Pluck Launches BlogBurst: A Barometer of Things to Come
Important Details: BlogBurst came out of stealth mode this week, further blurring the boundaries of content creation and syndication. BlogBurst is Pluck’s new product, an offering that sits aside two older Pluck initiatives, first an RSS reader widely used on the Web and then a blog enablement service, now best seen at its launch site, Austin 360, home of the Austin American-Statesman in Pluck’s hometown.
BlogBurst is kind of an inside-out product. In Pluck’s product line, it sits side-by-side with Pluck’s newly named SiteLife. That product includes blog enablement, comment management, and new tools to allow sites to create a My Yahoo!-like "My" product, keeping users on publishers’ sites while allowing those users to bring in outside content. BlogBurst is inside-out because it offers publishers lots of outside content, while Pluck’s initial products allowed news sites to create more user-generated content inside their own sites.
What does BlogBurst offer? Well, yes, a burst of blog content, some 700+ blogs to start. Top initial categories are Travel, Women’s Issues, Technology & Gadgets, Food & Entertainment, and Local Metros; stuff intended for newspaper-owned Web site use. The tone is set by BlogBurst Editor Eileen Smith’s snarky and progressive Texas politics blog, In the Pink.
It’s a good tone, and Outsell thinks that Pluck is making an interesting bet in believing that often by-the-numbers newspaper Web sites will want to enliven themselves with BlogBurst content. Already, the Washington Post (a commendable Web early adopter a number of times over), a spate of Texas papers (Austin [in beta], Houston, San Antonio), and Gannett have signed up. Eric Newman, GM of Pluck’s Portal Solutions, tells Outsell that about 200 news sites are in the pipeline to run the product.
What’s in it for publishers? More content – publishers display full posts – with a hip tone and an ability to participate more deeply in the citizen-generated content revolution of the day. The bloggers get exposure and potentially additional traffic.
In Outsell’s Opinion: It’s an interim model, to be sure, but one that deserves notice for breaking down some boundaries. Here are some things to watch in and around the BlogBurst development:
- Pluck has chosen to focus on newspapers as its main customer base. The industry historically has been slow to innovate and take advantage of – and really promote – key partnerships. Its chosen market is a gamble for Pluck but a potential boon for publishers who are looking to break loose from the bonds of their Web 1.0 Web sites.
- When will the first newspapers start using the BlogBurst content – which their license agreement allows – in print? A key issue for publishers is the high cost of their content production. Outsell believes that as publishers look to make cuts, they will inevitably focus reporting and writing resources on local content (what they can uniquely do), and some feature content such as travel, food, and gadgets will be bought as cheaply as possible.
- Where will that put the traditional wire services, especially a feature-oriented service like Knight Ridder Tribune? KRT largely redistributes and syndicates newspaper-generated feature content. How much is it, and other wires, thinking about doing what Pluck has already done? After all, these are syndicators, and good content is good content. Will they innovate after watching what innovators have done?
- Overall, the knocking-down-the-walls phenomenon of BlogBurst is a good one, reminding news publishers that their roles as publishers and as Web distributors are not one and the same – and that bringing in fresh Web content is a key to their success.
- Newstex has already proven that a blog syndication model at least has toes, if not yet legs, in announcing its deal with LexisNexis. Combine the Newstex and BlogBurst announcements, and you start seeing the further blurring of news and blogs and begin to realize that good content is good content.