Mark Fletcher from Bloglines and now owned of Ask Jeeves. Bloglines is the first service for searching, subscribing, publishing and sharing the news feeds, blogs and dynamic content. It is basically the "real time web." and products many opportunities for publishers. The challenge for consumers is the amount of content out there, they help you manage that. Most news readers are desktop bound. No blog creation tools fully integrated with news readers. The challenge for the publishers is to build, sustain and track audiences. Increasing thread of "distributed denial of service" like attacks from desktop news readers. And hard to monetize content for small blog publishers. The challenge for advertisers are traditional web advertising venues dont cover to reach new dynamic content. Lack of rich historical targeting information. The bloglines solution is the 1st fully integrated service for all 4. They are free. Consumer friendly. Web based. And support mobile devices. Bloglines search; keyword search, search into the future feature (save search, i use that)}, service provides "most popular" and personalized recommendations, advertising opportunities for targeting real time content. Bloglines subscribe; lets users select and organize the feeds in folders and save searches. Integrate email content through disposable email addresses. Easy for publishers to accurately track feed audience numbers. Integrate of email provides additional advertising opps. Subscription information provides excellent targeting information. Blogline publishing; they have a blog service, easiest way for new/avg users to create a blog, one click articles. Bloglines sharing ability to share subscription with others, share favorite news, email others and word of mouth. He then showed an example of a screen.
Jim Pitkow the CEO of Moreover technologies. Founded in 1998, pioneers in XML and RSS. They are the behind the scenes people, that power others. In 1950 they have several newspapers and some tv and radio. But now in 2005 there and so many newspapers, thousands of online newspapers, and hundreds of TV. But now we have 8 million + blogs. Internet news is the only trend increasing over time compared to other news venues. Yahoo! News was one of the first and then lots came into the game, Google News was a bit late, MSN Newsbot later and now SNAP. Most of the news powered on the net is from Moreover, except for Google News. In 2002 CNN was #1 for news places and in 2005 Yahoo! news is number one, and CNN is #2. They power lots of professional news sites and now they have a blog subscription service. They add value through editorial control. And then he shows some meta data including; source rank, pub date, name, author, cate, etc. Just ping www.moreover.com/ping to get in - they do not charge for inclusion.
Scott Rafer from Feedster was up next. They spend a lot of time ensuring they get a lot of feeds, they are at 5M+ feeds, but they increased it in months by like 4 million (I think). He said feedster is just like regular search, type in your search query and you get results. They have ads in there and you can subscribe to this search. He then gets into what an "RSS Headline Ad" looks like. Basically a text add marked as an ad pushed into your normal rss results. The other case is inserting ads within the individual blog postings, but for that you need permission from the publisher. He went on to explain about how much "we" know about the advertisers. He plotted a calendar view of all the entries on a blog by day, kinda neat. So he can define to only show ads on topic A, with X entries per day, etc... Feedster has jobs.feedster.com and they know the difference between news, jobs, audio, etc.
Chris Tolles from Topix.net, which is an other news aggregator, previously from ODP. He told the history of internet search on one slide. So now we have 8 billion plus pages publicaly available within search. So now what? He said, lets search the "incremental web". You search on "chronologically ordered" sites, RSS feeds, discovery relevance from freshness, economic model is the newspaper. The "long tail", basically top 100 searches are 2%, whereas the top 100,000 are 40%. 50% of the searches done at Google are brand new. How do you program for that? So how do you get all the information on certain information that I personally want on a daily basis? He showed examples of doing this with topix.net. The opportunity is massive, aggregate all news on one Web site, appealing to all audiences, delivery format is wide and topic focused ads works very well.
Jeremy Zawodney from Yahoo! Search to talk on this topic, since he is a big blogger. RSS Drives traffic: RSS is the ultimate opt-in. Readers featch content frequently (fresh). Syndicate summaries and send clicks back to your site. Add to My Yahoo! Button increases subscriber base. He said compared to email newsletters, the more you send it, the more annoying it gets and they want to unsubscribe. But with blogs, they want more and if you don't give more then they unsubscribe - so it is an opposite affect. RSS Can Help Rankings; bloggers love RSS feeds, there are a lot of active bloggers, they link to sites they like, they do this every day and quality links help rankings. Then he shows RSS on My Yahoo interface and shows you how to add content, without talking much about RSS (which people might not understand). They also expose RSS in the Web results ("RSS "Add to My Yahoo!" View as XML). They recently released a toolbar for Firefox that has an "add to my yahoo" button. Yahoo! News Search and RSS moved to the #1 spot. They have over 7k sources, provides RSS feeds to these feeds, and also by query based feeds. Yahoo! Search Web Services announced this morning allows you to program it (developer.yahoo.com). What you can do today; create good content, provide feeds, add them to my yahoo and then use the add to my yahoo button to your site.
