Inform.com’s Latest Offering
Michael Arrington
14 comments »
I’ve gone back and forth on Inform.com in the past (we also covered them here). They are a massively funded New York startup that launched an inferior news product late last year. Since then, they’ve made real efforts to shake things up. Their newest product, Inform Publisher Services, is aimed at big web publishers, and is designed to help them increase page views by adding relevant links to other, hopefully related, content in their archives.
The new service automatically creates links in existing articles, which link to a results page containing relevant content from the site as well as from the web, including blogs and audio/video content. It’s currently live on NewsOK.com, an Oklahoma newspaper site. To see it in action, see this article and click on one of the links within the text. I clicked on “State Department” in the second paragraph, which brought up this results page.
Frankly, I didn’t see a lot of relevant content.
Inform Publisher Services is entirely automated, and I’m sure they’ll tweak the algorithm over time to make it better. But with all the new links in the articles, it seems that readers will quickly tire of seeing a results page with barely-related content put in front of them.
Eric Schonfeld at Business 2.0 wrote a very long post on the new product tonight, suggesting that this will give pubishers the edge they need to compete with Digg and Google in the war for reader attention. I don’t see the logical connection that he sees, but the company has convinced six partners to launch with this soon: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, The New York Sun, NewsOK.com (Web site for The Oklahoman newspaper and News9, KWTV CBS Affiliate), The Huffington Post, The Deal LLC, and NameMedia. If Inform does a good job of creating more page views for these companies, they’ll keep this business and add more partners over time.
See our posts on Blogburst, another company offering services to media publishers. In the case of Blogburst, they are offering to syndicate vetted blog content to these sites at a much cheaper price than they pay for other content.
I do not see how Inform.com could enable media companies to compete with Digg and other services by merely adding relevant links all over the place.
It takes more than that to create “social network” effects.
It seems that just like Sphere, this is a company which works more by relationship building with other companies than by having a good product.
As Sphere clearly proves, you can get a lot of business coming your way even with an inferior product, if you know how to talk to other business people and convinge them.
They changed http://www.inform.com. It works like a normal website now. This is impressive. I agree with Innovation Zen and Dark Scorpion media companies are going to need a lot more than related links to stop the bleeding.
I like this website & it is a normal website.
Providing more relevant links in the form of blog content that drives readers outside the newspaper’s site as well as audio and video content as their service includes, does not drive more pageviews for these papers and their “back” button argument to me at least seems weak. Newspapers need to leverage services that keep readers interacting at their own sites as much as possible and for that to happen its gonna take some human based design effort cause not all audiences are created equal especially in the newspaper business where its really about the local community
By no means does this one move catapult online news orgs into any sort of real competition with the social networking/bookmarking/linking all-stars, but it’s one little piece of a larger trend, and I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s a good effort. Better than nothing, essentially.
I’d love to see newspapers start listing links to related news stories, blog posts, and YouTube (or similar) videos — in a sidebar with every online story.
Send them away so they come back for more.
I have signed up with both BlogBurst and Scoopt for my blog ‘Serge the Concierge’ and I am still waiting to see a significant upside to it.
On the other hand I get regular visitors from my ’seeds’ on Netscape and Now Public.
Other significant drivers of visitors are:
1) Comments on some of the New York Times blogs
2) Snippets of my blog posts in relevant CraigsList discussion groups
Serge
Biz:
http://www.njconcierges.com
Blog:
http://www.sergetheconcierge.com
Tone, I think you’re missing the point. Newspaper sites aren’t ever going to be able to contain every single story or piece of content. Visitors who don’t find what they are looking for are going to go away anyway so, by helping them find the content they want, you’re embedding that link in their behaviour: they know that, even if your site doesn’t have the content, you’ll get them where they need to go to find it. And they’ll come back.
Another positive aspect of linking out is that it allows readers to dig deaper. When I read a well written blog post that links off elsewhere, I don’t necessarily think of that 3rd party content as being separate from the original - my current favourite example of this is http://www.noodlepie.com/2006/.....kfast.html - where the blogger provides some content himself but links out to additional photos, information, websites, etc. It’s a great post and, in my mind, it’s his post even though a lot of what’s there is external content.
A third reason to link out is that, by doing so, it can encourage people to link back. Linking out is, I hope, little kids steps in the direction of joining the conversation and actively engaging with external content and it’s producers.
I post all the time about the importance of linking out, most recently at http://www.noodlepie.com/2006/.....kfast.html
Cheers,
Robin.
make that last link http://www.cybersoc.com/2006/0....._use_.html
(browser paste gremlins got me!)