Blog Azeroth

And btw, there is a poll about Outbrain on the top of this thread.

sorry, I should have been more clear. I was thinking about building a survey for blog readers, do some usability testing on what users like in a blog- etc.

Matticus hey! -


I’m the founder of Outbrain, and I’ve been tracking your chat about our product. I was trying to answer some of the questions that were raised, but have not been able to reply there. So, if you could pass the messages below to your fellow warcrafters I’d be grateful:

- To Game Dame – if you use FeedBurner for RSS syndication, then we’ve got support for that - http://www.outbrain.com/new/pages/get_r ... urner.html
It’s a little lame compared to the proper JS widget, but it’s the best possible within RSS feeds…

- To Bbr – No – we offer no customization of the widget. We debated this a lot, but decided in favor of keeping the widget and installation as simple as possible. For example – to allow for customization, we’d probably have to require bloggers to open an account with us, etc.
That said – we have put a ton of effort into inheriting as much of the blog’s design as possible. In fact, except for the color of the stars, I don’t think we push *any* of our design with the widget, but rather inherit the whole look&feel from the site. We also put a lot of effort in blending in nicely with your blog’s background.
So I think that in general we give you 90% of the benefit of customizing the widget to fit the design of your blog, with none of the headaches.

- To Rhoelyn – Same points as above. The widget should look more or less as if it were designed by the blogger as an integral part of the site.

- To Phaelia – As bloggers, we felt like we were writing into a black hole and got no feedback from our readers. Ratings is a great way for readers to “tell” the blogger what kind of stuff they find most interesting.
Also – after a handful of ratings, we start personalizing the scores that are shown for each specific reader. So a post averaging 2.5 for one reader may show a 4.5 for another. In other words – this is less about putting a global red flag on certain posts, and more about telling each reader – “here’s something we think you’re *really* going to like!”. I think readers will appreciate that service.

- And lastly – to you – We do offer a ‘most popular’ widget as a sidebar, but it’s still in closed beta. If you’re interested, we’ll try to set you up on that. The cool thing about it is that we don’t look at ‘highest average’, nor at ‘most ratings’ (both would give bad results…). Rather – we’ve developed algorithms that consider both # of ratings and averages, as well as the age of each post, and we blend that into a true ‘most popular’ list.

Hope this helps. If there’s *anything* else we can help with, or if anyone there needs some help setting up, please don’t hesitate to drop me a note at:

Galai [at] outbrain [dot] com

BBR - yes you can show the 10 Most Popular posts on your blog. Great question actually. If you registered with Outbrain you can turn this feature on with a check box. If you did not register shoot me an email and I can walk you through it - john(at)outbrain(dot)com.

See Demo - if you visit the Outbrain http://blog.outbrain.com/ - you will see a widget in the right side bar titled "Most Popular" - this is it. Basically a great way to drive readers deeper into your content and increase page views. Side note - the Outbrain Most Popular links are calculated on pure social values including ratings, raters and relevance. This is quite different that most of the simple numerical "Top rated" widgets that are around. The result is that the Outbrain Most Popular links are different than a numerical list and thus more interesting - which in turn draws more engagement and clicks/page views.

good question - thanks for raising it here on Azeroth.