Outbrain

I've had the Outbrain stars on my blog and vote option on my feedflare for a while. I like the ease of use and I like the anonymous feedback.

I recently got on to the beta to add the Outbrain recommendations widget. You can see the most popular stories (by rating) have been added to the top right of the blog.

I'd encourage you to start rating my blog posts. Why? Outbrain learns what you like and starts to make recommendations for you. Think of it as a personalised and content sensitive widget version of Google News.

There's a catch; it needs enough data before it can start to make recommendations. Does anyone know of any other search related Outbrain blogs? I'm inclined to start reading them so I can start building up my Outbrain profile.

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madKast adding blog analytics

madKast is a widget start up that I've had an 'like - remove - like - remove' relationship with for a while.

I'm currently in a "remove" stage of this relationship and have banished their widget from this blog. They're a very clued up start up so they emailed to ask why. They also let me know about this...


You can get a live view of this old data here

This is a blog analytics offering. Not only can I see my traffic lines (as a their widget is on every page) I can see how often their widget is used to share my blog posts - and that's an insight unique to madKast. It's a clever thing for them to share.

I also like the way they look at the reading trends of my readers. I can see which other blogs people are looking at. In fact, in many ways this looks a lot like MyBlogLog except the analytics are more thorough (we have share data) and prettier (we have graphs).

I certainly might put the madKast widget back on but I removed it last time because it simply stopped working.

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