Web X.0

Free idea - Affiliate links to RSS readers

(note - this post is a bit nuanced, so if you're not into RSS readers, etc you can probably safely skip it... ;-)

Here's a simple and sweet idea I'm giving out for free to all the RSS reader companies in the world. I offered it to Mark Fletcher of Bloglines about a year ago, but haven't seen it implemented yet. I'd really love to see this done by one of the RSS readers/aggregators/whatever they're called:

It seems like the biggest barrier for mainstream adoption of RSS readers is subscribing to that 1st feed. I know this, because I evangelize Bloglines to a lot of people, but then when they finally sign up for an account they're usually clueless about what to do with it next, and why they should even ever use it. 

Now, as a blogger, I'd be more than happy to endorse an RSS reader on my blog so that new users that are wondering what those RSS links do could subscribe to my feed.

But simply linking back to an RSS reader site is pretty much useless for my readers, and doesn't have much value for me (blog owner).

So I thought it would be awesome if I could post a link that "primes" the recommended RSS reader with my WebX.0 feed. So when a new user clicks on my "We love Bloglines!" link they go to the Bloglines signup page. Once their account is active, my feed is already automatically subscribed to. Cool!

Value to me (feed owner) - I easily got a new subscriber. This link is 100x more valuable to me than a stupid link back to the homepage of some random RSS reader site.

Value to user - their account already has one feed they're interested in, making that 1st feed hurdle that much easier.

I think this could be a sweet and cheap (aka - 'viral'...) way to build a lot of affiliate links back to the RSS reader company that does this first. The implementation is probably super simple... they'd just need to add a referring feed URL in the link (something like: www.bloglines.com/signup.jsp?sub=www.webx0.com), and support it in their account setup process.

Please someone do this... you're guaranteed a ton of free incoming links from the blogosphere!

2c

Introducing outbrain

In the past few weeks I've been bugging you with posts about a mysterious 'RSS relevancy project' I'm working on. Here's the story:

RSS is a great way to consume content. So you get all excited and start adding feeds to your RSS reader. And then it quickly becomes an unmanageable crazy avalanche of content.

Out of this pain outbrain was born.

The idea is simple - If every blog/post/feed is read by many people, why don't we harness the collective wisdom of all the readers for everyone's benefit? That way we can save each reader's time by quickly floating the best posts and flagging the worst.

But 'best' and 'worst' are very subjective definitions. A post about ski that might be extremely interesting to my good friend, could be a total bore to me.

So we decided to try and take this one step beyond the collective 'wisdom of crowds' type sites (aka - Digg & clones, or should we say 'wisdom of bored teenager sites'...), and develop algorithms that try to predict personal interest in a specific article/post before it is read.

We do this by asking all outbrain users to vote on the items they read. The algorithm then seeks out similarities in voting patterns among different outbrainers, and personalizes recommendations accordingly. The more people vote about stuff they read, the smarter their outbrain becomes in recommending the right items to them.

Which brings me to the second goal we set - We hate being bugged by sites where submissions are a 5-minute process including logins, captchas, forms, etc. We want to bug our users as little as possible, and give them the benefit of the technology wherever they're already used to consuming their RSS feeds. Except for signing up, I don't think you'll ever have to visit the outbrain.com site again.

The first small step of outbrain is now available. More information about it on the outbrain blog here.

If you're interested in joining the outbrain project - head over to the website and submit your email address. I'll shoot you back an email with a user name and details on how to get started.

RSS relevancy project - updates

Excellent post by Jim Meyer on the attention crisis, as it relates to RSS readers. From this post:

There's no doubt that RSS has had a significant impact on how people access and discover information on the web. But to most people the experience has been bittersweet... for a while it seemed a small yet noticeable step in the right direction for fighting the information overload most of us face every day.

As time passed, more and more websites proclaimed "we have a feed, add it!", and so we did, thinking that this feed might be the one we couldn't live without... RSS suddenly made it all too clear that we will never be able to read and comprehend all the content out there.

If you're a regular reader of blogs/RSS feeds and feel this pain yourself - this post is for you: Today we're expanding the RSS relevancy experiment I mentioned here, and will be adding the first 25 readers to sign up. The only requirement is to be a Firefox user.

What's in it for you? - Honestly, nothing at all right now. But the effort is tiny and within a few weeks I believe the results will be very interesting. Plus - we'll be forever grateful for helping us out!

Interested in more info? Sign up here.

RSS relevancy experiment - NewsGator now supported

Today we're expanding the RSS relevancy experiment to support NewsGator readers as well. 

In a nutshell, we're looking for folks like you to help us vote on feeds you read and find interesting.

In addition, we support Bloglines, Rojo and Sage:
 

If you use any of these to read your feeds, and want to help us out in the relevancy project, shoot me an email and I'll set you up. Thanks!

yaron (at) galai (dot) com

RSS relevancy experiment - Rojo and Sage supported

I recently posted about an experiment I'm running around relevancy in RSS. In a nutshell, we're looking for folks like you to help us vote on feeds you read and find interesting.

We initially supported Bloglines only (on Firefox). Today we're adding support for Rojo and Sage (thanks Rogel!).

If you use Rojo or Sage (or Bloglines of course) to read your feeds, and want to help us out in the relevancy project, shoot me an email and I'll set you up:

yaron (at) galai (dot) com

[UPDATE] We are now supporting NewsGator too.

Looking for feed readers

Do you read blogs like this one via a feed? Do you use Bloglines on Firefox[1]? If yes, then Uncle Yaron Needs YOU!

For an experiment I'm involved in relating to relevancy and blogs, we're looking for folks like you to help us vote on feeds you read and find interesting.

What's in it for you?... Hmmm - to be perfectly honest - not much for now... Well, except for the great privilege of helping me out, of course!... ;-)

I can say that this is an extremely interesting project, especially if you're a regular feed reader. And by helping us now, you will get permanent priority access to any new features before anyone else. I think you'll appreciate these a lot once we make them available.

Interested? Shoot me an email and I'll give you more details:
yaron (at) galai (dot) com

[UPDATE] - we added support for Rojo and Sage, as well as Bloglines (all on Firefox).

[UPDATE2] We are now supporting NewsGator too.

[1] Or, of course, willing to convert to Bloglines + Firefox.