Outbrain installed on Marin Modus

Today I installed the outbrain widget on this blog. I found out about the widget on Techcrunch where I discovered that Yaron Galai, Quigo founder and a really nice guy, started up outbrain. I interacted with Yaron in 2002 to 2005 period while I worked at Ask.com and Fathom Online.

I really like the outbrain concept and think that if executed as it is described by Galai, could produce much more interesting recommendations and reading than reddit and digg. I'm not sure if outbrain is intended to compete with those services but when competing for my time, it certainly does.

The best part of the outbain concept is that I do not need to remember a web URL to go find the links, instead the links come to me because they syndicate to every webpage that installs outbrain.

The one hesitation I have is, do I want to publish links to other websites and send my audience away? For now, the answer is yes because I'm really curious to see how the results refine themselves over time.

At the bottom of each post, you will now see five rating stars. Please rate the posts and we'll see how the service works (and do not worry about my feelings if you want to rate a post poorly; I gave myself some bad ratings too!).

TANGENT: Why are ratings always on a "1 to 5" or "1 to 10" scale? I like ratings on a "1 to 3" scale: 1. below expectations, 2. met expectations, 3. exceed expectations or 1. below average, 2. average, 3. above average or how about a 2-point scale: 1. did not like, 2. liked. When you introduce a higher point total scale, it seems that the ambiguity factor would increase dramatically. On a scale of 1 to 10, what really is the difference between a 6 or a 7? or on a 1 to 100 scale, what is the difference between 73 and 77? or 24 and 39?

If you want to learn more about outbrain's features, go here.

UPDATE: Outbrain uses cookies to identify users. I use multiple devices. So, my profile and therefore my preference does not carry with me from desktop to laptop to mobile phone :-(

2/18/09 UPDATE: Today I took Outbrain off the site. Users were not using the ratings function. Of the few thousand visits I have had since I implemented Outbrain, there have probably been <20 ratings completed. I still love the concept- just don't know how to get people to participate and today when I saw my page load hang due to the outbrain script, I decided that the test was complete.