outbrain

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!!

 

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!

Personalization of rating scores

Earlier today we opened up our rating widget to the world. If you have a blog, go ahead and get it here.

One additional important feature we're releasing today is the addition of the personalization algorithm to our rating widget.

From now on, whenever we serve the ratings widget to a reader, we look at his/her rating history, find like-minded people automatically, and adjust the rating scores accordingly. This is what the widget looks like with personalization:

In other words – two people might be looking at the same blog post, but each will see vastly different scores based on each one’s personal rating history. The more each person rates, the better our recommendations will be specifically for him/her.

We think this is really important for two reasons:

1. When consuming content, personal tastes are waaaay more important than averages. Consider this example - The movie Pulp Fiction is probably loved and hated by an equal number of viewers. On average it would be rated say 3.5 stars (of 5). For potential Pulp Fiction lovers, this would be too average to rise above the noise. Many movies would probably fall in the 3ish range and therefore would not be recommended.
   On the other hand, potential Pulp Fiction haters might consider seeing the movie because 3.5 is after all a positive score.
   So with average ratings, no one really gets a meaningful recommendation experience. If your rating widget is limited to averages - it's definitely time to switch to outbrain.
2. The second reason we think personalization is so important is that it finally gives your readers a true personal incentive to rate stuff (and rate things honestly), as they get tangible, long term value from building a rating history.

Again - the outbrain rating widget is available, for free, here. No registration required.

Rating widget now available!

After long incubation, we've finally opened up our blog rating widget to the public. You can get the widget on your blog by going here:
http://www.outbrain.com/get/

A few points:

• No registration required
• Installation is super-easy... we adjust the widget's design to your blog's look&feel automatically
• It's absolutely FREE
   

We currently support the following blog platforms:

• Blogger.com blogs are supported with a 1-click install (blogs using the "classic" template - use these instructions)
  
  
• TypePad blogs are also supported with a 1-click install.
  
  
• WordPress *installed* blogs are supported via a plugin that's available here.
  (unfortunately, blogs that are hosted on WordPress.com are not allowed to install plugins...)

We've also opened a support forum here. If you're having any difficulty installing the widget, or any other feedback - please let us know!

Blog rating widget - Principal #2

As I mentioned before, outbrain's blog rating widget will soon be available (you can signup for it here). In the mean time, we wanted to discuss some of the principals that guided us in designing the widgets.

I talked about the 1st principal here - Our widget is a service to you, the blogger, and not a viral distribution platform for outbrain. Today I want to discuss the 2nd principal we've tried to follow:

Principal #2 - Blending in with your design
When designing the rating widget, we wanted to make it work well with as many host blogs as possible. Initially we thought we'd do what mostly all widget developers do - give you a tool for customizing the look&feel to match the design of your blog. But that really sucks... After all - you've already designed your blog... so why should you worry about re-designing the ratings widget (or any other widget) over and over?
So we made it our goal to automatically inherit as much as we could from your blog's design, without requiring *any* customization or settings from you.

The design and colors of the stars are consistent - we think that provides for the best usability with color schemes that people are already used to, and which help your readers quickly find the most interesting posts.

But all the rest - fonts, text color, background colors, text size, etc - those are all inherited automatically from your site to ensure that the look&feel of the outbrain widget is consistent with the rest of your page.

Here are two great example - they both use the identical widget code (with no custom settings), yet each one inherits the look&feel of the blog on which it's hosted on:

Aaron Brazell's Technosailor blog uses a light gray background with black Lucida fonts. The outbrain widget looks as if it were designed together with the rest of the site:

In the mean time, Steve uses for his kayaking blog a dark-blue background image, with small light-blue text:

Two totally different site designs, using the exact same widget, with 0 configuration effort. Cool!

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Interested in getting this widget for your blog? Signup on our home page, or shoot me an email to [galai at outbrain dot com].

Help us test ratings on Drupal

We're looking for a friendly blogger using Drupal as the publishing platform to help us test the rating widget. You can see the rating widget in action at the bottom of this post ---v

If you want to help us on this and be the very first Drupal blogger using the outbrain widget, drop a note to Ori (olahav [at] outbrain [dot] com)

Thanks!

Blog rating widget - principal #1

As warned, we'll soon be releasing our rating widget for bloggers. You can see it being tested on some of the following blogs: Ouriel's, Ori's, mine, and of course this blog (look below).

As we get ready for the release, I wanted to cover some of the principals we decided to follow with this widget.

Principal #1 - Our widget is a service for the blogger, and *NOT* a viral distribution platform
The first principal we decided to follow is to design the widget as if it were designed by the owner of the blog. Unlike most widgets, we do not see our rating widget as a viral distribution platform, or as a banner for outbrain. In fact, there is no sign anywhere on the widget indicating that it is 'powered by outbrain':

We are bloggers ourselves, and we do not appreciate it when companies take it for granted that we've given them some screen real estate. We respect the fact that the blog's screen is *yours*. We are guests on your page, and are there to do a service. We don't intend to abuse this invitation you extended to us for pushing promotional materials!

We know the cost of this principal is going to be in slower distribution of the widget, but we are here to serve you, and not the other way around.

Are your other widget partners treating you this way?

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Interested in getting this widget for your blog? Signup on our home page, or shoot me an email to [galai at outbrain dot com].

Testing the rating widget

We've been quiet lately, and here's why. We've started testing our upcoming blog rating widget. You can see it at the bottom of this post, as well as on our personal blogs (Ori's, and mine).

This will be available for bloggers within a couple of weeks. Until then, any feedback you have on the performance, the design, the usability, anything! - will be highly appreciated. You can post it in the comments below, or shoot us an email (info at outbrain dot com).

Please keep in mind that this is a testing version and our engineers are beating the crap out of it on a daily basis, so it may be a little erratic at times... ;-)

Linkroll bugs fixed

Two bugs relating to our Linkroll widget were fixed this morning. The first caused the Linkroll to serve very slowly. The second caused some of last night's recommended links not to show up in the Linkroll for a few hours.
Both bugs are fixed now, and all of last night's recommendations are now showing up properly.