If you missed last week's excellent webinar on ways to increase ad revenue and page views using new content syndication methods, you can now access the 30-min webinar here, so that you can watch and listen to it at your leisure.

Lori Cuthbert, News Director at Discovery.com, Jason Hoch, VP of Product Development at HowStuffWorks.com, and Walker Fenton, GM of NewsGator's Media & Data Services provide you with valuable insight into these new content syndication offerings and the benefits they bring to online publishers and their audiences.

This webinar covers:

• Discovery Channel’s Science & Technology news widget
• HowStuffWorks.com’s Related Topics feature
• How these new syndication offerings operate
• The benefits of these offerings for online publishers, including: increased ad revenue and page views; enriched content, audience engagement, and click depth
• How these offerings can increase ad inventory for new revenue streams and help increase ROI

We hope you'll check it out.  (Note, scroll down to the bottom of the page to access it.)

Last month, NewsGator's Walker Fenton, General Manager of Media & Data Services, and Sean Ammirati of mSpoke (a NewsGator partner), were invited by Professor Andreas Weigend, an expert in data mining and E-business, to a discussion at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

There the three of them discussed, in front of a class, the atomization of online data (such as RSS), the impact of Twitter on traditional media and businesses, the way "conversational media" is developing, and other topics.

In particular, Walker spoke about how NewsGator collects relevant attention streams/data; for example, every time someone clicks, rates, shares or interacts in any other way with content on our system -- whether through widgets or RSS feeds -- we collect this data.  And Sean spoke about how mSpoke then uses this data (which we share with them) to help power NewsGator's various Related Content offerings  for publishers -- covered here, here and here on this blog.

If you're interested in widgets, attention data, RSS, and ways data can be repurposed online, you'll want to check out the video above (click on it to play).

Enjoy!

A modicum of self-promotion here: NewsGator has just been named to the inaugural class of "Colorado Companies to Watch" by the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade in association with private and public organizations dedicated to supporting second-stage businesses in the state.

The awards program honors 50 second-stage Colorado companies "that demonstrate high performance in the marketplace or exhibit innovative products or processes."  Second-stage refers to companies beyond the startup phase and facing growth, rather than survival, issues.

While you may know NewsGator for our content syndication services that proliferate published content to consumers, boosting public revenue, you may not know that we're also responsible for:

• FeedDemon, one of the most popular Windows RSS readers on the planet
• NetNewsWire, an RSS reader for the iPhone and one of Time Magazine's Top 10 iPhone apps of 2008
• Social Sites, an enterprise computing environment that lets companies activate "Facebook for the Enterprise"
• the internet's single largest repository of free RSS content -- as we add 9.1 million new articles to the repository every day, indexing and aggregating 4.6 million feeds and archiving 4 years of historical content

We're honored to have received this recognition.

Please join us a week from now, on Thursday May 28 at 2pm ET, for our free webinar, "Increase Ad Revenue & Page Views with New Content Syndication Offerings -- from Discovery Channel & HowStuffWorks.com." 

We're excited to have Lori Cuthbert, News Director at Discovery.com, and Jason Hoch, VP of Product Development at HowStuffWorks.com join NewsGator's Walker Fenton on this webinar to provide you with valuable insight into two new content syndication offerings and the benefits they bring to online publishers and their audiences. 

In this 30 minute webinar, the following topics will be covered:

• Discovery Channel's Science & Technology widget
• HowStuffWorks.com's Related Topics Feature
• How these new syndication offerings operate
• The benefits of these offerings for online publishers, including: increased ad revenue and page views; enriched content, audience engagement, and click depth
• How these offerings can increase ad inventory for new revenue streams and help increase ROI

Anyone in interactive/digitial media managment, advertising management, web management, or business development management is likely to find this webinar beneficial.

So register today and join us next week!

The website All Things Digital, which is co-edited by Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg and BoomTown blogger Kara Swisher and is the online extension of the annual "D: All Things Digital" conference started by Walt and Kara in 2003, today announced the launch of a new iPhone™ and iPod® touch application on the Apple App store which was developed using the NewsGator iPhone Media Application Framework. 

The application makes exclusive content from AllThingsD.com and the D conference available for iPhone and iPod touch with a range of features and tools including:

• Kara’s BoomTown, John Paczkowski’s Digital Daily and Peter Kafka’s MediaMemo blogs and video
• Walt’s Personal Technology and Mossberg's Mailbox columns, his videos and his Mossblog
• Katherine Boehret’s Mossberg Solution column and videos
• Ability to post article links and text descriptions directly to Twitter and Facebook, or to email them to a friend
• Galleries of D conference videos and photos including the full 2007 historic joint appearance by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates
• Live D7 conference coverage throughout the May 26-28, 2009 event.

Walt Mossberg describes the app: "All Things Digital for the iPhone is a smart, streamlined mobile application that we know iPhone and iPod Touch owners interested in technology and media will enjoy.”  Developed using the NewsGator iPhone Media Application Framework, the All Things Digital app is designed to contain all the news and reviews from the Web site. As on AllThingsD.com, each journalist’s section is identified by specific color schemes and headshots, including stylized icons that emphasize each writer’s personality and beat. Customized navigation enables users to choose their favorite sections and personalize the content.

The All Things Digital app is available immediately for free from Apple’s App Store on iPhone and iPod touch or at itunes.com/appstore/. For more information, go to allthingsd.com/mobile/iPhone.

Branded iPhone apps are emerging as an effective way to gain revenue from, and readership of, your content. We have written a mini white paper that offers tips for successfully implementing an iPhone app – from its creation to its approval by the Apple App store.

In this mini white paper we’ll address:

• Why you should consider an iPhone App
• Marketing & monetizing your iPhone App
• Whether an iPhone App is right for your company
• How to get registered as an iPhone developer
• What to expect when submitting an app for approval
• How NewsGator can help

Who should read this mini white paper?

• Interactive & Digital Media Content Providers
• Advertising management
• Web Managers
• Business Development Managers
• Mobile application managers
• Marketing managers

You can access this free mini white paper here.

This week Walker Fenton, GM of NewsGator's Media & Data Services, will be attending the annual Digital Hollywood spring conference in Santa Monica. 

He will join Brad Pelo (CEO of i.TV), Danny Passman (Global Head of Programming at Joost), Wendy Feldman (Executive Director of Mobile Marketing & Digital Promotions at Sony), Michele Edelman (VP of Marketing at Warner) on the Music 2.0/Mobile Media Track panel discussion from 3:30-5pm on Wenesday, May 6.

The panel, which will be moderated by Steve Polsky, COO of Flixter, will focus on the following topics:

• iPhone Apps
• App Breakthroughs
• Video
• Games
• Mobile Engagement & Advertising

So, if you're attending Digital Hollywood, be sure to check out what's bound to be an informative and engaging discussion on the subject of iPhone apps and mobile media.

Also, if you'd like to meet with Walker in person while at Digital Hollywood, send him at email at walkerf AT newsgator.com.

In an interesting new partnership, fellow Colorado company -- Filtrbox -- announces this morning that they have turned to NewsGator to boost the quality of the proactive market intelligence it provides to sales forces, executives, marketers and investors. 

Filtrbox scours millions of online sources, both mainstream and new media, and delivers high quality business intelligence tailored for each client.  As a result, organizations make better decisions based on breaking news, trends and competitive happenings.

With help from NewsGator, Filtrbox's product will become even more compelling: they now use our metadata based on over 50 million Internet user actions every month.  As Ari Newman, founder and president of Filtrbox, explains, "We analyze massive amounts of information to ensure the relevance and value of content we deliver" and now that "NewsGator has just added attention metadata to the mix, we can use that to further boost the information used by FiltrRank to rate articles."

Flitrbox has turned to NewsGator since we operate the largest repository of free internet content.  Indeed, NewsGator adds 9 million new articles to our repository every day, indexing and aggregating 4.6 million separate feeds and archiving four years of historical content!  And, because millions of people interact with NewsGator products each day, we are able to supply Filtrbox with millions of pieces of metadata on user actions. 

As Walker Fention, GM of NewsGator's Media & Data Services explains, "NewsGator's Data Services' unique insight into how audiences are responding to content gives Filtrbox clients more value out of their intelligence information." 

You can learn more about NewsGator Data Services here.

I stumbled across a helpful food-for-thought type blog post by Kailee Brown of Ignite Social Media titled, "8 Questions to Ask When Developing Widgets for Social Media Marketing."  As Kailee rightly explains, "widget development can be costly and time consuming. It is important to ask the right questions before developing widgets. Here is somewhat of a checklist that needs to be answered if you are considering developing a widget as part of your social media marketing campaign."

Here are 8 specific things she suggests you have in mind before launching a widget (campaign):

• Why would people want to use the widget?
• How will people find the widget?
• How will you or your organization track the widget? 
• What is an appropriate size for the widget?
• Who is the target demographic?
• Is it appropriately branded?  (Note: I think this one is huge)
• How long is the campaign?
• Does creating a widget match your overall business objectives?

She goes into detail regarding each question in her blog post, and most of what she says is spot on.  I suggest you give it a full read.