Lijit

Strike that. Reverse it. WAY too much to do and so LITTLE time to bring it all to you, dear publisher.  New functionality and increased value…all designed to improve your site’s experience and benefit your readers so they’ll come back for more of your emotive diatribes. Or, that’s what I hope happens on my own blog.

First an aside and a howdy. I’m Greg Keller, Lijit’s new product guy and this is my dream job. Why? Well, I essentially get to be the Willy Wonka of the establishment. My team and I compose a new discipline here at the Mother Ship called “product management”. This essentially means we ‘are the dreamers of the dreams’ and put pen to paper to scope-out and formulate the products and services which, by their design, help expose your content in new and innovative ways. Our team then inspires our unbelievable engineering staff through agile methods to make these designs and specifications become real for you…and me! Oh yes, for me as well as I too I am a blogger (therefore I am, I guess). Writing has been an immense part of my life over the last few years and now I am building better tools to help expose my own content!

So consider this post a first salvo of sorts out to you. I will be publishing a regular column to keep you abreast of all the rad things we are doing here in Boulder. I want to ensure you feel some of the energy from here on Walnut Street as you continue to write and publish your content and engage your readers. We’ll be there with our search-powered tools to help more people find and enjoy it. These posts will be timed with major milestones of product releases and will help educate you on what’s new and showing you repeatedly release after release why you chose to install Lijit on your site. We’re growing….and you should see the results!

These past few weeks have been prolific for Lijit. We’ve turned a major corner in the history of the company vis-a-vis our search product and its architecture. We’ve finalized a phalanx (yes, I said phalanx) of new features we’ll be unveiling in the coming weeks (I’ll blog about these specifically upon release) which will dramatically enhance your reader’s interaction with your content. They all are of demonstrable examples that will/are affecting you and your readers directly.

With respect to things we’ve done now and have released ‘live’ to you, the first example is pretty huge. That is the routing of our entire network of publishers onto a shiny new content delivery network. We’ll be making an announcement soon on this subject so stay tuned! The choice to invest engineering and business cycles on our content delivery network gives us an infinitely more efficient…and global…mechanism to scale our search network and ensure it rips for your readers. What this means to you as a publisher is that your content returns results much quicker during searches while providing way more scalability as our publisher base scales (and is doing so at a rapid clip!) into the 10’s of thousands of publishers. It also provides a reliability and fail-over system to ensure our content returns to your reader when the search, the moment they search around the globe.

Second is something super cool which your readers will LOVE! That is the implementation of thumbnail previews in your Lijit search results. What we have essentially done is crawled all of your content (as normal)….and that of your network (as normal)…and where possible grabbed all relevant images from posts and injected them next to each of their results in your Lijit SERP (Search Engine Result Page) overlay. This provides your reader a very quick ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ of the result link to enable quicker visual parsing of the results. This is what we call: COOL. We think your readers will wildly appreciate this and be able to discover the right results in all of your content in quicker time. We are moving massive blocks of our publishers to this new platform each week so if you do not see this on your SERP tomorrow, do not fret. You’re queued for it. If you want to see what these results look and feel like, check out my blog and try a couple of searches. Or go to my Lijit Account and use the Search Cloud interfacing with my blog as my daily readers will have queued up some great searches relevant to my (maniacally cycling focused) content. You can also see some larger implementations of this technology on mainstream/commercial sites such as VeloNews.com, a world wide leader in cycling news.

So, again, consider this a first salvo of product and platform information for you, Lijit publishers! We have TONS queued for you and as a blogger myself, know that there is a voice of your own here in Boulder helping to guide and shape your search-based publishing tools.

Stay cool.

Greg

Tags: release announcements