Lijit

Come on in! We’re open!

That’s right, Lijit Publishers! Our Ad network is officially out of beta and we are rolling! We’ve invested a lot both in technology and people power to provide what we think is a great money making vehicle for you. Our Ad Serving Platform is world class and our direct sales force is working directly with the large premium brands and ad agencies to serve the creative you want and expect to match your site and your reader audience.

What does the Lijit Ad Network give you, publisher?
More money making opportunities! Lijit has historically provided you revenue share from advertising displayed and clicked through on your Lijit search results pages but our Ad Network is all new! What’s new for you:

• Front Page Ad Tags: Monetize your blog through the simple installation and display of front-page banners, skyscrapers or sidebar units.
• Premium Advertising: Lijit Network’s sales force works directly with major advertising agencies and brands to reach your readers with meaningful creative that your readers will appreciate…and be more likely to engage with.
• Better Performance: Knowing your site’s content, reader demographics and reader intent allows Lijit to yield better ad performance over prototypical ‘spray and pray’ ad networks. We want your site to have meaningful, contextually relevant and engaging creative your readers will appreciate and move to act on!

How do you install Lijit Ads?

Easy! We’ve made installing ad tags as simple as installing your Lijit Search Wijit. Check it out…

1) Opt in to share revenue with Lijit. You will see a new tab on your Wijits administration page called Ad Many of you have already taken advantage of this by opting into revenue share from your search page ads and if so, you won’t see this step. For newcomers, you will see this simple screen to fill in your account information (e.g. where we send the checks!) and the opt-in information.

2) Create an Ad Tag: With your registration complete, you are immediately presented with Ad Wijit (e.g. ad tag/ad unit) creation tools to post on your site. Creating one is super simple. You select from the styles we offer (e.g. a banner or a skyscraper or a rectangle), name it and you’re done! Create as many as you want!

3) OK, you’re ready to install! Simply save your wijit in the step above and you will be prompted to move to the install screen you see below. Just like your Lijit Search Wijit, we offer simple one-click installs for major blogging platforms like Blogger, WordPress and TypePad in addition to providing you the java script for proprietary CMS systems and web site platforms. Once the code is live on your site, you’re set and Lijit can get about its job streaming in ads!

4) You’re done!

With your ad tags installed, Lijit’ will take over from here. Our sales force as mentioned is queuing up premium brand and advertising campaigns which will be served directly form our ad serving infrastructure direct to your ad wijit tags. We stream in creative which will match the effective category, demographic and reader audiences who visit your site. Ads will rotate frequently as our model is to continually ensure 100% fulfillment. When a premium ad is not available, we will display remnant ads to ensure a continual money making stream for you.

How do I get paid?

All of the payment and accounting information is managed in your ‘Account’ management console on Lijit.com when you are signed in. Here you can visualize your ad performance, earnings, modify your account registration information and more.

Need Help?

Contact our Advertising team here in our offices in scenic Boulder Colorado. (advertising at lijit dot com) We’re ready to get your site dialed in and ensure you’re making money right away!

Just because a bunch of us are currently headed to Blog World in Vegas doesn’t mean that we’ve stopped working. In fact, with our most recent release, we’re proud to offer our users more enhanced search results and an easier way of installing Lijit on your blog. That’s right. While it may be hard to believe, we just keep making our search better and better.

Hello Google Gadget!

If you are using Google’s Blogger platform, it is even easier to add Lijit’s search to your site. (And it wasn’t very hard in the first place.) When you are looking in Blogger’s Gadget Gallery, you’ll find that Lijit is now available . You can find us by selecting the “Add a Gadget” link in your blog layout menu, and then searching for “Lijit” in the Gadget Gallery’s search tool.

Once you’ve located the special Lijit gadget, you can easily add our search to your blog even if you don’t already have a Lijit account. It’s easy to create a new account from within the Google gadget without even going to the Lijit site.

If you already have a Lijit account, you can simply enter your Lijit username. Either way, after you’re done with that step, you can decide where you want to put your search (we suggest the top!) and enable our search functionality on your blog within minutes.

If you’ve been looking for a better way to search your Blogspot blog, you now have the power. Give your readers more and do it the easiest way possible.

Twitpic Integration

Another cool piece of yesterday’s release is the ability to bring blog readers even more visual goodness in your search results. If you use Twitpic, it’s now easy to add that account into your Lijit content and have images displayed, similar to what we do with Flickr, on the ‘Content’ tab of your search results.

In order to add Twitpic into your search results, simply log in to Lijit and click on ‘Content’. Underneath the space where you put in your Twitter account, you’ll see an area to put in your Twitpic information. Give us a bit to crawl your pictures and before long, you’ll see Twitpic included as part of your Content search results.

We hope you like our newest enhancements and by all means, we encourage you to share your thoughts. Leave a comment and help us to improve what we’re doing!

**A special shout-out goes to Noah Everett, the brains behind Twitpic.

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

We love offering value to blog publishers and the folks at AddThis share the same passion. If you haven’t already heard of them, AddThis is the most used sharing and bookmarking site out there. They make it easy for visitors to share your blog posts with their friends on different social networks. Who doesn’t want their content in front of even more readers?

In addition to easy bookmarking, AddThis helps to increase SEO to your site, offers powerful analytics that let you better understand your readers, and has a global reach that allows your content to be shared worldwide. Like Lijit, AddThis is a free service and has a simple sign-up process. We’re using AddThis on our blog…shouldn’t you?

Spelling aside, we take our search wijit very seriously. It is by far the most visible component of Lijit’s offerings and, as such, necessitates some extra special design attention. A few weeks ago we noticed that a rendering issue started showing up in webkit based browsers (Safari, Chrome, iPhone), which was affectionately dubbed “the missing pixel.” This bothersome bit of negative space was much more than a compatibility issue. It was - to put it simply - our wijit failing on us.

How Did We Get Here?
So how does something so simple get so complicated, such that it starts breaking in the most modern, standards-compliant browsers? Well as it goes in any start up, results must come quick and that often costs certain details. We had written so much CSS quickly, to solve so many one off issues, our code was becoming brittle. And the missing pixel wasn’t even half of it. We had focused so intently on our technically supported browsers that the unsupported browsers were treated as second class citizens. Opera was a mess, both desktop and mobile. And with IE8 on the horizon it was time to go back to the drawing board and build a better wijit.

Planning a Happier Wijit
Rethinking the wijit posed a unique design challenge. It needed to render exactly the same across every browser/OS/rendering combo imaginable (text-based mobile browsers excluded). This is contrary to an extremely popular mantra in web design: websites do NOT need to look the same in every browser. Just ask Dan Cedarholm. I still advocate this philosophy in almost every context. However, a piece of functionality as visible and essential to our product as the search wijit requires visual consistency. And considering the alternative who’s name we do not speak, we had to do it with good ‘ol HTML/CSS/JS.

Step One - Identify Rendering Issues
After analyzing the legacy CSS we identified the source of almost every rendering issues: quirks mode. Quirks mode is a deprecated method of CSS rendering used by browsers on pages that fail to declare a document type. You can learn more about quirks mode and the doctype switch here. Because of the diversity of blogging platforms and web sites that our wijits reside on, supporting quirks mode was a must. We had previously written CSS that simultaneously accommodated quirks and standards mode. This created a very unstable house of cards. Make a change for standards mode and something falls over in quirks. Not a good place to be.

Step Two - Target Quirks
With a little JavaScript wizardry we were able to detect the browser’s rendering mode. Mix that with a conditional quirks mode style sheet and voilà! We have healthier, happier wijits. The main rendering inconsistency between standards and quirks was the height of the text input field (hence “the missing pixel”). This is due to various box model differences that I won’t bore you with here. All we needed to do was set the height for the input 6 pixels higher in quirks mode like so.

Standards Mode CSS (base styles used by all wijits)

Quirks Mode CSS (only loads when browser is in quirks mode)

This solves 90% of our wijit rendering issues. The rest are taken care of by a swooping CSS reset.

Step Three - The CSS Reset
As stated earlier, the wijit needs to look consistent across countless platforms and within countless codebases. A common problem with the old wijit was inheritance of CSS from the blog or site it lived on. This can be good in certain circumstances, but is usually undesirable. For example, if your blog theme placed a custom bullet icon on list items in the sidebar, all the list items would inherit those bullets unless explicitly overwritten in CSS. In steps the CSS reset. By telling all HTML within our wijit to start completely unstyled, we can maximize rendering consistency. We used a fairly liberal reset which allows us to start our wijit’s rendering with a clean slate.

Now we have a (more or less) bulletproof CSS/HTML wijit that will render consistently in more places than you can shake a stick at.

Step Four - Testing Testing Testing
Once this new front end code was integrated with the back end and we were serving wijits to real Lijit users, it was time to start testing. I set up a WordPress install and ran through roughly 100 different WordPress themes on every browser I had handy (IE 6/7/8, Safari 3/4, FireFox 2/3, Chrome, and Opera) and that’s before handing it off to QA. Things looked good. Really good.

The missing pixel was found and we now have a much more stable wijit that lives up to our publisher’s needs. We hope you like it as much as we do.

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed but in the last month Google Alerts has slowly (and now quickly) deteriorated.

Lately I have been seeing people talk about how Google Blog Search has lost its way, and how it’s now returning links from blog sidebars. Now, just a few minutes ago I got my normal Google Alerts report on “Lijit” and it contained about 50 items, most of which are references to our widget in blog sidebars.

Google must have some new crawler code going that isn’t quite as smart as the prior version. Weird.

The following is a guest post by Bill, a software developer here at Lijit who is leading the search engine team. I thought his post was a great follow-up to the one from our CEO on the company’s recent funding and appreciate Bill taking the time to share his thoughts on how we should spend that cash.

As you may know, Lijit recently received 7.1 million dollars in venture capital funding. This means different things to different people. To the investors, it means they see promise in the company and are willing to take a calculated risk. To the executives, it’s a significant milestone in building a successful company. To the employees, it means we still have jobs, and it keeps alive the stock-option dream. But to the engineering team, it signifies a new phase.

Prior to this, Lijit has been a true startup. Everybody has worn multiple hats: the VP of Engineering does systems administration, the senior architect does configuration management, and everybody doubles as the QA team. This early phase can be very exciting and very satisfying. You get to do a little bit of everything, and the urgency to ‘just get it done’ means that you’re rarely constrained by bureaucracy or red tape. But it’s also a difficult time. Everybody is overworked, you often have to do tasks outside of your comfort zone, priorities and direction can change daily, and progress is often constricted by a lack of resources.

I only joined Lijit a few months ago, so I missed a lot of the early pains. But I got here in time to experience some of it, and I worked with many of the Lijit staff at a previous gig where we went through all these phases.

With the funding, it all begins to change. From an engineering perspective, this can be a very exciting time. In the past couple of months we’ve hired a QA team, built a dedicated Test Environment which mirrors the production system, and instituted a bug tracking process. We’ve brought additional developers on board with specialized skillsets, and organized into teams dedicated to each of our primary products (website, search platform, adserving platform). Not only have we built a talented IT team, we’re hiring a configuration management engineer. We’re adopting agile development methods, and we’re building a product roadmap and release timeline that give us direction months into the future. Across the board, we’re transitioning from a small team with limited process to a larger, more specialized team, with greater resources, and naturally, more process.

If we do this right, we become a more productive and higher quality organization which can quickly respond to business needs. If we do it wrong, we can become mired in process and overhead.

And that, really, is the exciting part–we get to define ‘doing this right’. The trick is to integrate these processes and resources while still remaining nimble. We get to pick and choose the parts that make sense. If it doesn’t make sense, if it doesn’t make us faster and improve our quality, then we don’t do it. It’s easy to get bogged down in all this stuff. But we won’t because we’ve been here before.

Photo credit: noahwesley

This week Cuil launched. We pay attention to everyone in the search space even though we really don’t consider most companies competitors. Lijit builds search based applications that install on publishers sites. We selected that mission very carefully because publishers are first and foremost our customer. We don’t operate a destination search site but rather empower the sites we reside on and the publishers we serve. Lijit has all the parts of a search company, we have lots of computers crawling and indexing the web and our secret sauce is the way we bring a level of trust to results and an alternate methodology to ranking pages.

In the world of destination search, Google pretty much owns the show. It’s not impossible for that to change as witnessed by Google’s own rise. The latest contender in destination search is Cuil. I tried a few searches and had really good results. Others, not so much.

I had to chuckle at the Cuil results for a search for “Lijit”.

Cuil seems to lead with the Wikipedia definition of things (as do many other destination search engines – much to Google’s consternation). In our case the top result is the Wikipedia page Stan made about us a long time ago. (An aside: Now, I’m pretty sure we are the most knowledgeable people about “lijit” but Wikipedia outwardly dogs our entry as being a “conflict of interest” regarding this subject matter. It seems to me that requiring people less knowledgeable to be involved is a conflict of interest with regards to Wikipedia).

Anyway, where I was going here are the images. I kind of like the tabloid presentation of things but where did these images come from?

Apparently the best match images of “Lijit” is of a tire company logo, a boat of some type, a “buy now” button (our service is free), and my favorite a guy sniffing glue.

Search is hard..

Yesterday Yahoo! announced their BOSS platform. BOSS is an API into their search infrastructure that lets application builders build a new unique search experience on top of all the Yahoo indexed content. It makes a lot of sense, as search is not an easy thing to do, especially when your corpus of content is the entire world. For fun I lined up Google, Yahoo, Me.dium, and Hakia.. The latter two are utilizing the BOSS platform. Finally, I threw in my Lijit search operated off Lijit’s own crawling and indexing infrastructure.

It’s actually pretty interesting how similar Google and Yahoo results are for this vast sample set of 1 search for “paris catacombs”.

Obviously Lijit returns much different results because Lijit isn’t constrained by the “one right answer” problem. The Lijit results are centric to me (the publisher) and my experiences, as if you had asked me about the Paris Catacombs. The right answer is what “I know” about the paris catacombs, the corpus is my experiences – my writings, my bookmarks, my photos, my videos and stuff my friends know. Of course, Lijit is not a destination search site so we live in a different space then the others. They have the problem of delivering one right answer, we have the difficulty of returning thousands.

The takeaway for me is Yahoo! BOSS and Google CSE are both great platforms to build innovative search applications on top of. However, at the end of the day, innovation on top will rule that day or other everyone will just return the same results formatted differently. Look forward to seeing more in this space from everyone.

During the Facebook frenzy of the last year or so I have heard over and over that Facebook will kill LinkedIn, or LinkedIn is playing catch-up to Facebook, or some derivative of that theme. This is of course based on the meteoric rise of Facebook’s user base, even within the 40 something segment where I reside. While I understand the thought process of this, I simply don’t get the utility out of Facebook that I get out of LinkedIn. Now, one could counter that LinkedIn isn’t any fun, which is true – but it is useful, specially finding people with specific expertise in something I need.

But if I take a step back for a minute, LinkedIn could be so much cooler.

Let’s take a real world example. Two years ago my daughter was doing a report on 3D rendering. I thought it would be cool to find out what rendering platforms existed and what people were using out there. It dawned on me to go to LinkedIn and look for people that worked at Pixar in the off chance I may know someone. It ended up that I found a guy that worked with a friend of mine from the simulation group back at NASA. This guy was a technical director on the movie Ratatouiie that was then in production. Using LinkedIn and my friend I was able to get a conference call scheduled and my daughter and I spent a hour learning about the profession, the tools, etc. All very cool, a total LinkedIn success story.

After that call it dawned on me how cool would it be if I could search for information though that person. Surely Pixar Guy had bookmarks in del.icio.us, perhaps things he has written that appear online, maybe even a blog. We were lucky that Pixar Guy would take an hour out of their busy day to take a call with a teenager and her dad, but for everyone person like that there are probably a 100 that would not. If I could leverage that person’s knowledge without having to bother them how cool would that be. Of course, Lijit is in the search space focused on finding information through people and their connections so the leap was easy for me to make.

Yesterday, LinkedIn announced Searchable Groups Directory and this morning I checked out their blog to see what it was all about.

LinkedIn now allows self forming professional groups to create a tighter Link between each other. For instance one group in their screen image is the CIO forum. Imagine being able to search (for information) through some of the world’s top CIO’s. That would be an interesting perspective on enterprise software for sure.

So, for fun I decided to take a look what an integration of LinkedIn and Lijit may look like. The results were pretty cool.

Click on my hacked version of my LinkedIn page and then enter a search term in the new “Search My Content” field. I listed myself on LinkedIn as a startup CEO and CTO so a natural search term to enter maybe something like “Angel Financing“.

This could be a whole new layer of engagement within LinkedIn that provides even more use to me. In fact, based on the information that I can glean it would seem I would be a lot more likely to use the LinkedIn Answers because I drilled down on useful information..

Now image this capability tied to the LinkedIn Searchable Groups feature they just released. Essentially this would become the world’s largest vertical search engine generator. How cool is that?