Search-Powered Web Apps

Our #CrushIt contest with Gary Vaynerchuk has come to an end. Before we announce the winners, we want to thank everyone who participated and signed up for Lijit. We like working with friends of Lijit, our community and giving back so if you have any feedback or additional ideas, send them our way. We’re all ears.

Without further ado. Drumroll please…

The five winners, picked at random are:

1. Programming Language FAQ (http://programminglanguagefaqs.blogspot.com/)
2. Over U (http://overu.typepad.com/overu/)
3. I Heart PGH (http://iheartpgh.com/)
4. E Books For You (http://www.freeebooks4you.co.cc/)
5. John Allsopp (http://blog.tropicalismo360.com/)

Each of the five bloggers listed, will receive an autographed copy (by the man himself) of Gary Vaynerchuk’s, Crush It.

Note: We will personally e-mail each winner for addresses so we can send you your copy of the book.

“Crush it. Crush it real good.” (Sorry we had to).

As a startup we believe in passion and crushing it. It’s pretty obvious Gary Vaynerchuk has both in the can, which is why we’re teaming up.

Who: We’re hosting a contest with our friend, Gary Vaynerchuk - the man of hustle, Wine Library TV and the author of the recent book, Crush It.

What: We have five Crush It books, signed by Gary himself ready for you. You know you want to know how “Skills are cheap, passion is priceless.” Here’s all you need to do to be one of the lucky winners.

How: Choose one of these three options:

1. Never used Lijit? Sign up for Lijit’s custom search (we provide you with stats, too), add it to your blog or website, then add (http://crushitbook.com) to your Lijit network.
2. If you’re a current Lijit user just add (http://crushitbook.com) to your Lijit network.
3. If you’re a current Lijit user, get your friends to sign up and use Lijit’s custom search, while also adding (http://crushitbook.com) to their Lijit network.

For points 1 and 3, to sign up be sure to use this link so we can track and include you in the contest.*

Timeline: The contest starts now: October 23rd and lasts until November 6th.

To add (http://crushitbook.com) to your Lijit network: Sign in to your Lijit profile page and click on ‘Network’ at the top or the ‘Edit’ button next to your Network list.

Then, you’ll be on your network page…

At the end of the two weeks, we will pick (at random) five lucky winners who will be on their way to learning how to #crushit.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email Grace.

*You get one contest entry for each friend who signs up with Lijit. Remember, if you have lots of friends (good for you) but it also means you can enter more than once.

I write. A lot. And as I’ve done this blogging thing now for quite a few years, with 1000’s of posts now under my belt and submitted to the open interwebs for lurkers and loyal readers alike to enjoy, I’ve learned a few things:

a) Man, that’s a lot of posts. How the hell do I get people to enjoy my old stuff?

b) Man, I want people to HANG OUT on my site a while! How do I keep ‘em from leaping off too soon while trying to add color to my content with external links or anchoring text?

As it pertains to a) let’s just say that I discovered a little gem to help my readers do just that. Sometime in 2007 I started using Lijit Search and featured it prominently on my main blog and my other various blogs and sites I manage. Readers immediately started exploring my older content by searching for content and Lijit would take them directly to it where it lay on my blog as well as my social media content and where it lay on my friends sites via my trusted social graph. I liked it so much, I just HAD to work there (although I cannot say “I liked it so much I bought the company…ha!).

Now as it relates to b) there’s a lot of strategy that goes on by bloggers to keep those precious time-on-site metrics ticking ever longer. Ultimately, keeping folks on your site is about your content…good content…that engages readers and fundamentally shows who you really are. But very often it is about other content…content that can and should be used to help punctuate points within your posts and typically done by referencing something external to your site via hyper-linking. Yet the world of hyper-linking fundamentally jeopardizes time-on-site goals desired by bloggers because people LEAVE!

Enter: The Apture Experience.

All over this post and any of my blogs are examples of what Apture provides. The product offered by this Bay Area company essentially satisfies point b) above by creatively and elegantly displaying these punctuation points you desire to add color to your posts. Have a YouTube video that reminds you perfectly of that prose-like sentence you just wrote? Use Apture to link to it and pop up on your site. Have that perfect image that can elicit an emotive reaction to your text? Link to it with Apture and have it too pop up on your site. The installation of Apture caused zero brain damage (installed in ~2-3 minutes) and is just as easy to use. Once a post is either published or in a pre-published state, simply select text and allow Apture to search for similar content on the internet or input specific URLs to explicitly pop up content you desire.

Apture is so similar to Lijit in our focus on creating powerful tools for our publishers which at their core both help inspire and engage readers more thoroughly with your content. Lijit helps mine and discover content, Apture helps expose and punctuate your content with it. Like peanut butter and jelly. 

Finally, as blogger AND a manufacturer of publisher tools for our community. I am truly inspiring you to take a look at Apture and the types of features it can provide for your readers to creatively punctuate your content while ensuring the enjoyment of said content happens directly on YOUR site, keeping readers engaged and entertained post after post. Open up the “Apture” for your readers and keep ‘em engaged!

Here at Lijit, we love finding out about new blog tools that make it easier to discover great content. (Hey, it’s a big part of what we do!) We first met the folks from outbrain at SXSW in 2008, when both of our companies were helping with the b5 Blog Network Camp. Since then, we’ve both grown up a bit. It’s not unusual now to hear both Lijit and outbrain discussed as must-have tools for any blogger.

In the interest of research, I wanted to give outbrain a try on my work blog, I quit for Lijit. It really is a simple one-click install and only took me a couple of minutes to get it up on my blog. I love that I can now get instant feedback and, underneath my posts, I’m recommending other quality content for my visitors to read. For a free service, outbrain rocks. I’m looking forward to checking out the reports that outbrain provides and to find out even more about the people coming to my blog. Who doesn’t love stats?

If you’re interested in an easy blog enhancement, be sure to give outbrain a try. Their widget inherits the look and feel of your blog, making for a seamless integration that can only help your readers. We really like what outbrain is doing and think you will too!

You can read more about outbrain on their blog and follow them on Twitter.

Although we wish we could sponsor and support each event and charity that comes our way, unfortunately, as a startup, we can’t every time. However, we believe in giving back and sometimes it’s the little things that count the most. This is why we’re happy to be sponsoring 12for12k’s charity tweet-up in cities across the US, Canada and Australia, taking place on April 18th, in conjunction with Mom It Forward. Check here to see if one of the tweetups is in a city near you to join in!

What is 12for12k, you ask? Headed up by a loyal Lijit user and friend, Danny Brown, the 12for12k Challenge is “the combination of social media and fundraising.” The organization’s aim is to raise a minimum of $144,000 for 12 charities over the course of 2009, with a new charity being supported each month and the proceeds go directly to charity.

The concept:

• 12 months of the year
• 12 charities, a different charity each month
• $12,000 per charity

For more information about 12for12k, you can check out their website.

To donate for the April Charity, pay it forward, here:

**Many thanks to Grace for taking the lead on this and writing a fantastic blog post!

After last night’s release, you’ll see a new tab along the top of your profile page.

What’s that, you ask? How can Lijit possibly give me even more cool stuff? Well, we’ve managed to do it by partnering with two fantastic companies, JS-Kit and ShareThis. These two widget companies offer complementary services, so that if you need a commenting system, a way to display polls, or a way to let your readers share your posts with others, you can find it all on this new page. Consider it one-stop shopping for all your blogging needs.

We’re excited about this opportunity to co-promote some other widgets and give our users more tools to make their blogs even better.

There were also a few tweaks made last night to insure better relevancy and faster display of the search results we bring back, two things that we’re continually working on improving. If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it.

This post is by our very own Derek Greentree, who visited the Yahoo! campus for a field trip. In addition to using his business cards for the first time while on this trip, he was also very excited about being the recipient of developer swag. And he was nice enough to share it with the rest of us in the office.

Two weeks ago, I flew out to sunny California to attend Yahoo! Open Hack Day, an interesting developer event periodically held by Yahoo!. Attendees get access during the event to up-and-coming APIs (and other technology) in development at Yahoo!, and are given a challenge to create a mashup or other interesting hack and demo it at the end of the event. You can find information about the hacks that were demoed at the hack day blog.

If you’ve never been to the Yahoo! Sunnyvale campus, you probably won’t know quite what to think, as it’s filled with purple carpet, exclamation points on the walls, and emoticons everywhere. It’s interesting to see a very large corporation try to promote a youthful and exuberant appearance at a corporate headquarters with security guards, a cafeteria, fountains, volleyball courts, outside dining, and multiple buildings. I arrived Friday morning and was also surprised at how organized the event was; after entering, I was always greeted with friendly faces willing and able to help me find what I needed.

The theme of the weekend was APIs and openness. First, I’m happy to see that Yahoo! is getting behind OAuth, an open standard for API authentication. I wish everyone supported this simple mechanism (*cough* Facebook *cough*), as the various APIs offered by services out there desperately need to settle on a single, well-understood mechanism for allowing users to grant access to private data.

The second most exciting thing demoed (for me) that weekend was YQL, which will be a single URL that takes a SQL-like query and returns data from many Yahoo! services–like Flickr, mybloglog, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail, and others. Currently, each of these services has a different API and a different authentication mechanism, which means that supporting them is a pain. Having one mechanism for authenticating to the Yahoo! API (OAuth) and for querying any data within it will greatly simplify the code base we use here to interface with external services.

Next was Yahoo! BOSS, a search API. Many services (like Google and even Yahoo!, using yet another API) expose search services to external users, but BOSS is special. The problems with all the major existing APIs out there is draconian usage restrictions. Many of them, for example, don’t allow you to:

• Reorder search results
• Change the display of search results
• Use the API more than a certain (low) number of times per day
• Inject advertising of your own into search results

This is a mistake: allowing services to use your search data in unique and interesting ways is a win-win for the service and the search provider. With BOSS, on the other hand:

“BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is different–it’s a truly open API with as few rules and limitations as possible. With BOSS, developers and startups now have the technology and infrastructure to build next generation search solutions that can compete head-to-head with the principals in the search industry. BOSS will grow and evolve with a focus on providing additional functionality, tools, and data for developers.”

I attended an excellent presentation by Vik Singh, a member of the BOSS team, on some example usage. He’s also developed a very cool Python library called the BOSS Mashup Framework that lets you whip up interesting mashups using Yahoo! Search with simple, elegant code. If you’re a developer and into this stuff, you definitely should check things out.

Perhaps most importantly, the weekend made me think about APIs that Lijit wants to offer (or could offer) to the outside world. We have access to a lot of interesting and unique data here, and I’ve seen more than a few startups that would benefit by having access to the work we’ve done. Look for more on this in the future, but I think providing access to Lijit’s data via a set of APIs could produce some very interesting mashups, and help Lijit grow in cool and unique ways.

[Photos found on Flickr and used via CC license: freshelectrons, Jinho.Jung, and bluesmoon]

Once the gauntlet was thrown, there was no looking back. Micah pulled off a friendly competition that brought together all those with big appetites in the local tech community. 12 guys showed up to compete and after deciding on the rules together, the contest began. But not before the spectators put their predictions in for who they thought would win. Jenny from Boston thought that Danny Newman was the one to pick, mainly based on the fact that he came dressed to play…

Brad Feld was honest when he said that he would stop eating when he was full…because Amy, his wife, told him to and we all know what a good husband he is. (Additionally, Brad kept making the competition harder by adding in his own rules, like drinking a beer between each round and attempting push-ups as well.)

Spectators took turn ordering the rounds of sushi so that the competitors didn’t have any unfair advantages. The first few rounds were easy, but the sushi got progressively worse as the night wore on. Plates of the hard stuff (quail eggs, smelt roe, fermented soybean, and the like) began appearing in the later rounds, knocking out weak-stomached competitors along the way.

After 14 rounds of sushi, one competitor puking, and many others looking like they were going to puke, the first Sushi Regurge champion was crowned. To the surprise of no one, the same guy who organized the entire event (and talked the most trash) was the one who was left standing at the end of it all.

Many thanks to the employees of Hapa, who put up with our screaming and cheering, and to everyone who showed up to support the competitors. And of course, thanks to Micah…

without whom, none of this disgusting gorging would be possible. Thanks for pulling it together, calling everyone out, and putting your best stomach forward! We look forward to another equally unappetizing gathering like this again next year.

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.

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.