Our friends over at mSpoke have the second part of their answer to the question, What makes a blog popular?, in a new post they have up.  This post, a follow up to the first part which we linked to here, specifically addresses the aspects of subjectivity and polarity of blogs.  Their conclusion is an interesting one:

The items with a high NewsGator attention score tend to have a greater percentage of sentences identified as subjective.  There’s still pretty wide variance, so subjectivity is a weak predictor at best.  This trend also only applies to items with a NewsGator attention score of at least 5, corresponding to the top 3.7% of items in this particular dataset.  Nevertheless, we can conclude that there is a tendency for posts that receive a lot of attention to have more subjective sentences than those receiving less attention.

The whole thing's a good read, so check it out.

P.S. Happy Thanksgiving from the entire NewsGator Team!

Over at iMediaConnection, Mitchel Ahern has written an article that talks about some of the keys to, and pitfalls of, widget success.  It's a good read and it has some important pointers regarding using widgets as marketing tools as well as the overall state of the widget-o-sphere at the moment.  I'd like to highlight a few of his comments, specifically in regards to what we're doing at NewsGator Media & Consumer Products; feel free to read the whole piece here. 

Since NewsGator Media & Consumer Products is now offering branded iPhone apps for media clients -- indeed, we just had a successful free webinar on the subject last week -- I thought this post, "The Mobile Application Rush: Is the iPhone Really Leading the Way?" makes an interesting read. 

Compete's Eleanor Baird asks the simple question:

Are iPhone owners really interested in mobile applications any more than other Smartphone users, or is it just hype? 

According to her analysis, the answer is a resounding yes.  First, she reports that a full third of of Smartphone owners don't have any applications on their phone, whereas only 7% of iPhone users can say this.  Also, nearly three-quarters of iPhone users have 5 or more applications on their phone, while only one-fifth of Smartphone owners can claim this.  (You can read the full article here.)

The popularity of iPhone applications, then, underscores the relevance of NewsGator's Branded iPhone Apps, which enable you to:

• Deliver a branded media experience to iPhone users via a custom, native App
• Include text, images, audio, and video
• Market your App on the Apple App Store
• Monetize your App with sponsorships
• Minimize development and support costs with NewsGator’s hosted service
• Provide a superior experience over web Apps by enabling offline features and a richer, faster user experience

You may read more about our iPhone offerings here.

Our ever-helpful technical support engineers have added 2 posts today to the NewsGator Technical Blog.  If you're at all technically inclined, you may find them helpful. 

The first post, dealing with bookmarklets, is geared towards developers and technical users in general, and is not only useful info for widget development but for just about any web application.  The second post explains how to show FavIcons for individual posts within your widgets; this is a handy way to show the feed source in an attractive way.

Check out the NewsGator Technical Blog today.

According to an article on Australia's iTnews, Google has espoused a new security standard for its online widget platform called the "OAuth System."  Google's previous security system was a in-house, but their move to support the OAuth system, an open standard, has been made to allow sites to share user information for mash-up apps securely and at the same time let users to authorize what bits of data are disclosed.  The move to OAuth gives Google the hope that their iGoogle widgets platform can expand to other web-based platforms in a secure fashion.

Check out the complete story here. 

Robert Murdoch, in comments from part of a lecture series sponsored by the Australian Broadcast Corporation, portrays the current environment for newspapers and media companies, not unsurprisingly, as difficult.  In particular, he calls out "some of the [obsolete] editors, reporters, and proprietors who are forgetting a newspaper's most precious asset: the bond with its readers."  However, Murdoch points to a potentially bright future for the space if newspapers and media companies can learn to adapt.

In short, Murdoch says that newspapers must embrace technology advances -- RSS content in particular -- to be successful in the changing media landscape.  He believes that the key challenge for success in the future will be to "use a newspaper's brand while allowing readers to personalize the news for themselves-and then deliver it in the ways that they want."      

These comments lend significant credence to the work we're doing here at NewsGator Media & Consumer Products with newspapers and media companies through RSS, widgets, and related content. In a general sense, the solutions that we offer at NewsGator help newspapers and media companies extend their brand's reach, improve traffic and monetization, and -- here's the key -- also enhance the end user's  experience through dynamic (and often customizable) content delivery platforms.

Indeed, If you read between the lines of his comments, Murdoch makes a powerful case for precisely the type of viral widgets that NewsGator provides, by referring to the importance of tools that allow, "a newspaper's brand...[to] deliver [content] in the ways that [readers] want" by "allowing readers to personalize the news for themselves."

You can read more about his comments in this article on CNET, but the main point I want to convey is that Murdoch's take away message strongly validates the type of solutions -- widgets, related content, etc. -- that NewsGator currently offers.  If you believe Murdoch, then widgets in the newspaper and media space have a very bright future. 

Editor's note: the following is a guest post by Jeff Jarvis on the subject of reverse syndication; this post post appeared on his blog, BuzzMachine.

In the story about their layoffs today, the New York Times mentioned, as it often does, that the Baghdad bureau costs them $3 million a year.

I’ve been wondering about a new way to help support that bureau: reverse syndication.

Now, the Times supports that work not with advertising associated with it directly — who wants to associated a brand with war? — but by doing the other things — food, entertainment, autos, homes — that bring in the money. And it runs a syndicate in which it sells its stories to other news organizations. But I know from my time in newspaper online sites that syndication is a dying business as newspapers cut back all the costs they can and as the web link pretty much obsoletes the model: Why buy the content when people can get it to already online?

So how about turning that model around: Let’s say the Times says to Tribune company that it will provide all the reporting on Iraq for Tribune’s readers. But instead of charging Tribune for syndication, the Times pays Tribune a share of the ad revenue it gets from traffic Tribune sends to the Times. Tribune, which is also engaging in layoffs, can’t afford to do everything anymore and so it has to do what it does best and link to the rest. Granted that the ad revenue on a Baghdad story won’t be great but added traffic would add revenue and would help.

And if this model works, wouldn’t Tribune also want to link to Wall Street coverage from the Times. Or the Wall Street Journal and Reuters could compete for that traffic. There’s a church-state question here: Would Tribune be motivated to link to any of these three because they have the best coverage or because they pay the best commission? Given equal quality, the best commission will win. But Tribune has to give its readers the best links to the best coverage or its readers will seek those links elsewhere. So I think quality will succeed.

(This is the first of two posts exploring new models for the business of news — I’d love to see you explore more. I also want to give credit for inspiring this to Jim Kennedy, the head of strategy at the Associated Press, who drew a similar model when I first brought Daylife to meet him as he tried to figure out how we as an industry could help support quality coverage from local papers that right now aren’t motivated to take national traffic since they can’t monetize it well. This may be a model that addresses that.)

Though I'm not saying Brad Feld is necessarily an entirely objective observer of NewsGator -- as he is an investor -- he nonetheless has a very complementary post up on his site that makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside.  He also mentions the excellent guest post from SAP's Craig Cmehil that appeared on this blog last week; if you didn't have a chance to read it, I suggest you do.

There's a post by Melinda Gipson up on The Newspaper Association of America's Opportunopoly blog that explores NewsGator's new and growing relationship with mSpoke, which has been profiled before on this blog. You should definitely read the whole post, but here's a quote within the article from NewsGator's own Walker Fenton, about the power of related content widgets, which are made possible through our relationship with mSpoke:

"The more relevant the content, the more relevant can be the adjacent advertising.  When you compare related content ads with banner ads, we see significantly better engagement -- 3 percent to double-digit click-throughs, depending on where the ads are in relationship with the content recommendations"

If you're in the content syndication, related content, or contextual advertising arena, this article is a must-read.  Check out the full post here. 

Editor's Note: The following is a guest post from Craig Cmehil, a technology and community evangelist at SAP.

SAP's developer community and their business process communities signed on board with NewsGator just a few short weeks ago. It's an exciting time for our communities and thanks to NewsGator it's getting even more exciting!

The SAP Developer Network (SDN), SAP's developer community of over a million of our customers, partners and employees joined together to discuss and collaborate around SAP technologies, products and our NetWeaver platform have excelled at generating content, millions of forum posts, thousands of wiki pages, tens of thousands of blog posts, articles, eLearning and more. Parallel to that the Business Process Expert Community (BPX) quickly growing and expanding at astounding speeds is beginning to generate enormous amounts of content of their own including the recently published "Process First", created and collaborated on by the community within a wiki. To top that off recently the addition of the Business Objects Community (BOC) has caused a content explosion that needs to be handled, optimized and sorted to continue to provide our combined 1.4 million and growing user base with the information they need in ways they can consume regardless of where they choose to start their day.

Over the years we've explored various means of getting our content into the hands of those who can most benefit from it, popular but still not main stream our RSS feed activity has seen remarkable growth since we began broad use back in 2006 and our own widget activities have been extremely popular so it seemed a logical choice to research available viral widget options in the market.

It didn't take us a long before we realized that when you want quality, scaleability and extreme flexibility NewsGator was the name we continuously came across. We did at one point even considering using our own considerable resources and building a solution but it was NewsGator's millions of feeds and content that also interested us, not to mention their attention to detail and professionalism!

The team I was put in contact with to help me work through whether or not this was the right solution for us, if it would work with our platform, what about security issues and an seemingly endless number of other questions that their team patiently addressed, answered, found a solution for and kept on in a highly motivated fashion. It was a great experience working with the folks at NewsGator (Craig, Walker, Jeff and others) that I found it hard after we ran out of the technical stuff, the legal stuff and everything else to find a single reason to even hesitate. It was a week or so after we worked through everything that I cornered several of my management folks at one of our events and through dinner, cocktails (an entire evening event) I spoke about the potential use cases for the community, the ROI, the simple value proposition.

The next day I was nothing but smiles as a decision had already been made, money allocated PO's approved and we were ready for contract negotiations.

We've officially completed those negotiations and we've had amazing results from our very first pilot widget, so when the NewsGator team asked if I was interested in sharing a bit of our still very new story I jumped at the chance! Our first pilot widget was associated with our 80 SAP mentors, a program started not so very long ago itself to highlight the top 1% of our SAP ecosystem. Those individuals in our ecosystem that question, critic, support, give feedback, push back and pull forward; these are the folks that we look to in order to ensure we are listening, acting and changing when and where necessary to continue to give our customers the highest quality of product and services possible. We asked several of our Mentors if they would be interested in a small experiment, simply give us their RSS feed for their blogs, we had the ones from within our own environment already and wanted to see how the system worked with a good mixture of content. Several of those we asked agreed and we created a simple widget, not much to look at from design but the content was of course top notch.

The widget we placed on my personal weblog, Craig's Rantings..., and waited to see what would happen. We didn't advertise, simply told one or two community members to see what would happen. Over the course of several weeks we came to have 14 descendants and over 50,000 widget impressions. A solid test, better than I could have hoped for! Now armed with our full team ready to go we have begun to explore together with the NewsGator team the various options available in our "Editor's Desk", extremely user friendly interface giving us total control over our widgets. Our graphic folks are experimenting with the design and layout options and our platform team are busy building in standard and easy ways to add the widgets with little effort to our standard SAP NetWeaver Portal which is the backbone of all our community sites.

We also tied this to another experiment we have around the Facebook platform and were amazed to see this widget being used by almost 300 users with an average of almost 100 daily! Actually within Facebook we have a group, fan page and a few other things as well, so these feature was a perfect fit.

We've added a couple of more for our tests and have begun to explore the styling options as well.

• SAP mentors - View your widget in the NewsGator gallery
• Community TV - View your widget in the NewsGator gallery
• SAP TechEd - View your widget in the NewsGator gallery

One of our main hopes or wishes behind such a move is to fulfill a request from our own communities, many tell us,

"I login to my computer in the morning and I'm on my Yahoo homepage, why can't I get my SAP updates there as well?"

Our first reaction to this was, "but you can", after talking to more and more of the community members we came to realize that the shear mass of great information within our communities was simply spread across to many different mediums and they didn't want to have to add multiple different input feeds but they rather wanted a collective. We worked out a solution to combine our own feeds together but we felt there was still something simply not there, something that was missing.

NewsGator gave us the answer, we can now give our community the ability to "take the community with them", what they want and how they want it - where ever they want it!