(…cue, confetti falling from your ceiling where you are)
The day you have all been waiting for has finally arrived. BlogBurst went live today on many of our lighthouse publisher partner web sites. SFGate.com is showing travel blogs, as are the Austin American Statesman and San Antonio Express News. The Statesman is also branching out to other parts of their site to use BlogBurst blogger content in their sports section and life - style and home decor section, where you can find blogs on home improvement and fashion. Houston Chronicle is displaying some of the tech blogs in our network, and it doesn’t stop there. Even local papers, such as the Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier (Iowa) and the Santa Maria Times (California), both part of the Lee Enterprises family of papers, as well as the Gannett papers, including the Des Moines Register and Phoenix’s Arizona Republic, are currently testing BlogBurst blogger content on their sites.
Of course, we could not have done any of this without your blogs and your willingness to participate in the BlogBurst network. We raise a virtual toast (imagine the Pluck BlogBurst team of editors, managers, developers and marketers holding up large frosty mugs of Shiner beer) to all of you for helping us get to today’s launch and beyond.
We are now in a position to begin tracking and reporting blogger pick up by publishers, as well as to promote more topical blogs to more content areas of publisher sites. So, we should start seeing a larger variety of blogger syndication in the coming weeks and months. We will also be rolling out more publisher partners and begin displaying your blogs on more of our current partners who are gearing up to start the service, including Washingtonpost.com and Parade Magazine. So keep up the good blogging and we will continue to take your feedback to improve the service.
Congratulations on a job well done. The work you’ve done on the website, the reporting, and on creating the network of publishers/bloggers is top notch, and you should all be proud.
bob
Congratulations on the official launch of this wonderful service.
Thanks for pulling this together; I saw my Family Travel blog feed amongst the online offerings in the travel section of the “San Antonio Express-News” and also had a big spike in site traffic as of this morning. Cool!
Sheila
Congratulations. I have 3 blogs accepted and I am excited that Blogburst is live now and the mainstream US newspapers are showing blogs from this network. I am from Bangladesh, a South Asian country. All the best, to you.
Sorry to spoil the party, but… The entire posts are displayed as part of newspapers’ coverage, together with newspaper logo, ads, etc. Where is the benefit for blogs? Traffic when someone in the readership clicks on permalink? (Most readers wouldn’t even know what permalink is.) Seems to me like blogs provide content and get shafted…
Way to go, BlogBursters! I blog alongside Razib at Know More Media and we’re excited to have several of our authors (including me) signed up with BlogBurst. I think it’s a win-win, and I look forward to watching you grow.
Oops, left the wrong URL - I blog at http://www.businessblogwire.com. Thanks! By the way, we’ve recommended BlogBurst to our 54 bloggers, so you’ve got some more members coming your way from us.
We echo the congratulations. What a great service for bloggers, bringing greater attention to the newsworthy, and even the useless!
Thanks again for having us as part of your BlogBurst!
RE 5: Dr.O
What differentiates BlogBurst from other syndication networks is that we actually develop and facilite relationships between the blogger and mainstream media publisher, which most likely wouldn’t exist otherwise, especially for bloggers looking to expand their readership and increase visibility for their blog. When your content is displayed on a publisher site, it is fully accredited with your byline and a direct link back to your blog. In that sense, it can only drive more traffic to your site. There are three main great benefits to being a part of BlogBurst:
1) Opt-in
2) Attribution back to your blog
3) Forthcoming compensation model
We hope this helps - no party spoiled here.
I have left the following comments in this post: they have not been published yet. Why not? The issues raised are legitimate and, modifying or resolving them will go a long way in making BlogBurst a better service.
Please publish the following comments:
Sorry to spoil the party, but… The entire posts are displayed as part of newspapers’ coverage, together with newspaper logo, ads, etc. Where is the benefit for blogs? Traffic when someone in the readership clicks on permalink? (Most readers wouldn’t even know what permalink is.) Seems to me like blogs provide content and get shafted…
Thanks, Michael
Thanks for answering my questions. I guess will have to see how it works. Good luck with the service! Our blog is looking forward to being syndicated in the health sections. Thanks again.
Dr.O does have an interesting point. Since there is no pay structure in existence, the only benefit to blogs is links. But since the whole blog article is up on the relevant newspaper, there is little incentive to click outside the newspaper. Why not have half the post on the newspaper site, and then a “more” link that goes to the blog entry?
You say: In that sense, it can only drive more traffic to your site.
“Can” is the operable word, but will it actually do so? I already post on the Austin American Statesman site, with a link back to my main blog from which most of the Statesman version is derived (cut and paste is a magical thing). I have even tried not including all the material and adding a tease and link back to my main blog to drive traffic there. It has not worked.
In April, I got almost 41,000 page hits on the Statesman; almost 53,000 hits in April. How many of those clicked through to my main TypePad blog? Virtually none, especially in the cases where I did not offer the readers anything new, but basically duplicated the content (as BlogBurst does) from my main blog.
And why should they click over? They are already getting most of the info anyway in my independent syndication effort with the Statesman, as they will in BlogBurst’s case. I appreciate the exposure angle, but I would like exposure for my blog, not it’s BlogBurst clone.
I must go with Michael/Dr. O here. How will BlogBurst ever be able to offer me readership back to my blog if you’re basically giving it away? That why buy the cow story my mother told me growing up is true!
Yay!
Good Luck with the service.
I’m just hoping that the publisher partners don’t choose the blogs that already have a higher profile, and some of us “little-un’s” get a chance.
Time will tell.
Congratulations! We are extremely excited to be a part of the BlogBurst launch. Please know that we will be working around the clock to bring enriched and timely content to BlogBurst clients - content that they and there readers will get nowhere else.
Respectfully Yours in Safety and Service
Brian Humphrey, Spokesman
Los Angeles Fire Department
…oh, and we’ll try to remember spell chekc!
hey! Goodluck everyone with the blogs going live. Hope this becomes a succes for all of us!
-manfred
Just curious as to whether my earlier comments will be posted?
Congratulations - recommending blog burst. This sure will provide more reach to publishers (Bloggers too) - Only to be seen real Bloggers n blogging is chosen.
Congratulations and one quick question. Will there be a way for us to find out which of our posts have been picked up by which publishers? So far what my reports tell me is that someone has looked at the post, but do any of the catagories imply that it has been published?
Thank you
Richard Marcus
Congratulations on the Launch
I guess it will take a little time before traffic builds up.
How do I know that new traffic on my blog ‘Serge the Concierge’ is due to my presence on ‘BlogBurst’.
Is the reporting of activity already available?
Thank you
Serge
Blog:
http://sergetheconcierge.com
Kay, just to clarify the click-through effect you made note of, it’s a bit different in the case you described. On your Statesman blog, the links back to your main blog probably are not as valuable since the user is already viewing your whole blog hosted on the Statesman. This is a great way to build credibility and authority within the Statesman’s community and affiliated more strongly with their online brand. But it was never intended or designed for driving traffic back to external blogs.
In the case of BlogBurst, we deliver posts to the publisher. When a reader comes across one of your BlogBurst posts they would click on your blog in order to read your other full posts. In other words, if the reader is interested in the topic and the post is a good representation of your blog, they would be more likely to click through. At the very least, the reader would be exposed to you, your blog brand, and your content in a context and on a scale that simply wasn’t possible previously.
Additionally we are working on a several new ways to provide even more links back to your blog as part of a richer set of publisher layout options.
Lastly with respect to the notion of giving away readership, I think it’s important to consider that so far we haven’t seen any evidence of a cannibalization effect - BlogBurst exposure displacing regular blog traffic. So in other words, there’s just not much to lose, and in fact there’s quite a bit to gain - including actual dollars once our forthcoming compensation model is in place.
I hope this clears things up a bit, and speaking on behalf of the Pluck/BlogBurst team, we are truly excited to help both bloggers and publishers succeed.
Very best,
Adam Weinroth
Director of Product Management
Pluck, Inc.
Last thing to add to this discussion is that now that we have some content and traffic flowing in the network, we can actually start figuring out things like compensation models for top grossing bloggers. Stay tuned over the next few months as our service comes out of beta with publishers and we start figuring out the money side of things. In the mean time, enjoy the exposure and we’ll be watching the secondary traffic generation as closely as you will.
Thanks to all BlogBurst folks who addressed my concerns. I realize this is a new and far-reaching effort. I do hope it succeeds and exceeds expectations for everyone involved.
Can anyone link me to their blog both original and the one displayed on a site of one of the publishers ? I am curious as to how it looks like.
-manfred
Manfred, and to all bloggers, here is a link of SFGate.com’s travel page where you can see the BlogBurst blogger widget displaying BlogBurst network bloggers:
http://www.sfgate.com/travel/
RE: 26. Adam Weinroth
Adam:
The more I think about it the more this service makes me extremely uncomfortable.
In simple terms, you take people’s content, in its entirety, and
publish it elsewhere (is that what you call the fair use?). In the
process, you supply someone else’s content (always fresh, and always different) to newspapers, while collecting an unknown amount of revenue. In return, you promise clicks and display of the brand. Plus, possibly, possibly money (never mind that your partnership agreement says “royalty free”).
So far by looking at Sitemeters of blogs, I don’t see clicks coming back. And I have checked a few.
What else I see? I see loss of traffic via Google, for example. How? With Google Rank of 8 for SFGate’s site, my article on SFGate will pop up before my permalink, when a particular word combination is used, because my blog is Rank=6. Am I wrong?
What else? I see SFGate, Austin American Statesman and San Antonio Express News and others stealing bloggers’ bandwidths via deeplinking (or hotlinking) jpegs straight through to the newspaper article (via your use of RSS, I presume). Not a nice thing for us bloggers, not a nice thing for SFGate to know either: someone will switch jpeg to pr0n one day. And, I am sure, that SFGate and Co would not want someone reputable to reveal that low-life practice. They are not LiveJournal after all.
Then there is more. I believe that your company, while having gone through extensive negotiations with newspapers, have not consulted us, the bloggers. That is shameful: we provide the content, and we are as important to your service as the newspapers. Putting us up before the fact is plain wrong.
So to summarize: I see other people’s content being stolen. Which is not fair use.
I believe that there are many outstanding issues your company has to address ASAP, before this thing spins out of control. And you know, the blogosphere is a big place, but bad news travel very very fast.
Here are 5 links to show BlogBurst on different publications.
Austin360.com - Music
MySA.com: Travel
Science, technology and computer news | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle
SFGate: Travel
Style: A look at fashion and design for the home and more
Some great points in this thread folks. Let’s address as many as we can here, but first a bit of philosophy:
BlogBurst is working to break new ground here and it is not going to be easy to bridge between two completely different worlds (traditional media and new media). Everything we do is working toward the goal of benefiting both groups, but it will take some time and experimentation during this beta to optimize the service for both worlds. Simply stated — we want you to win — and we’ll only win if you do. We hope that the dedication of our blogger advocacy, editorial staff and the vision we are attempting to build here speaks some volumes about not just what we are doing, but also how we are doing it.
Now onto some of the specific points:
It seems a bit early to make judgments about any results just yet as the system has been pushing blogs for only a very short while. Please be sure to take a moment and read the Burst Blog post on reporting (Show Me the Exposure post) for details on what you are seeing in the reports. Headline impressions are kind of like ads on a publisher’s page, the location of the widget serving the blog post headlines, how much traffic the page receives, how well written & inviting the headline is all make the difference of whether a headline impression results in a post view on the publisher’s site.
Along those lines, bear in mind that this service is primarily about exposure for bloggers. However, we believe that BlogBurst can drive free traffic to you in two important ways: First, blog posts present great opportunities for bloggers, publishers and Pluck to make a big difference for exposure and traffic generation. We show full, linked attribution and encourage all of you to use links in your content to drive readers of a post back to your blog (”part 3 of 4″ for example, or “read more on this subject at my blog”).
Secondly, it is a numbers game. Right now we are just getting started in terms of total impressions and post views as we work with publishers to figure out the right way to leverage this new voice for their audiences. However, publishers are rapidly picking up more topic areas on their sites. As the topical breadth and number of sites joining the program increases, so will total traffic for BlogBurst bloggers. Putting the marketer’s hat on: if a % of readers see your post and a % of those click through to your blog for more, then your traffic will become more significant as BlogBurst is used in more places.
As for the deep linking, you are right, we heard this concern as well from our blogger advisors and some of the many bloggers we interact with each week. The current feed caching model we use solves this for your blog text, but for photos we are working on a proxy engine whose job it will be to front your photos on publisher sites so that page views on those sites will not impact your bandwidth usage. Look for that capability this summer.
Lastly, please allow me to correct any misconceptions regarding Google crawling and page rank. We host all BlogBurst content on the publisher sites in dynamic, embeddable widgets that work much the same was as AdSense ads - a single line of javascript calls up the right BlogBurst content from our cache for display in real time on the publisher sites. This content is not crawlable by Google and will not show up as publisher web pages in a Google search.
Please feel free to send me questions directly if you wish. I can be reached at eric@pluck.com
Eric:
The thing is that I want your service to succeed: you have, overall, a great business idea. Unfortunately, I think that taking someone’s entire content is plain wrong way to do this business. Would newspaper ever agree to participate in Free-Giveaway-of-Content-for-Clicks scheme? No, they would not. Neither will blogs that respect themselves: the content is the most precious thing they have. Simply providing an excerpt followed by “Read more here…” with a link to the blog, would solve any issues. Your recommendation–”to use links in your content to drive readers of a post back to your blog”–is a wrong way to deal with issues. The problem is in your business model, not in our content.
The debate is not over yet…
P.S. Thank you for answering my question about Google ranking issues.
Dr. O
I am another blogger, and I disagree. (IMHO)
The model has been around a lot longer than the internet. It is just like the News Wires, such as the AP and Rueters. The difference is that it was not as visible, since most people did not read 2 newspapers from different cities.
When you read your local paper you may not even notice that the article you read said it was written by an AP writer, but, that same article was also in 1000 other local papers at the same time.
Why is this any different ?
Especially since it is served through JavaScript and not crawled by the spiders of the net.
The AP writers are directly reimbursed for their content. The bloggers are not, at best, they are indirectly rewarded.
I also disagree with Dr. O. The BlogBurst model makes bloggers true content contributors and puts our voice into the mainstream media. The link and abstract model you describe can be done by publishers today, just by using your RSS feed. If that was useful they would already be doing it and wouldn’t need a full fledged service like BlogBurst.
I am concrned about the hot-linking of images using my bandwidth and the reprinting of the entire text of my posts. I thought my posts would just appear in the sidebars of news sites with a link to my site for people to read the entire article. I don’t intend to write for newspaper readers for free. I don’t want them co-opting my posts as their own.
Should I withdraw from the service?
I see that food writers are on the wish list. Epicurious.com editor, Tanya Wenman Steel just noted my blog in her Epi-log.
Ideas on how to maximize this? I updated my profile to highlight it…I’m excited about the potential of this model. *Fingers crossed.*
TalkLeft:
We have removed our site from the service. Please note that we think, that if you place your blog in *suspend*, BlogBurst still can claim your content. According to the agreement, for as long as you have any relationship with BlogBurst, they can claim a “derivative work” of your content. And as you can see, in their view, “derivative work” means a full post, full title and a full picture. And, probably, your bandwidth.
Continuing to clarify the speculation: If your blog is suspended, your posts are no longer accessible to anyone else in the system: Your blog can no longer be discovered and your posts are automatically removed from any of our hosted widgets on publishers sites. New posts from suspended blogs will continue to flow into your profile on BlogBurst, but the only place you will see them is on your personal blog profile page - this is based on the assumption that a suspended blog may want to re-activate at some point. If you delete your blog, all content is removed from BlogBurst and no new posts will flow into the system, but you will have to go through the re-verification process if you re-add your blog again later.
I am happy that we have a lot of questions and BlogBurst is trying to address most of the issues. What I feel is that BlogBurst is taking blogging literally to the next level. Now my 2 blogs are displayed in the mainstream media and yesterday one of my blogs has around 4500 headlines impressions. I admit that the actual clicks were almost virtually none but this matter did not discourage me because of two factos. Firstly, I am happy that my blog is displayed in the top rated mainstream media houses. Secondly, I have seen in my blogging experience that it takes time to build a good base and BlogBurst is just few days old. Finally, now BlogBurst is talking about the idea of a compensation model.
In the end, I like to say that if BlogBurst fails to live upto the expectation and deliver some good benefits to the bloggers then this service will become dead anyway but BlogBurst has opened a new window of opportunity for the blogger. I am sure some other companies will follow this idea in the coming days and the bloggers will be benfitted in the long run.