The BBC is testing a new ”football gossip’ widget. The gossip feed links are by Moreover, as are the “From Other News Sites” sections alongside many of the BBC’s news articles (explained here).
An interesting comment about this widget trial: “Our users tell us that one of the things they value most about our service is our policy of linking openly to other websites.” The New York Times has seemingly had the some of the same feedback, and rolled out Times Extra at the end of last year – Outsell’s Ken Doctor posted an interesting analysis on his blog. (Techcrunch meanwhile called it clutter :)
Some good news today – our spam-free index of blogs, a.k.a “The Moreover White List”, just hit a royal new high of 254,351 blogs. That’s a great increase since our previous post announcing ‘only’ one hundred thousand blogs back in October.
We’ve been adding blogs by platform, here’s a summary of the latest additions:
Here’s a challenge (and quite beyond yours truly): we have 600 news feeds in our list. All of these feeds can be cross-referenced, stacked, or blocked from each other.
For instance, you can combine feed A and feed B to make feed C. Or, you can block feed B from feed A and make a new feed D. Finally the feeds can be cross-referenced: articles that appear in feed A and feed B create new feed E. You can use those 3 options in combination, and with as many feeds as you like, for example you can cross reference 10 feeds with another 10 feeds, from which you block another 5.
So the challenge is this (and ignoring the fact that not all feed combinations will make for sensible results):
How many possible feed combinations can you make? Presumably there is a limit. Initially I thought 600-squared (360,000), but that doesn’t seem right, it must be more?
Unfortunately no prize for the brave and brilliant soul who can answer this question! Though expect a bag of respect and your number may well make it into the Moreover “we have THIS many feeds” marketing blurb (saved for posterity ever after).
A note to our French customers and others interested – the UGC Metabase was updated overnight with approx. 15,000 French language blogs from blogging platform Canal Blog. Bon.
When you have a moment check out this excellent video by Dr Michael Wesch, exploring the changes in the way we organise and use information. The pace of change is so rapid, it actually makes it easier in some ways to take a step back and see the wider picture - basically you don’t have to step back very far. Helps of course when someone like Dr Wesch sticks it in a YouTube vid …
With the new website bedded down we’ve been turning out attention to the free RSS feeds section. Now you can pick one of 500 prebuilt feeds (will in fact grow to 600 next week), or you can create your own - just enter keywords to describe your topic, adjust the relevancy and sources sliders, and you’re all set. Grab the RSS feed itself, or add it directly to an iGoogle style start page or feed reader.
We’ve also put up a feedback page for comments and suggestions, powered by uservoice.com. We hope to hear from you!
Last Thursday we added <generator> and <publishingPlatform> tags to the UGC Metabase XML. It lets us list out feeds by blogging platform, and help customers organise the data accordingly. The <generator> tag gets the raw generator value from the original RSS, which <publishingPlatform> then consolidates under their common platform name, e.g. Wordpess, Blogger etc.. At the moment we’ve marked out 150 blogging platforms (some pretty obscure ones out there…. ). The top 25 show in the White List:
We’ve been pushing on and now have just over 115,000 blogs in our UGC White List. Still got many more millions of blogs in the wider UGC index though, and we’ll be pulling more from there over the coming months as we build out our spam and adult-free White List. Still, 100,000+ ain’t bad for starters (but we want MORE!).
Our company blog with the latest news, product updates, media intelligence insights, and other fine fare out of our Dayton (OH), Reston (VA), and London (UK) offices!
