outbrain

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. 

Top-5 posts API service

A couple of weeks ago we announced the availability of the outbrain API. This API allows publishers or feed aggregators to easily integrate full rating capabilities into their services.

This week we're adding a new service to our API, allowing partners to query our database and create top-X post lists from specific blogs. I've been messing with this API, and I have to admit it's very addicting...

Here are a few top-5 lists, as rated by the outbrain community, that you might find interesting.

Top-5 posts on Seth Godin's blog:

1. The brand formula - rated 5 out of 5
2. Triangulation - rated 4.6
3. Purple Cow Redux - rated 4.5
4. The Dabbawalla's secret - rated 4
5. The Tyranny of Opportunity Cost - rated 4

Top-5 posts on Joel Spolsky's blog:

1. A game of inches - rated 5 out of 5
2. Seven steps to remarkable customer service - rated 5
3. The Command and Control Management Method - rated 4.25
4. Smart and Gets Things Done - rated 4
5. More about elevators - rated 4

Top-5 posts on Guy Kawasaki's blog:

1. By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09 - rated 4.86 out of 5
2. "The Effort Effect" - rated 4.83
3. The Lesson of Tam's Art Gallery - rated 4.25
4. The Art of Schmoozing II - rated 4
5. DIY PR - rated 3.67

If you're interested in integrating the outbrain rating API into your service, shoot me an email to: galai [at] outbrain.com

FeedBlitz integrates the outbrain API

Today we're announcing with FeedBlitz the first integration of the outbrain API.

FeedBlitz (www.feedblitz.com) is a service for bloggers, which converts RSS feeds into email digests and delivers them daily to subscribers' inboxes. FeedBlitz manages subscriptions, circulation tracking and is compatible with all major blogging platforms. If you have a blog and are not offering email subscriptions yet, you're losing a big potential audience of folks who don't even know what RSS is.

Over the next couple of weeks FeedBlitz will be integrating the outbrain rating system across all the blogs using its service. Bloggers using FeedBlitz will now have direct feedback from their readers as to how interesting (or not...) each post they publish is. In addition, readers subscribed to FeedBlitz updates will benefit by getting immediate visibility into how interesting each post/article is for each one of them. With the flood of information made available by RSS/email feeds, this is an extremely important feature for users of aggregators like FeedBlitz.

We're making the outbrain API available to select partners as of today, free of charge. To get started, drop us a note at info@outbrain.com

Phil Hollows, CEO of FeedBlitz, covered the partnership here.