Lijit

We are excited about our newest offering for blog publishers: the ability to create and maintain your own Content Network. Many of our users were requesting some way to build topical communities that would promote their content and help to drive traffic to individual sites. We listened and now you can organize groups of bloggers that write about a common area of interest.

There are three Content Networks currently up and running: The Security Bloggers Network, The Venture Capital Bloggers Network, and The Cycling Bloggers Network. With the release of the Conent Networks, Lijit provides all the tools for you to easily create one of your own. Lijit will host the main site, aggregate all the RSS feeds from the individual bloggers, and allow your readers to search through the entire network of experts. Additionally, we give you the ability to monetize your network through display and search advertising.

The real beauty of the Content Network lies in the simple fact that by collecting similar content in one place, readers have an amazing way of searching across a number of different bloggers writing about the same thing. When you visit the Security Bloggers Network, you can do a search that will bring back results from all of the 200+ bloggers who are a part of that network. No one knows the industry better than those blogging about it and now, readers can benefit from all that expertise in one place.

You can read more and find out how to start your own Content Network here. We love hearing feedback and are proud to be able to empower bloggers to do even more!

This past Saturday, Lijit was proud to help sponsor the first-ever Chicks Who Click, a social media conference geared for women. More than fifty women (and a handful of men) gathered to talk about many different aspects of social media, including how to effectively use different tools to market your small business, how to create a consistent brand online, and how to balance your online activities with your offline life.

I was honored to speak on a panel titled “Your Social Media Toolbox”, with the amazing Wayne Sutton and the talented Lucretia Pruitt, both of whom know way more than I do and both of whom I’m sure will be installing Lijit any day now (wink, wink). Once I got going, I realized that I’ve really learned a lot in my two years at Lijit and with that in mind, there is still so much more to learn. Just over the course of our panel, I learned about some interesting new tools that look promising. I’ll be sure to share more details once I’ve tested them out myself.

It was lovely meeting so many different women, doing so many different things, that were able to come together to discuss something we all had in common. Whether it was a small business or a huge corporation, everyone seems to realize the importance of social media. The main challenges come from proving the value of it to those who don’t understand…ah yes, ROI.

Some of the businesses represented at the conference include:

The Wisdom Coach
Fresh Organic Office Delivery
BirdDog Press
Baby Candy
Little Alouette
Sama Baby
One2One Network
BumperTunes
Park City Mountain Resort
ZoomAlbum
Working Knowledge
Klein Buendel
Crocs
Embarq
Colorado Springs Health Partners
Beneficence
Synapse3Di
Local Matters

If I forgot someone, please let me know and I’ll be sure to add you to the list. (Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to talk to everyone!) Many thanks to the other sponsors, Kirtsy, Metzger, and Walmart and to the many women who shared their expertise. Chicks Who Click was a wonderful event and I’m looking forward to doing it again next year!

[Photo credit: Emily Lewin]

You would think, that with all the good things happening here at Lijit, we couldn’t want for anything more. While basically true (we’re healthy, have funding, and mostly like one another), there’s always room for dreaming. And after asking around the office, it turns out there a few things that Lijit wants for Christmas. File these under “publishers we want to be using our search” and enjoy the list!

Design*Sponge features the absolute best in home and product design, including product reviews, new designer profiles, trend forecasting, student design and global design shows. Lijit could help Design*Sponge by searching everything they’re doing so wonderfully on the web: their press and accolades, their Flickr photos and featured podcasts, each contributor’s content, and their newest video collaboration via YouTube with the New York Public Library. Not to mention, with design in mind, they can use our WordPress plugin and not change their current blog design and layout.

Alex, the author of Blogsessive, is “obsessed with blogging” and covers all the tips, plugins, themes, coding, etc. that goes along with blogging. His site is a mecca for the blogging expert to the first time blogger, however, the one missing tool he hasn’t featured or tried out is Lijit’s search. We see this as a holiday win-win, because his reader base will learn another Lijit blogging tool while he could increase his reader’s engagement, pageviews and searches done on his blog.

If Geeks are Sexy, then those of us working at Lijit have got it going on. However, we would argue that using Lijit makes you even sexier. We couldn’t agree more with the blog’s mission to provide “up to the minute tech news, reviews, and tutorials.” So why not include Lijit’s search and help out your readership of “IT professionals and computer enthusiasts”? Don’t they deserve a good search option as well? Plus, we know that Yan who runs the blog just loves our “Too Lijit to Quit” style.

Ken Rockwell is a go-to source for reviews on photographic equipment and advice. While Ken is currently using Google’s site search, we’d really love to see him using Lijit, if only to see the valuable information contained in his network! In many parts of his blog, Ken says that he supports his family with his site’s revenue, so he might be interested in ways to increase his ad revenue (Lijit can do that!) and since his site winds up as a destination for many Google searches, we also know he’d see the real value keeping searchers on his site longer (Lijit can do that, too!).

The Talking Points Memo is high on the list of favorite political blogs amongst Lijit employees and has organically grown over the past eight years into something of a blog network. It’s also the epicenter for a lot of original reporting that pushes the mainstream news cycle. All that political coverage demands a better way of searching through it, in order to receive trusted and relevant results. Memo for the New Year, Talking Points: Install Lijit.

We wish Political Wire was Lijit because many in the office consider the site’s author to be something of a political guru. Taegan brings current, up-to-date information to readers on the hour and the site’s breaking news aggregator provides quick insight about what’s going on in the world of politics. Also, with a blogroll like the one on Political Wire, doing a Lijit search of their trusted network would bring back a wealth of information. Here in the office, we’re hoping Taegan will vote for a change…in his blog’s search tool.

We enjoy a good laugh around the office and Stuff White People Like delivers the goods every time. Besides being funny, it’s true. Unfortunately, this blog is hosted on a wordpress.com site, which means that they can’t use Lijit. So, I guess what we really want for Christmas is the ability for bloggers to use our search on wordpress.com sites. (Hear that Automattic, you can make our holiday wishes come true!)

From all of us here, we hope you have a wonderful holiday celebration and that you find all you’re searching for! Also, if you see yourself listed on our wish list, please understand that we mean it as the highest form of flattery and are keeping our fingers crossed that you might be susceptible to a little holiday guilt. Hey, a startup can dream, right?

This is another in our series of guest posts written by Lijit employees. Mike Pritchard is bestowing the honor on us this week and if you like what he has to say, you can find more of his writing (and photography) on his blog.

So, what is a day in the life of Lijit like? My name is Mike “Pip” Pritchard, I’m the tech lead for the ad server team, and if you’re been following the blog here, you’ll realize that we’ve been pretty busy. Crazy busy, in fact, but we’re excited that we’re working on projects that are helping grow Lijit and create revenue for both Lijit and our publishers. And we have some great projects in the pipeline that you’ll get to hear about as we roll them out!

I’ve been at Lijit since October and I came to Lijit from a non-traditional background for a web startup. You see, I’ve come from a strong AI background and have spent most of my career building robots for either the DoD or NASA! Weird, but true.

I’ve built tiny robots, flying robots, crawling robots, industrial robots. So how did I end up at Lijit and why? Well, I love working in the AI field. The more we learn about biological intelligence the more it seems to be incredibly parallel in nature, the human brain seems to be a vast collection of independently functioning systems (structures of neural networks) working together in a fairly chaotic way, with the emergent behavior being intelligence, or at least what we think is intelligence. Almost like if we were to throw billions of computers together all connected to each other something would emerge from the chaos, something very unexpected. Sound familiar?

Well, that is for the future, but for today humanity has created this vast connected mass (or mess) of information and computers that we’re only beginning to organize. Maybe we’re not organizing it, but its organizing itself. Just like many complex biological systems we see in nature, it is perhaps a self-organizing system and it seems to be organizing itself around structures like social networks.

This, of course, is why Lijit is so important. Lijit is the natural evolution of this process, and allows us to search through these social networks in a more meaningful and useful way. This is why its an exciting time, and Lijit is a cool place to be…

(Photo used with CC license courtesy of: Dan Coulter)

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.

Another in our series of employee guest posts, this time around we’re honored to have Ryan Peterson contributing. He is a software engineer here at Lijit (although he prefers pimp), considers himself a tea connoisseur and can be found at his blog.


On January 21st, 2008, Microsoft announced its upcoming version of Internet Explorer (IE8) would not render Web pages in a standards-compliant way by default, and for the browser to do so, Web sites would need to include a special “meta” tag in its header.

Later, after tremendous outcry, they reversed their position and announced IE8 would render in a standards-compliant way by default.

This blog post is not about browsers or IE8–but an interweb phenomena which I have dubbed “blog events”. These announcements by Microsoft are perfect examples.

Defining “Blog Events”

Despite the likely fact that an academic or established Social Media personality has already observed and named this phenomenon something much more eloquent, I call Blog Events

“Events, announcements, or news that motivates large numbers of individuals from various social media demographics, online communities, or groups to blog and/or comment on the event of interest.”

When Microsoft made their announcements, Web developers and designers had various things to say. Blogs, comments, and forums filled with chatter regarding the issue. People were motivated to discuss the event. Even I rushed to write a blog post on the issue on previous employer’s blog, but another developer beat me to the punch by about 2 minutes, posting his blog post first. My blog post was naturally wittier and more fun to read, but that’s beyond the scope of this blog post.




Other Blog Events

Some other “blog events” I have observed are the recent Motrin advertising debacle, Magpie’s attempt at a Twitter Ad Network, and pretty much any Apple product announcements.

What are some other “blog events” you have noticed or observed, in your online communities or elsewhere?




photo used via Creative Commons courtesy of: davepatten

Last week, the Defrag conference came to Denver. In its second year, Defrag is unlike the standard conferences Tara and I have attended on behalf of Lijit over the past year or so.

Defrag’s tag line “Accelerating the aha moment,” is rather appropriate. I liken it to a dinner where the participants are all highly educated and someone like Professor William Duggan, Columbia Business School and author of Strategic Intuition speaks on where the origins of innovation are in the brain.

Or, there is a rousing discussion around the aggregation and dissemination of content around the web with T.A. McCann, Gist; Tom Keller, IntenseDebate; Daniel Ha, Disqus; Avinoam Rubenstain, my6sense.

Imagine listening to Charlene Li discuss how to harness the implicit value of the social graph?

But, more importantly, because of the small size, interaction increases. I sat down with Howard Lindzon and was able to talk about Lijit and StockTwits at length, which just is so difficult to do at larger conferences.

It was great to have a conference of the quality of Defrag locally, and I am excited to see what Eric brings to Denver next year!

Our (my) intention was to produce these reports and blog posts on a semi-frequent basis. It turns out that working in a startup means that your priorities shift quickly. This report sadly became a victim of these shifts, and hasn’t had the attention it deserves. So I am making a concerted effort to publish these more frequently than once every 9 months.

I took some time this go around to clean up our widget classification quality and relevance. As business models change, and web products morph, it can be difficult to accurately classify every service with a widget. If you have have any feedback regarding the way I classify a widget, let me know in the comments. I would also be interested to hear if there are specific widget verticals that we aren’t reporting on that you would like to see.

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Overall Popularity

Below are the top 50 widget providers by domain, ordered by the percentage of blogs which contain at least one widget from the provider. Google is the obvious leader here. The top 20 hasn’t changed much in the last 9 months, which shows Google’s strength in the ad and analytics space.

Popularity by Vertical

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Below are the rankings of widgets within some of the top verticals. Note that each pie graph represents the percentage widget distribution among all widget objects from the vertical. Different this time around is our inclusion of comments widgets. We previously showed trackbacks here, but I felt that comments and commenting widgets are more relevant in the blog market and have a higher install penetration than they did 9 months ago.

Analytics

Advertising

Comments

Search

Woohoo - Check out Lijit !!!! To be fair, we are number one in the graph now due to the reclassification of the snap.com widget. We previously considered them a search widget, but their primary tool does website previews and doesn’t relate to the search vertical in my opinion.

Video

Our survey is primarily focused on widgets that are permanent fixtures on a blog, not those that are embedded in posts. Our crawler makes a note of widgets found in front-page posts, and these are primarily video widgets.Here is a graph of relative popularity of video widgets in blog posts. You’ll notice there are a lot more video providers in the list. It’s good to see some of the smaller guys grabbing some of the market share.

Methodology

Our definition of “widget” is

any regularly-occurring functionality on a blog powered by an external service, voluntarily installed by the blog owner, and powered by Flash or Javascript.

• “Functionality” includes analytics widgets. These add functionality for the blogger but are invisible to visitors.
• “Regularly occurring” excludes widgets embedded in posts, such as YouTube and Dailymotion videos. (We do collect statistics on these, however. The final chart of this post shows the results.) Widgets that occur on all posts, such as the “Digg This” widget, are included.
• “Voluntarily” excludes widgets automatically added by the blog hosting platform. We are only interested in widgets that bloggers make an effort to install.
• Image-based badges, such as FeedBurner subscriber counts, are not counted. HTML forms, such as the original Google search boxes, are also not counted.

Our crawl is “centered” on blogs with our Lijit widget. Our crawler then expands outwards by following blogrolls. This will give a bias to the overall results.

UPDATE:
Number of blogs examined: 184,431
Blogs with widget of any sort: 146,636
Total number of widget installations found:1,222,155
Survey period: 9/26/2007 - 11/06/2008

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!

I spent a lot of time traveling and talking to publishers and publisher networks about the value of Lijit.

“Oh, you are the social search guys.”

“Um, no, we are not social search. We are trusted search.”

“Whats that?”

Social search is often defined as search results that are improved by the input of the community. Chris Sherman, of SearchEngineWatch, writes a great article (albeit a bit dated) about social search and its importance. Even Marissa Mayer of Google, talks about the importance of social search. Mashable, about a year ago, listed about 40 social search engines.

Given all the buzz around social search engines, why do I make the differentiation?

Lijit is focused on providing great results, not from the interaction of the community, but as defined by the publisher. In addition, Lijit is not a destination website, while most search engines, including social search engines are.

Instead, Lijit allows the publisher to be the center of their universe.

The two specific ways that occurs:

First:

Algorithmic and social search engines attempt to index all digital information, and either programmatically or through a community effort, provide relevant and quality results.

Therefore, the assumption is that the indexed content is not trusted, and either needs to have a technical or “cloud” solution applied to them so they can “earn” the right to be included.

Lijit takes the opposite approach. Because its the publisher’s defined content, and the search results are centered around that publisher, the assumption is that the publisher and his created content is trustworthy, and should be included in the results.  The content “earns” its place in the index by default.

Second:

Algorithmic and social search engines are constantly consuming content. Google, for example, considers it their mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Most destination search engines take on a similar mission to Google.

Instead, Lijit believes in the concept of the Social Media Starfish.

Lijit is built on the concept that you are at the center of all the content you create online, and that if someone comes to your publication and does a search, the publisher provides context and trust, and the results should reflect that.

In essence, the publisher’s online brand becomes searchable.

image used by permission. Darren Barefoot of Getting to First Base.

Take my blog as an example.

If you do a search (using the default Lijit widget) on my blog for “billie,” I provide the context, and you will see posts, Flickr pictures and YouTube/Viddler/Vimeo videos of my dog.  The fact that I have dogs, and am a bit obsessed with them, is part of my online brand, and is evident in the Lijit results.

You want a more useful example?

Do a search (he has integrated Lijit into his TypePad default search box) at Fred Wilson’s blog for “kozmo” a famous internet company from the “dot com bubble” of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

In the returned results you get this post entitled Web Services The Cater To Both The Publisher And The Reader (while Lijit isnt really a web service, I do think we focus on providing a service to publishers that help both them and their readers), you get two great flickr photos of Kozmo swag, and in Fred’s network section a fantastic photo of Seth Goldstein with Lee Majors (who was in the first Kozmo commercial. Lee Majors, not Seth Goldstein).

In both cases, the reader learns more about the publisher.  The level of trust the reader has for the publisher’s content and trusted network grows, as does the publishers online brand.

In this case, I favorited pictures of the Kozmo swag and Seth & Lee (since I worked there in 2000 in San Diego), and friended both Fred and Seth on Flickr.

By allowing the publisher to be the center of his universe, Lijit allows four things to occur:

1. More relevant results;
2. The reader learns more about the publisher because he is discovering all of his generated content; this, in turn, allows the reader to
3. Completely trust the results; and
4. Discover and trust content that he would not have found using algorithmic or social search engines (case in point the Seth & Lee photo).

For the publisher, being the center of your universe allows you to better engage your readers, by providing them more relevant and trusted content. (Not to mention the search specific stats Lijit provides publishers.)

As a publisher that spends a lot of time and care on the content I create (I know, the surprise is overwhelming) and the personal brand I am building, it is important to have tools that support that effort.  I think thats why I run business development at Lijit versus a social or algorithmic search provider.

Or, it could be that I just like being the center of my universe.