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Last week we released a new set of enhancements to Lijit, primarily focused on the signup process.
But there’s one feature that I’m particularly excited about but that isn’t immediately obvious: automatic blogroll crawling. What’s that you ask?
If you have a blog, it probably has a section where the you list other noteworthy blogs. These are blogs you read and basically find attention-worthy. Lijit can now automatically find this part of your blog and add all of those blogs to your Lijit search. And the Lijit server will check on your blog every day or so to see if you’ve made any changes–no need to configure things here every time you make a change.
Blogrolls form a huge implicit trust network, and no other service has really exploited them until now. Adding them to your network is just the first step, I’m also working on some blog authority algorithms that rely heavily on blogrolls. I’ll post some preliminary results soon.
So get those blogs rolling!
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Stan and I were having a chat with Tim Wolters the CTO of Collective Intellect yesterday. I have known Tim for 1000 years and he is a genuinely smart guy. As we talked I was explaining our market and it dawned on me (or maybe it was Stan) that we are the long-tail of Vertical Search..
Everyone knows vertical search (although not always by category). Vertical Search is best known by the names “Yahoo Local” or “WebMD” or other easily identifiably high level verticals. Vertical Search works really well, mostly because the search domain is constrained by a set of ‘editors’. It’s cool and works well because these editors figure out the good stuff and put it in there. Problem, Vertical Search around a single subject matter will only get to a certain level of specificity. If the Vertical itself can’t support an ad based business model on its own, then it just won’t happen. No revenue, no editors, no search.
Lijit is about enabling search for/on everyone, specifically publishers. As our publisher base grows we will be able to aggregate the best and brightest on an infinite number of vertical topics….essentially creating the long tail of Vertical Search.
How about the “Engineers that play Flamenco Guitar Search Engine” anyone ?
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Today we added a Search Wijit customizer. If you’ve already have a Wijit installed, you can now match it to your blog. Just go to the Wijit pickup page. And if you don’t yet have a Wijit, well then sign up and get one!
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I love working with technologies and companies I actually find really useful. Back at Raindance I would do web conferences from time-to-time but the value was only in that certain and controlled circumstance. It was cool, but I didn’t use it everyday. Conversely, I have been using Lijit all the time.
Last week we found out that Lijit has been selected to present at Venture Capital in the Rockies. As a result I have been working on my presentation, between snow shoveling and present opening. In doing so, I have been doing a lot of ‘Searching”. Some of the items I have been researching are company related, some are market related and others are a function of the conference itself.
Simultaneously, I have been playing with some stuff I found on Feedburner Networks. Feedburner Networks can export OPML. For fun the other day I constructed a Lijit Personal Network Search engine using the data from over 50 of the most influential bloggers on Venture Capital.
As a result I have started to be a fairly large consumer of the Lijit PNS Engine for Venture Capital.
It’s been so useful in fact I used the ‘stick in my browser search” feature so I could do it right from firefox.
Here are some searches I did today…
Search the Venture Capital Network for business plan, VCIR, Google Adsense, elevator pitch…
Pretty cool…
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What would it be like if you could search “through” a person?
Last night Lijit released our first version of Personal Network Search. We have been heads down for a month or so on a really cool strategy to make people, their online identities, and the people they know vertically searchable. It’s an amazingly powerful concept. In the following weeks we will review more about this strategy but for now you can try the concept right here on my blog.
In fact anyone can try it on their Blog if they have a Lijit account. First run our identity wizard to grab your other online personas and map them into Lijit, then turn on your Personal Network Search functionality from your Profile page.
Thanks to a cool Typepad integration you can one-click your search Wijit onto your blog..
Give it a try and shot me some feedback.. Interesting things to “Search My World” for that demonstrate the power here…
Search “me” for “tivo”
This results in a combination of bookmarks about Tivo that I have made in del.icio.us as well a entries from my blog that talk about Tivo’s.. Also mixed in there will be some hits of PVRBlog that I read on a regular basis..
Search for “Niel SAP”
I read Niels Blog Parallax and he is the most knowledgable person I know on SAP.
Search for “term sheet”
Returns a wealth of information from multiple sources close to me on building Term Sheets for startups..
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“You could rely on the so-called experts to make smart decisions for you. But experts often disagree with each other. That leaves you to pick the best expert, and that’s something you probably aren’t an expert at doing.”
This post by Dilbert creator Scott Adams is fantastic. Not only is it fantastic, but it exactly reflects the way we’ve been thinking here at Lijit.
Who are the experts?
What makes someone an expert?
How can you find them?
How can you use their expertise?
Today we pushed out a few changes in our “Testarossa” release. The biggest one is the “Add other identities” page where you can link to your accounts on other services like Delicious, YouTube, and Flickr. Any content that you create on these other services will count as coming from you. In Lijit-land, this means that you not only trust this content, you are this content!
Congrats to Andy for the cool AJAX-y interface and Derek for figuring out how to mesh with all these other services.
Tags: features, release announcements | View Comments
Hello Lijitters! Today we released a new feature (as well as a few bug fixes) for your Lijitting enjoyment.
The new feature allows you to send a notification about a report to another Lijit informer (or even to someone who’s not yet a Lijit user) that’s just kind of a, “Hey, this is cool. Be sure to check it out!” message.
You can send a notification from any report, anywhere — just look for the little “send” icon displayed at the bottom of each report. When you receive a notification it’ll display at the top of your Lijit List and you’ll also get a heads-up about it via email. (If you don’t want to receive the emails, you can disable them from your Manage Account page.)
It’s a great way to make sure your friends see and share in your Lijit report discoveries!
Tags: features, release announcements | View Comments
Welcome to yet another new Lijit release! You might have noticed that I included a release name in the title of this blog post. We’re planing to name our releases after cars, as we have several automotive enthusiasts on staff. The first in this series is the “Vantage” release (named after the lovely Aston Martin Vantage), which offers the following feature goodies:
- You can now convert your Firefox and IE bookmarks into “good” Lijit reports. (If the pages were originally good enough to bookmark, aren’t they now good enough to share with your network?) It’s also nice to have everything (bookmarks, Lijit reports, etc.) together in one place. New informers will be offered the opportunity to upload their bookmarks during the process of creating an account; existing informers can upload their bookmarks from the “Manage Account” page.
- We’ve updated the look of various elements on the site. (Did you notice that the title bars in the sidebar and the title bars associated with the blocks on the right-hand side of the site are no longer black? They’re now a softer charcoal. Oooooh. Ahhhhh.) We’ve additionally prettied-up the Lijit search mark-up for Google and Yahoo! in Firefox (Internet Explorer got its search mark-up facelift in the last release), made the site resizeable width-wise, and removed the orange, cross-hatched bars along the side of the site. They’re all pretty subtle changes, but we hope they enhance your enjoyment of Lijit. We’ll continue to tweak the look of the site regularly. We can’t leave well enough alone sometimes…
- We’ve sprinkled contextual help links throughout the site. We don’t want any part of Lijit to be a mystery, so please click around and learn!
- We now support the ability to include ATOM feeds as informers in your network, in addition to the RSS and OPML feeds we support today. You can include ATOM feeds in your network through the “Add RSS Feed” page.
- We also did some testing and appear to be fully compatible with Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0. Upgrade and enjoy!
Oh, and we’re rather sorry that the site was down so long today while we upgraded. Please accept our apology for interrupting your afternoon Lijit-ing. We won’t do that again.
Tags: features, release announcements | View Comments
Board Meetings are all interesting, specially if they are your own, but you’re never exactly sure what you are going to get.
Yesterday we had our second Lijit board meeting. In a way kind of our first because the first Board Meeting had a lot of “we bought desks” on the agenda. Our current Board of Directors includes myself and Stan, Brad Feld, and Seth Goldstein.
Boards are interesting when you first get everyone together. Everyone is generally very intelligent and has good things to offer, but much like Panda Mating, you’re never quite sure you’re going to get a Panda.
All the planets lined up yesterday and I have to say I personally had the best board meeting I have had in 8 years of going to board meetings. Everyone was engaged and had extremely valuable input. The output was many times the sum of the parts, and it didn’t end in what I was used to from Raindance, a Sales VP getting whacked.
I left the day thinking to myself, “Wow, this company can be huge”. These are enormous ideas we are talking about, the kind of ideas that can change the world.
That’s a great way to end the week. I’m taking the team out for a beer.
