Lijit

After our release last night, we’re proud to introduce a super-cool integration that allows you to see blog comments in your search results. If you’re using JS-Kit, Intense Debate, or Disqus, you’ll now see something different when doing a Lijit search.

For example, if you do a search on Guy Kawasaki’s blog for Twitter, this is what you’ll get…

Underneath the search result, you’ll see how many comments the post received and when you click on the link, you’ll get a preview of the first couple of comments. There is also a “View more comments” link that will show you all the comments on the post.

Why is comment integration important?

–People that write and read blogs are always interested in what others have to say.  One of the most valuable pieces of any blog is the comments section because it’s an excellent indicator of reader engagement and shows the conversation taking place around a topic. Lijit understands that and with this integration, give you the ability to judge a search result by checking out the comments before you click on the result.

–The integration of comments into search results is an important step forward in the integration of widgets and the content that BOTH publishers and readers find valuable. Lijit is proud to offer a unique search experience that is not available anywhere else.

–Lijit was founded on the notion of trust.  We recognize the critical importance of your social network in establishing and conveying trust.  This is yet another example of how Lijit uncovers more valuable information for publishers, readers and commenters alike.

We are proud of this new feature and want to know what you think. Leave us a comment with your feedback and enjoy the enhanced search functionality!

I’m Dave Ferro, the Director of Ad Serving here at Lijit Networks, and today’s guest author for the Lijit blog. Today, Lijit is releasing the latest version of its ad network. The theme of this release is to offer greater value and control for our publishers. In our first release, we provided publishers with the ability to opt-in to our ad network and earn money from the largely overlooked ad inventory of search results pages. It was a solid first step in our product evolution, and now we are taking a second step toward our goal of providing publishers with a transparent, flexible, and manageable search ad offering.

Publishers can now set their own pricing for search ads that advertisers target for their search results pages. Publishers who choose to do so can also sell their own search ad inventory through a link that they can email to advertisers. Because many publishers will prefer the leave the business of selling ad space to us, we will fill all available inventories with ads that we sell directly to advertisers. As always, we will fill the remaining unsold inventory with ads from third party networks like Google AdSense and Yahoo!.

We have also placed a link in the search results pages of our publishers that will bring an advertiser to the ad creation workflow. For publishers who have opted-in, the links will bring the advertiser to a workflow specifically for their publications. If a publisher has yet to opt-in to the Lijit ad network, the advertiser will be taken to the generic campaign workflow.

We are also making it easier for advertisers to target their ads to match the intent stream of the reader. Advertisers now have the ability to search for individual publishers who have opted into the ad network, and to review statistics and pricing information before creating a campaign for a specific publisher’s search results pages. For those advertisers who target individual publishers, they will pay the price set by the publisher. Advertisers also now have the ability to upload lists of keywords and keyword phrases to target their campaigns.

In the coming weeks and months, we will release features and offerings to improve our ad network for both publishers and advertisers. Continuing to add value for our publisher and advertiser partners by providing flexibility, transparency, and control are the fundamental principles behind our decision tree. I look forward to future guest posts where I can announce what we will have rolled out in our next releases.

You can find out more details on our Advertising Network page.

If you’re looking to spice things up this season, why not coordinate the color of your search results with your widget? After last night’s release, we’ve made that possible. Now, if you are choosing to have your search results pop up over your blog, you can match the color of that box with your widget’s look.

If you didn’t already know, on the ’search wijit’ page within your Lijit account, you can choose how you want your search results to display. If you’ve chosen the ‘on my blog’ option from the drop-down menu, you’ll notice a new box previewing what your search results will look like…

If that’s not enough lovely eye candy, check out the customization options we’ve made available. You can choose your color palette and pick what color you want every aspect of your search box to be…

At this time, these options only exist for the slim, rectangular widget style, but we encourage you to have some fun and play around with different colors. Enjoy the more unified look of your search results and please let us know if you have any feedback around what we’ve done.

Because of publishers like you, Lijit continues to grow in new and exciting directions.  We’d like to tell you about our newest one right now:  During 2008, Lijit has been developing features that allow advertisers to present your readers with highly targeted ad placements in search results.  But that’s not all – we’ve also developed features that allow YOU to share in the revenue from these ad placements!

The beta release of the Lijit Ad Network will be open to advertisers and publishers like you starting October 8^th, 2008.  In this release, publishers will be able to opt-in to the search-based ad network and begin receiving a share of the revenue for ad units displayed in your search results.  As a thank you for your patience while we’ve been developing and testing these features, your account will be pre-loaded with a credit for estimated revenues based on your search history during this period (a minimum of $5).

We’re not done yet!  In the near future those publishers who have opted in to Lijit’s Ad Network will be able to sell their search based ads directly to advertisers with whom they may already have relationships, targeting just their own publication and making even more money for themselves.  This is going to be big!

To start capturing your share of revenue from the Lijit Ad Network, log in to your Lijit account and at the top right of your profile page, click the “Start Now” button.  (If you don’t want to participate in revenue sharing, you certainly don’t have to and can continue using Lijit as you do today.  We promise to use your share of the ad revenues wisely.)

Our new publisher FAQ answers all the questions we could think of during development and alpha testing of this cool feature, but if you can think of one we haven’t covered, please email us at support@lijit.com.

We look forward to working together with you to help you monetize your search results. It’s an exciting time to be Lijit and we welcome any feedback you may have. Thanks again!

We released some new features last night and in order to take advantage of the improved functionality, you need to know about it. Away we go!

Invitations. You don’t have to make them by hand, fortunately, but you now have the ability to invite friends to join your searchable network within Lijit. From your Lijit ‘account’ page, you’ll see a new section underneath your account information. Click on the link under the header ‘Invite your Friends’ and you’ll get to the page that allows you to manually enter email addresses or import them from the contacts in your address book. (Don’t worry…we’re tied in with many email services!)

If your friends already have Lijit accounts, they will be automatically added into your network upon accepting the invite. (And if they don’t have Lijit accounts, they will be added in once they set up their account!)

New Re-Search options. In the past, if you wanted to utilize Re-Search on your blog, you only had the option of displaying results on top of your widget or at the top of your blog. We are proud to announce that you can now show that Re-Search goodness either above or BELOW your content. So, if someone comes to your blog through a Google or Yahoo search, they will get even more of your related content with the blog post. Using Re-Search allows random searchers to stay on your blog longer and to allow them to discover even more of your knowledge!

For example, if you do a Google search for ‘winamp itunes plugin’, the first result you get is a blog post from Daniel, one of Lijit’s finest. If you click on that result, you’ll be taken to his blog where you’re met with even more of his content, easily found underneath his blog post…

To change your Re-Search settings, simply log into your Lijit account and click on the ’search wijit’ tab. Scroll down to where you see Re-Search listed and pick your option out of the drop-down menu. Remember to save your new wijit settings!

Better integration with Vimeo and Viddler. We’re now serving up thumbnails from your Vimeo and Viddler content, meaning that searchers can now watch videos from within your search results. What could be cooler than a more multimedia approach to search results?

For example, if you search for Boulder on my blog, you’ll now see this doozy in the results from my content…

More robust search results. With the release last night, you’ll begin to see better search results from content sources like Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, YouTube, Tumblr, and MyBlogLog.

Please let us know what you think of the new additions and send your feedback our way. We love hearing from our publishers and it’s important to know what YOU think about what we’re doing.

[Photo credit: zakwitnij via CC license]

After a lot of work, we are proud to introduce something new for our WordPress.org users. If you like the Lijit search and want it to be integrated on your site in a more, how shall we put it, hijacked fashion, then this plugin is for you.

As everyone knows, you can currently install the Lijit widget on your blog in the traditional, add-the-code-to-your-sidebar kind of way. But now, with this new Wordpress plugin, you can keep the current search bar you have on your WordPress blog, but have Lijit power the search results. It’s like magic.

It looks like a normal search bar, but when you do a search, BAM! Search results brought to you courtesy of Lijit.

Like any other Wordpress plugin, you can find the Lijit Search (version 1.0) in the plugin directory. Or HERE.

Once you download the widget, simply log into your WordPress dashboard, go to the plugin page and activate it. Upon activation, you get to choose whether you want to use your existing Lijit account or you can create a new one inside the WordPress admin console.

You can also choose between the classic widget install option OR hijack the existing WordPress search box and make it Lijit-enabled.

But wait! That’s not all. We’ve also included another super-cool feature…integrated statistics. You love the stats that Lijit gives and now you can see those from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard. Simply click on your Lijit stats and you’ll see all that detailed goodness, telling you exactly what you need in order to keep your readers happy.

Many of you asked for a better way to integrate Lijit search on your WordPress blog and here it is. With a cleaner and tighter feel, Lijit and Wordpress.org are playing even better together than ever.

***This plug-in is only available for those WordPress users with versions 2.3-2.6.***

We would like to thank the great team at Crowd Favorite for helping us to make this happen. And by all means, let us know what you think of the plugin. We think it rocks, but are more excited to hear your thoughts.

Happy hijacking!

One of my favorite bloggers (who still *ahem* hasnt installed Lijit on his blog) is Loic Le Meur the founder of Seesmic. As Loic built Seesmic, a short form video startup, he recorded a video blog about the struggles and triumps of building a startup. Every day.

That’s transparency.

At Lijit, we embrace transparency. Like so many other companies, we understand that the increased access that users have to a company’s founders and employees (for example, you can follow the following members of Lijit on Twitter:

• Todd, CEO
• Tara, Community Catalyst
• Micah, VP, Business Development
• Leslie, Senior Director of Product and Operations
• Daniel, Integration Engineer
• Mike, Designer
• and many others…including Lijit itself (yes the company itself tweets!)

But that is just one form of transparency. That is the transparency that speaks to what we are doing in building the product.

As publisher advocates, its important that we explain to publishers exactly what installing Lijit provides them in terms of functionality, and, more importantly, how we get that info, and what we do with the data.

We, of course, have a privacy policy and terms of use that outline specifically what we do with data.

As a Lijit publisher, you know that we provide a wonderful suite of stats around searches and searcher behavior. To provide those stats, we collect the following pieces of data around the search itself, the publisher, and the behavior associated with the query:

USER BEHAVIOR:

• Wijit views
• Wijit tag cloud clicks (side note: if you dont use the search cloud, you are missing out on 3-5x the total number of searches you could be getting. Im just saying…)
• Wijit searches
• Searches on a users profile page
• Search paging
• Search result clicks
• Site/result clicked
• Re-Search (side note: Yeah, me again. If you arent using this feature, you are almost suggesting to your readers to click the back button once they get to your site from a search engine. You like giving traffic back to the search engines do you? I didnt think so.)
• Re-Search result clicks
• Site visitor behavior across installed publishers
• Search(terms, clicks) behavior across installed publishers

PUBLISHER DATA:

• Account Demographic Info
• “Blacklist terms” - publisher selected “negative” terms
• Wijit data (is it installed? Its style, etc.)
• GEO data (collected through a provider)
• Trust and content relationships (content sources, blogroll, mybloglog, tags, etc.)

All of these data points are shown in our stats package, which a publisher can make public or keep private. For example, Brad Feld opens his stats to the public.

At Lijit, transparency is not a word we just throw around.

For us, our singlar belief in providing a service that helps publishers be better publishers means that there are no secrets. We gain nothing if we dont view our relationship to our publishers as a partnership. So, ask us, you might be surprised at the answer.

(As an example of this openness, I have started to leave my email address: micah [at] lijit [dot] com and my cell phone number (720) 231-7120 on FriendFeed and other places. Have a question? Call me. Drop me a line. I will always be open to helping and telling you how I will dominate the sushi eating contest.)

The most common question I get (well, after “Have you ever heard the MC Hammer song? Really? You have?”) is “Isnt Lijit just a search tool?”

I always reply the same, “No, we are a publisher advocate.”

Which is always greeted with one of three responses: 1) a look of bewilderment; 2) a look of amusement; or 3) a look of agreement.

Perhaps the strangest response I get is: “Why?”

For Lijit, the answer is simple. Because our entire existence is predicated on publishers. Not our business model mind you (although thats part of it) but our core value.

Our belief about publisher widgets is that there are two types: Widgets that exist to make publishers better publishers and seek to develop a true partnership and widgets that provide some value extension to the publisher.

The first type are publisher advocates, they have to improve the entire experience, both for the publisher and the reader.

The second type either is successful only on a high traffic publisher, or only for one consistuency, the publisher or the reader.

Our guiding principle when we add features to Lijit is simple: “Are We Being Publisher Advocates?”

In other words, does this feature make a publisher a better publisher by providing better service or increased engagement to their readers?

This also limits our focus to three areas:

1. Content Discovery / Reader Engagement

By indexing all of a publisher’s social content and trusted sources, Lijit allows content that may have been buried in a general search engine search to bubble to the top. Why? Well, we only index the things that are important to you; general search engines index everything. So, our base value proposition is that a publisher’s readers should find everything that a publisher trusts and wishes to expose.

In addition, when a reader comes from a general search engine, our “Re-Search” box proves additional implicit white-labeled results that tend to have a relatively high click through rate, effectively keeping a reader on the publisher’s site versus clicking the back button to the search engine.

Our stats also provide a variety of information for a publisher including results that returned zero results, providing a clue as to what readers are looking for from the publisher, potentially helping to inspire future posts or articles.

2. Optimization of Monetization

Publisher monetization is a noisy, competitive field, and currently we are loathe to produce a sub-standard ad experience for publishers. We cannot just be Yet Another Google Adsense Clone. We have to be better.

Lijit has to create an experience where publishers are optimizing revenue from an under-monetized section of a publication, namely the search results.

Everyone knows that search can be monetized effectively, but we believe because the results driven through Lijit are more contextual and relevant, the resulting revenue should be higher for the publisher. So, we are spending a lot of time developing an effective user interface and experience. Its hard and takes a long time, and we are close.

Besides search results, there are two immediate things that occur when using Lijit search. Your current social content gets better promotion increasing your overall pageviews, driving additional revenue now.

3. Cross Promotional Traffic

This is really effective if a publisher has multiple blogs or a blog network. With Lijit a publisher can use a high volume publication to help drive traffic horizontally to lower traffic blogs through cross-promotion in the search results. On average, our blog networks find that almost 30% of the results clicked in a search result are to another network blog, rather than the originating publication.

Each of these three functions: Content Discovery/Reader Engagement, Optimization of Monetization and Cross Promotional Traffic are all examples of how we feel that we are being publisher advocates, helping publishers be better publishers and helping them serve their readers.

After all, at Lijit we know one thing to be an absolute truth:

If publishers didnt provide social content or trusted sources, our results pages would be empty.

Here it is, the third day of a three day weekend and (perhaps because it is Monday), I have Lijit on the brain. This holiday weekend has been a good one for us, with new publishers such as Chris Pirillo, Duncan Riley and Dave Zatz (who runs a great TiVo blog. Todd, you can thank us later) giving us a whirl.

Side note: For all you aspiring business development people out there, getting someone to try your stuff is the easy part. Making sure they are happy with the product and feature set is the hard part. We like the hard part at Lijit.

We even got mentioned in a couple of blog posts, with a real comprehensive review from Louis Gray himself.

And, in all the flurry of activity, one line of Louis’ post seemed to sit in my brain:

[...] essentially acting like FriendFeed in reverse, not looking for one site to track my activity, but instead a search point to analyze all my activity around the Web.

One of the hottest spaces online right now is the social aggregator space, with companies like FriendFeed, Socialthing, Profilactic and others taking the lion’s share of the buzz.

Friendfeed, who is the clear leader offers a multitude of ways to slice and dice the aggregated social data from yourself and your friends, including a search function that can drill down by service or relationship (friend or yourself).

But still, its like drinking from a firehose.

I get an RSS feed of the ~150 people’s feeds (plus my own) that I monitor. Even with Twitter “hidden,” I still get an average of 500 updates to that RSS feed daily.

Frankly, a firehose of data.

And I love it. I am a consumer of data. Robert Scoble (another Lijit user) is THE example of a person that can drink from a firehose of data and pull out the pieces that are inherently interesting, not only to him, but to others as well.

Which brings us to Louis’ comment.

What if instead of passively looking for information (which is what watching FriendFeed is really doing), I want to know everything that one person (and his trusted sources) has written about a topic? Enter Lijit.

Lijit is a social aggregator like FriendFeed and the rest, we just dont open that data to the end user. Rather, we say, “Know someone you trust? Come to them with a search query, and we will find everything they and their trusted sources have blogged, photographed, videoed, or said about the topic and return only those results to you.”

In essence, what Lijit does is drink from the firehose for you, and return just a glass of your favorite information to you. (Yes, with no backwash.)

Want an example? OK, here we go…

I want to know about Link Baiting. I know Micah (being that I am Micah) was a pretty good SEO back in the day, so I go to LearnToDuck (my favorite blog of course) and using Lijit, do a search for “link baiting.”

Turns out that I havent written much about linkbaiting, only one article which is really not that interesting, so I click on the My Network tab…and what do I find? Gobs of results from people Micah trusts:

And for comparison, here is the same search done in FriendFeed:

At the end of the day, FriendFeed is a wonderful tool that I use daily.  I find it feature full and informative, especially when I want to understand what is going on right now.

But, when I want to see the photos that Robert took on his last trip to Yosemite, or that one YouTube video Chris made a few weeks back, or posts from people that Micah trusts around linkbaiting, Lijit is really the best utility out there.

The punchline? Well, it depends on what you are attempting to do, but my general rule is:

When I want to drink from the social media fire hose RIGHT NOW, FriendFeed is where it is at; and when I want to sip [find relevant data] from the social media fire hose, I find Lijit is the right utility for the job.

And, yes, I cant wait until we launch FriendFeed support (coming soon!) so you can get the best of both worlds…

Over the past month or so, we have been working with several companies to better integrate their content into our results.

We recently improved the integration of Flickr and YouTube and have continued down this path, by adding six additional content sources.

Initally, most of the integrations make it easier for us to index that content, but over the next few months, we hope to bring some interesting innovations to the results themselves (see this post for a sneak peak.)

So what are the content sources? Glad you asked (in alphabetically order, and in their own words):

Disqus - “Disqus, pronounced discuss, is a service for blog comments. Disqus enables bloggers to make the conversations on their blogs more interactive and manageable. Our distributed comment system connects readers across blog communities, while empowering publishers in promoting their content.”

Intense Debate - “Intense debate is a comment replacement service for blogs. Intense Debate increases the interactivity of blog comments driving more reader engagement. In addition, Intense Debate tracks your comments, and the comments of your friends, across all blogs helping publishers be discovered.”

Mixx - “At Mixx, all of the content is user-generated, which means that we don’t have an editor who decides what you should find interesting. We figure that you can find that same-old same-old pretty much anywhere else. So instead, we make it easy for you to submit stories, photos, videos—whatever you find interesting, informative, different or fun. You can also see—and vote on—the stuff that other Mixxers submit.”

Tumblr - “To make a simple analogy: If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks. You can also look at tumblelogs as slightly more structured blogs that make it easier, faster, and more fun to post and share stuff you find or create.” (Note: If you have a custom domain for your tumblr, enter it as a blog or URL. We are still working through some minor things.)

Viddler - “A fresh, creative web application that allows you to upload, enhance, and share digital video easily and quickly inside your web browser.”

Vimeo - “Simply put, Vimeo is the home for videos you make. You can use Vimeo to upload and share videos with anyone, watch great videos, meet new people, and explore Vimeo the way you want to.”

So, there you have it. Six new content sources. We are planning on continuing to add new sources every month or so.

Have a source you would like us to add? Please leave a comment, and we will start the process.