If you read gameshogun via the website, you would have noticed the “5 Stars” below every posts. If you are reading via feeds (XML/RDF/Atom/RSS), you may have noticed the words “Rate this” at the bottom of each post.

That is Outbrain which I fou…

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 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.

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: http://www.getsatisfaction.com/outbrain

Thanks!
Yaron Galai, outbrain

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.

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…

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