The Brinkwire blog

Encourage bloggers to reblog your news

Posted on 27. Aug, 2009 by Andrew.

This is the second in the “Brinkwire features” series of blog posts. Our goal is to help explain some our unique selling points and features.

Brinkwire uses a reblog button on our hosted press releases. It’s powered by Zemanta and is a quick and easy way to encourage bloggers to spread your news.

There’s a reblog button at the bottom of this post for you to test. In essence the post – whether it be your Brinkwire press release or a blog post – is fed into the clever Zemanta editor. After a blogger clicks the button all they have to do next is select a quote from the press release.

Once the quote’s been selected the blogger is shown a powerful blogging editor that provides some correctly licensed images to use alongside the quote, suggestions some additional links and related articles.

At the bottom of this page is a large “Publish to your blog!” button the blogger can use to automatically import this enhanced quote to their platform or they can simply select to copy the HTML to paste it elsewhere.

Our Zemanta integration featured on Zemanta’s own blog this month as an illustration of a good use of their API.

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Reuters adds Twitter widget

Posted on 26. Aug, 2009 by Andrew.

The Reuters UK blog has added a Twitter widget to their sidebar.

A few months ago we might have presented this news as evidence of the impact Twitter is having on the media. Not today. Today my first thought was that this was a good move as it helps convince readers that the @reuters_co_uk Twitter account and its suspicious pigeon are real and valid.

Reuters UK still have a long way to go in collecting even a fraction of either the BBC and CNN’s followers. The reason they’re so far behind is nothing to do with the quality of news from Reuters and everything to do with them being more of a business-to-business brand rather than a more widely known business-to-consumer brand.

Expansion into Twitter makes sense for Reuters as it is a great way to strength the brand and get closer to the “consumer”, in other words, get closer to people. Reuters often breaks some great stories and a strong Twitter presence will help credit the news agency with these successes.

What do you think about the widget itself, though? Too stark a contrast to the rest of the blog design? Does it load swiftly enough for you?

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Pluck buys CoveritLive

Posted on 18. Aug, 2009 by Andrew.

The social media technology platform Pluck has bought CoveritLive. Pluck, from Demand Media, offers everything through commenting and community to content discovery and related posts. Here in the UK Sky News makes use of the service even though Pluck On Demand isn’t yet available outside the US.

CoveritLive is a platform which lets people build a social media space around an event. In a way it tries to harness what live Twittering or blogging could offer.

You can read about the new partnership over on Pluck’s blog.

There are some juicy quotes from the press release too.

Keith McSpurren, CiL founder and president said, “Dozens of mutual customers have already independently made the decision to use our products to drive social engagement on their websites. Together, we’ll deliver an enterprise class solution that delights millions of consumers each month,”

We like the look of both sets of software and certainly see how well the fit together.

Demand Media, however, has some fairly large shadows near by. One comes from Friendfeed (now part of Facebook, of course). It costs nothing to drop one of the new Friendfeed widgets into a webpage and turn that page into a live stream covering an event – especially if that event has done well and thought up a hashtag ahead of time.

The other potential threat to this combination comes from Google Wave. Google Wave will also let site owners embed widgets into pages. Unlike the current Friendfeed widgets these Google Waves will allow for multiple way interaction and even robotic translation or moderation.

Oh, needless to say that if you like the idea of reaching out to bloggers through widgets, especially if you have some corporate news (like a press release) to share then that’s what Brinkwire is for. Enjoy! We wish new Demand Media team all the best of luck!

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New starting dial screen for new Google Chrome

Posted on 05. Aug, 2009 by Andrew.

The Great Goog has released a major update for Chrome. Not Chrome OS but the original Google browser that seems to have updates and small releases every other day.

The headline news will be the speed and the themes they’re rolling out. It’ll be the HTML5 support that they’ve included that’ll interest the tech blogs the most (correctly so – HTML5 is coming).

What drew our attention? The new start up screen. We’re getting less window tabs and more text chat.

This first view shows a vanilla Chrome install with a standard start up screen.

This second view shows the start up screen with the window icons removed and with a lovely wavy theme.

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Zemanta’s customer care shines during outage

Posted on 14. Jul, 2009 by Andrew.

Here at Brinkwire we’re huge fans of Zemanta. The plugin is an easy way to make you blog better and for less effort. The widget scans your blog post to suggest links and tags but perhaps our favourite feature is how it finds appropriately licensed pictures to use with the post.

Zemanta also provides a handy-dandy “reblog” button that we use on Brinkwire as a way to let bloggers dive straight into the news piece, take the soundbytes they want and publish straight to their blog.

Well, on Monday the 13th of July there was a short outage on the API and this meant the widget interface started to show errors. It only lasted an hour. Things got slightly confusing as there was a problem with the DNS servers too and some people wouldn’t have been able to see the reblog button.

Zemanta did well as they helped people over Twitter and have their blog post up on the matter in speedy time. If you’re still not getting the Zemanta widget to show then the suggestion is to restart your computer to refresh your local DNS and then email support (at) zemanta (dot) com if that still doesn’t work.

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Scribd launches iPaper 2

Posted on 10. Jul, 2009 by Andrew.

It is pretty easy to find influential people in the social media and online PR community who are great fans of Scribd. Scribd lets people upload PDF files to a central hub but then avoid the annoyance of forcing people to read the contents of the file as a PDF.

It’s annoying having to download and then scroll through a clunky PDF. Sending a blogger a PDF version of a press release is often unwise.

iPaper 2 does not present any radical changes from the original iPaper product which launched in 2008 but it certainly is a step forward. The main change for iPaper 2 is that the code is less clunky and quicker.

This is significant as iPaper readers are often set to be embeddable. For example, you can see Text 100’s Blogger Survey from 2009 embedded here on the Brinkwire blog  as iPaper. By improving the iPaper reader then Scribd will encourage more bloggers to display it. This in turn will persuade more content creators to distribute and share via Scridb.

There is competition in this market too. Google’s own docs are embeddable. There’s Slideshare for presentations but also Edocr, Issuu and DocStoc for PDFs and these sites all have their own viewers.

What do you think? Do you see a near future where sites typically avoid press sections with lists of PDFs to download in favour of an iPaper or Scribd approach?

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Widgetbox (@widgetbox) ramps up with three more pro enhancements

Posted on 10. Jul, 2009 by Andrew.

The world’s largest widget community Widgetbox announced three extra enhancements for their professional customers last night.

Slideshow Pro

Slideshow Pro lets users create a custom slideshow in a widget. To an extent this will compete with the likes of Google Docs which lets users embed their presentations or even Slideshow and Scribd. Widgetbox’s advantage is that this slideshow widget can be more easily customised by other people re-using it and its integration with the likes of Flickr, Facebook and Google’s Picasa.

Countdown Creator Pro

A simple idea but an effective on; the countdown widget simply ticks down the time to an event. This is the sort of widget that motivates people to book tickets for your conference or online event such as a uStream broadcast. When combined with a portable widget it is possible to empower your entire community to create a buzz and urgency around your event.

Facebook Integration

Finally, Widgetbox have ramped up their integration with Facebook. This means that the publishing widgets, ratings and comments can appear on wall and Facebook news feeds. In fact, Widgetbox have added support for using Flash widgets in-line with the news feed.

Brinkwire

Brinkwire currently has two Widgetbox widgets. If you’re reading this on the blog then the chances are high that you’re looking at one now.

The Brinkwire panel widget is a simple way to show the latest Brinkwire headlines on your blog. Links through this widget are framed so your users can more easily share the news. This widget will appeal most to sites wishing to supply Brinkwire’s press releases to their own community of content consumers.

The breaking news panel widget with the RSS feed from the very popular and very fast @BreakingNews account at Twitter. Brinkwire’s headlines are accessible from a dropdown. This widget appeals to any site owner who wants to have up-to-the-second breaking news on their site and present it with a social media flavour.

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Putting Google’s new blog search RSS feeds to good use

Posted on 03. Jul, 2009 by Andrew.

Google’s just updated their blog search to include trend data. On the right of the page you’re now able to see what the hot queries are on blog search and some of the latest posts.

We notice that far from every blog qualifies to appear in the ‘latest posts’ section. This adds weight to the evidence that Google tiers blogs by quality.

Blog Search

Over at Mashable Adam Ostrow asks whether we still need a separate blog search engine. It’s an interesting point.

On one hand Google is now doing a good job of integrating blog results into the main web index as part of Universal Search and generally a blog post qualifies for web search anyway (unlike those documents found almost exclusively in Google Scholar or Google Book Search).

On the other hand everyone seems to be saying that Google is weak on real time search. Aren’t these enhancements to Google blog search supposed to be helping to address those perceived short comings?

Perhaps the advantage Twitter has in this area isn’t just that it provides real time search but it provides it for a huge community. People in the Twitter community are interested in what’s happening – in real time – around them because they can take part in the conversation. The same can’t be said for Google’s blog search which is a near real time search of strangers.

Here at Brinkwire we’ve thought of a few uses of the new RSS feeds from Google’s blog search. In particular we think that bloggers, affiliates and news watchers will be interested to see what the headlining topics of conversation are – and wouldn’t it be good to be able to monitor those topics without flicking from one site or feed to another.

The Brinkwire toolbar is designed with those people in mind. The toolbar – found at http://brinkwire.toolbar.fm – presents four main sets of updates;

1. The latest news from Brinkwire
2. The latest topic trends from Wikipedia (via WikiRank)
3. The latest hot trends from Google search (US results only)
4. The latest front page stories from Google blog search

In addition the toolbar uses a Google powered search box and contains a bunch of tools to provide easy access to URL shorteners, Twitter, translations and other useful aids.

Update: Google’s kept up with the innovations and inventions. Since this post was written the blog search data has been removed from the toolbar and replaced with popular shared posts from Google Reader. Why? We want to focus more on breaking news than broken news. Life is fluid!

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