I came across a new service this weekend: OutBrain and I’ve decided to give it a run out.
Outbrain does two things. Firstly it adds a rating system to each post. You can see now that at the bottom of each post there is a star rating system. I hope that this will get me some feedback as to the kind of posts people like most. This rating system should (I will see when I publish this post if it happens) also add the rating stars to the feed as well so posts can be rated without visiting the site at all.
This extra integration with Feedburner seems like a great addition that makes it that much more useful.
The second thing it does is offer some suggests for similar posts on other blogs.
It may not always be the most profitable thing to do but I like the idea of recommending good posts to anyone that is interested enough to visit the site.
Installation is pretty easy. There is a WordPress plugin and that is pretty much all you need. Importantly for me it can detect Disqus and work with it, as well as working with the default WordPress commenting system.
If you have used it yourself I would be interested to know what your experience is, otherwise I will report back in due course.
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Thanks for explaining Yaron. I can see how that would be limiting.
Perhaps an additional widget that filters the post content when it goes to the feed and adds some javascript that way?. On WordPress I am sure that's possible.
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Hey Andrew – I'm the founder and CEO of outbrain. Thanks for giving us a shot!
Regarding the FeedFlare – we are very limited in what we can do there, because FeedBurner only allows to post text that is linked to a different page. FeedBurner does not allow any scripts, images or anything dynamic to be served there. With that limitation in mind, you can better understand the FeedFlare implementation we chose.
As Kate – said – if you have any better ideas for the text we post there, we'd love to hear them!
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Hi Andrew,
Thanks for installing outbrain! We hope you enjoy our widget and if you have questions feel free to contact me. I'd also love to hear any thoughts you have on our feedburner integration. Kate[at]outbrain[dot]com
Cheers!
Kate
The outbrain team
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Hmm, not that impressed with the Feedflare. Oh well.