“provide washingtonpost.com with a daily feed of its “Best of the Web” series, including top recommended news articles and opinion pieces, to be featured in washingtonpost.com’s “Politics News & Analysis” e-mail newsletter and on the front page of the site’s well-regarded “Politics” section.”
More can be found here.We’re extremely excited to begin work together, and especially look forward to collaborating on new features for Election 2008.
This announcement comes on the heels of 2006 announcements with Yahoo!, FoxNews, Forbes, Time, and Opinion Journal — we’ve always felt the key to long term success was to cut distribution deals that would both build and establish our brand while also growing traffic to provide our value-add to a larger audience. Congratulations to John McIntyre and Tom Bevan, founders of RealClearPolitics for a job well done!
Our new BuzzTracker design, here at http://www.buzztracker.com, incorporates MyBlogLog communities very prominently above the fold on almost every page. We’ve been getting lots of questions of why this is, why did we do it, etc., so I thought I’d write this post to try to give a little insight into our thinking.
Let me start by saying that the principals of Participate Media have been thinking about and implementing online communities for over 10 years now — we worked together at Participate.com (sold to Outstart in November 04) from 96-04 — and we remain more convinced than ever at the power of online communities and social media to build brands, create loyalty, create value-added services, and help fuel explosive growth. We even wrote a series of whitepapers on Online Community, Return on Participation, and other topics relevant to the success of making this social media work. I posted about the Return on Participation whitepaper, and MyBlogLog here (whitepaper is available).
One of the largest values we believe a Publisher can deliver its readers is recognition — showing people off and rewarding them for their participation. MyBlogLog is the ultimate recognition engine — and even better — it rewards people for reading our site, and gives them a very quick way to find out who else is reading and enjoying the web site. For a newer site just building their first critical mass, MyBlogLog allows us to deliver this terrific feature NOW by leveraging the critical mass across the MBL network.
Now the other key benefit that you have to provide to readers is the ability to interact; to comment; to discuss. You must allow your readers to become part of your brand and to define your brand. We’ve gotten a lot of questions on — “where can I comment?” and we will be launching this shortly. We expect to work with MyBlogLog as well on this feature — as we will instantly have thousands of people registered to comment on our site.
Finally — we’re also very excited by what we expect to be a furious roll out of new features allowing publishers to show off most frequent readers, new readers, etc to the site — essentialy this should become a great platform for us to deliver more value to our user base.
When we initially launched our Beta at the end of August - we knew that our design as it stood then was not the final design - but our plan was to get the site launched, get feedback, and start learning. We used the first few months of the Beta launch to really hone our vision and get user feedback on the features, what worked and what didn’t. We then engaged with Rachel Cunliffe of cre8d design to work with us to re-design the site.
We think Rachel did a great job (thanks Rachel!) and has helped us accomplish our two major objectives for the re-design:
It passes the “Mom Test” — ie, will your Mom, who knows how to Google but could care less about web 2.0, understand and be able to use the site
Since BuzzTracker will always be about thousands of thousands of topics - can we devise an interface that allows for easy navigation and finding of topics of interest.
By focussing on the main articles found by our engine for a given topic, and de-emphasizing the blogs used to generate that result, we think we’re on the right track.
On the back-end, we completely swapped out our architecture to allow true scalability simply by adding more servers. We’re now using over 90,000 content sources (compared to 30,000 at launch). Without getting into too much detail — what this means from an end user is much faster and more timely results, our ability to publish more frequently, and ultimately enables our Create A Topic feature.
The Create A Topic feature will allow any end user to create and maintain a topic of their choice by essentially using all the back end levers at our disposal to fine tune their topic — including how far back in time does one want to search and test relevancy, the ability to apply boolean search terms, among other things.
We’ve really enjoyed using the new site and we hope you do to — one tip: if you have a hard time finding your topic in the navigation simply type it into the search box — it should come right up –
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