BlogBurst
BlogBurst to Launch Tomorrow
20 Comments
by Michael Arrington on May 1, 2006

Pluck’s new BlogBurst product will be publicly launching tomorrow, May 2, 2006. We first had a look at it back in February, and since then the team has reached a number of important milestones: partnerships with their first mainstream publishers (San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, Austin American Statesman and more), and 1,000 blogger applications.

The basics: BlogBurst is a service that takes pre-screened, categorized blog content and pushes it to mainstream publishers for a fee (charged on a CPM basis). To see an example, go to the Sf Chronicle Travel Section and look for the “Travel Blog Posts” area on the page. BlogBurst helps these mainstream publishers add more targeted content to their sites at a much lower cost than producing the content themselves. Bloggers benefit from extra exposure – each piece of content includes a prominent link back to the blogger’s original post, a linked icon/photo and a byline.

This is good progress for a service that is only two months old. If you are a blogger and would like have your content included, go to the main site to apply.

Disclaimer: I am an unpaid advisor to BlogBurst, and have done paid consulting work for Pluck in the past.

BlogBurst Can Save Big (print) Media
52 Comments
by Michael Arrington on February 18, 2006

Pluck demo’d a new product called BlogBurst at our party last night. The service is live but Pluck has not pushed it out for publicity yet.

BlogBurst is a service that takes topical content from pre-approved blogs and provides it to publishers (online newspapers, etc.) for republication. Blogs that apply and are accepted are categorized (TechCrunch would be “science and technology”. BlogBurst editors choose great content from those blogs for republication. For more information on how BlogBurst works with publishers, see this page. Bloggers must provide a full text RSS feed to participate, with no included ads in the feed.

Participating publishers have “workbench” tools to map content to specific areas of their site. Integration is “via simple JavaScript calls or robust SOAP or XML APIs“.

BlogBurst charges publishers for this service. They do not share revenue with bloggers, although each post has a byline and attribution/link back to the blog. For most bloggers, this extra traffic and attention will be very welcome.

BlogBurst already has a number of top publishers signed up, including the SF Chronicle, Washington Post, Houston Chronicle and San Antonia Express-News.

Disclaimer: I am an unpaid advisor to BlogBurst, and have done paid consulting work for Pluck in the past.

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