great post here.  This means a lot to us considering he has been part of the recommendation beta user group.  Adam Ostrow from Mashable also posted here.

Thanks to all the bloggers that have been using our widget already.  We would not be at this stage without you so thanks.  We do invite you to visit the new site and claim your blog.  As always feedback of all kinds is encouraged.