There is a growing battle between content engines — which suggest stories for you to “read next” — over access to publishers’ pages. The outcome will matter for publishers, readers and the future of “native advertising.” Read more at paidContent »
Outbrain wants to dominate the business of suggesting stories to readers while helping publishers buy and sell web traffic. But now competition is coming and the company has to protect its turf. Read more at paidContent »
Content recommendation services are becoming big business. The latest entrant is Reverb, a site that draws on its experience as a dictionary maker to offer useful story suggestions. Read more at paidContent »
The comments you leave on a website — are they garbage or a gold mine? Disqus says comments are more popular than you might think and has big plans to make money off them. Read more at paidContent »
Data from Disqus, which offers a comment-hosting service for websites, seems to show that the use of pseudonyms not only produces more comments, but also comments of higher quality. As interesting as the data is, however, it’s unlikely to settle the ongoing debate over online identity. Read more »
Writer-turned-venture-capitalist MG Siegler recently reignited a long-standing debate over whether blogs should have comments or not. Critics argue that comments are mostly noise and are a waste of time, but blogs that don’t have them risk being seen as just a soap-box for their authors. Read more »
Polls generally flow in one direction with an organization looking to find information from a pool of people or a community. But Urtak, a small, New York startup is finding that democratizing polls unlocks a lot of interesting interaction, engagement and new information. Read more »
The first quarter of 2011 saw plenty of competition between various web companies — and some heated tension, too. Content farms generated the most debate, with Demand Media’s IPO attracting attention and controversy and Google making a major change to its ranking algorithm. Facebook, meanwhile, maintained its heavyweight status online, but this time the social network’s impact was centered on social search, unified communications and comment systems. And Facebook’s ongoing dominance raised the question, Is there room for more than one social network? If niche networks like Quora and Color are any indication, the answer is “yes.” Additional companies mentioned in this report include Twitter, Groupon, Microsoft, LinkedIn and MySpace. To see the full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The buzz around upgrades to Facebook’s nascent comments service makes it sound as if the social network is about to launch another world-dominating technology. In reality, that’s an unlikely scenario, since there’s still plenty of room for competitive innovation as far as comment systems go. Read more »
