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Be the First to Rate This…

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outbrain_logo_small Yesterday, I saw a breaking news blog entry relating to Outbrain and Disqus. It’s a very small update in the Outbrain widget that detects if Disqus is being used and asks if the person rating an article would like to leave a Disqus comment as well.

Although the integration isn’t huge, it did catch my attention and I decided to install Outbrain on my blog. Outbrain is a plug-in content rating system that also provides recommendations automatically at the end of each article where it is installed. There is no special logins needed to rate an article, just click on the number of stars you think the article deserves and your rating is recorded.

outbrain-plugin The install was very quick and easy, with one odd hiccup. The hiccup came when I was instructed to paste in a unique activation code for my blog in to the plugin’s control panel.  After hitting the button to attempt activation, I eventually got a ‘timeout’ error. I tried the same steps several times with no joy. 

Eventually, however, I noticed that my blog management page on the Outbrain web site apparently decided I was activated, and allowed the plugin to operate normally. It was all very mysterious and I never actually got the confirmation through the control panel as I should.  But knock on wood, I am up and running.

As you can see in my screenshot, I rated my own article to see if the Disqus integration was working. However, it didn’t ask me to leave a comment.  (I subsequently figured out the ‘comment’ link only appears on the single post page, after the Disqus module loads.)

There are a number of great blogs that I follow that are now using the Outbrain plugin, such as Louis Gray, CenterNetworks, WinExtra, The Inquisitr, and VentureBeat.

posted October 30th, 2008 in Breaking, In Brief, News | Tags: ,

  • Hm, the recommendations might need some work - "Bacon Salt: How two tech guys created a viral food sensation"!?
  • Good observation. Personally, I love Bacon Salt, but you're right that it doesn't have much to do with Outbrain or Disqus or even Scribkin.

    I'm not privy to how the recommendation engine works, but I have noticed that, by default, one of the two recommendations always is accurate and fairly unchanging, and the other one almost points randomly. And if you click on "more recommendations" the hidden ones are usually fairly accurate as well.

    I'm not sure if the one wild-card recommendation is a 'sponsored link' of some sort, or Outbrain's attempt at forcing an algorithm to think outside of the box a little bit, but I can tell you that you can adjust what is displayed: On the Outbrain configuration page, you can chose from "best, limited, or none" for the recommendations. It could be that 'limited' only shows the more accurate links.. I'll be testing some more to see if that is actually the case.
  • I use Zemanta for related post recommendation etc. so I switched the Outbrain ones off completely on my blog
  • Hey guys - I'm the CEO of Outbrain.

    1st - thanks for installing our service, and blogging about it - we really appreciate it!

    2nd - regarding the Bacon Salt link you've been seeing - it is an algorithm experiment we're doing with ~10 links to really good stories that are slightly off topic. The results of this experiment will help us to greatly improve the quality of our recommendations in the future, as well as bring other benefits to bloggers using our service.
    These test links will start fading away within a few days, and as you mentioned - they can be immediately disabled through the dashboard settings.
    (Let me know if you prefer to keep your recommendations at "best", and we can shut off the off-topic links on the backend for your site).

    Again - thanks for giving us a shot. We really appreciate your feedback and are constantly working to improve the service based on that. If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a note at: galai[at]outbrain[dot]com, or on our support forum: www.getsatisfaction.com/outbrain

    Thanks!
    Yaron Galai, outbrain
  • Yaron, thank you very much for the explanation! I know personally I am actually amused a bit by the experimental recommendation. Also, I love Bacon Salt. So I don't have a strong need to be excluded from the group.

    If I had a much larger readership, I'd probably decide differently. I noticed some of the bigger sites don't have the rogue recommendation. But since you have said it's a limited-time thing, I'm OK with having it the way it is for now.

    Also, although I don't use it as much as I could, I'm glad you (and Kate) are pointing people toward Get Satisfaction.. I really like the goals and aim of their site, with presenting a unified format for feedback and troubleshooting to smaller companies that can't necessarily afford their own in-house support portal and/or call center. Once people get a free account at Get Satisfaction, they can track ongoing issues with a large number of companies using the service, which is very cool. I think of it as the "Disqus" of the customer support world.
  • Cool - we love GetSatisfaction... it's a really great service.
  • Thanks for this post. This will help me improve my writing! Rate away!
  • Outbrain just works. The integration with Disqus is small, especially if you have the comment box above the comments, and not below, but it's good to see folks working together.
  • I'm starting to get that opinion too, Louis. Outbrain just works!
  • Kate
    Hey!

    Thanks for installing outbrain! The integration is a small one but we think it's pretty slick and a nice way for the widgets to interact.
    I'm sorry you had trouble claiming your blog - shoot me an email at kate[at]outbrain[dot]com and we'll get it sorted out for you.

    I love the design of your site - I choose to view it in purple. Very cool.

    Best,
    Kate
    -The outbrain team
  • Wow, fast catch, Kate. Thanks for the comment!

    Regarding registering my blog with Outbrain, I think it is done. I think. Anyway, there doesn't seem to be any flags going off anywhere and the Outbrain site seems content to manage Scribkin as my domain.

    Thanks for the compliment on the site theme! I really like this theme too, it's easy to read and supports both constrained and variable-width modes (plus the seven user-customizable theme colors!) It's a pretty unique theme.

    I did notice that when I click on the "comment" link on Outbrain on one of my own posts, it doesn't actually jump down to the Disqus comment field. But I am suspicious that it has more to do with my funky theme than your hash tag not working correctly...
  • New blog post: Be the First to Rate This… http://tinyurl.com/5r55mt
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