Searchles Launches Conversation-Tracking Tag Cloud on Washingtonpost.com

The Buzz Map tag cloud placed on Washingtonpost.com's Live Discussion pages is a quick snapshot into the most buzzed about topics within the national news site's comment sections, forum posts and live discussions. This dynamic social tag cloud is designed to increase user interaction as readers can now navigate through and engage in the active online conversations by topic. The rich social layer of content - or the on-site "micro-blogging", if you will - generated by the Washingtonpost.com reader-community is now surfaced through this trending tag cloud and conversational topic-search powered by Searchles!


The tags link through to a corresponding search results page that aggregates the most recent site-wide user comments, discussion group posts or live discussion feeds where users can also quickly jump to the source content that sparked the conversation or the user profile behind an interesting comment.

This new social feature for Washingtonpost.com is powered by Searchles Discovery technology which crawls and analyzes both published and user-generated site content to establish connections between related users within the community, related online conversations to a particular topic or related content recommendations to an article - to cite a few examples. Searchles Discovery currently offers both tailored social solutions for large media and a free contextual Related Content widget for publishers of any size from the Open Widget Platform. If you think Searchles Discovery would offer a valuable solution for your site - check out the info page or contact us!

Recent Site Accessibility and Maintenance - Widgets Not Affected!

Hey guys, just an FYI - the access issues with the Searchles.com portal have NOT affected any Searchles Discovery widget delivery for sites that have our related content widget installed. Everything is still running smoothly there. That being said, we'd like to apologize for the issues accessing the site you may have had over the past couple of days. We were experiencing a few growing pains as we adjusted to the traffic increases. Things should be back up to full speed very shortly! We're also performing some server maintenance to ensure that these issues won't occur again going forward. Once again, sorry for the inconvenience!

Searchles Related Content Widget for Wordpress v.2 Released - Better Placement & Customization Options!

Based on your generous feedback we've released v.2 of the Related Content widget Wordpress Plugin! The widget is now displayed below each post instead of in the sidebar - which has shown to give you a higher click-thru-rate - and also allows you to change the background color to better fit the color scheme on your site. The installation instructions have reached a new level of easy too - so Wordpress users, head on over to the sign-up page to grab the Related Content widget! (seen below on this very officially official blog) Of course Blogger, Typepad, Drupal, etc. users can grab the widget as well!

Bloggers: Tips for Searchles Widget Placement to get the Best CTR

First and foremost we want to say thanks to those bloggers that have installed the widget and given us some great feedback so far! Please keep it coming. We've done a little check into widget performance ourselves and wanted to share a few tips with bloggers as to what placement & configuration trends have been bringing in the excellent Click-thru-Rates for our blog partners - which translates into page views, reader-engagement and ad revenue!

Obviously it depends on the layout and other features you may have on your site, but we've found that placing the widget below your blog posts has been generating some awesome CTRs - right where the reader finishes up the text of your post. Check out Stephanie Klein's blog or the Tax India's blog for good examples of widget placement.

The next highest CTRs are generated from blogs that have placed the widget prominently at the top of the page in the right side-bar - have a look at Gavin's Blog or Malc in the Burgh to check out their widget placement.

Another important factor is configuring the dimensions & color scheme to match the feel of your site. Realtrix has done a real great job with this and boasts a pretty stellar CTR as well - changing the border color to match the background of your site can give a great sense of flow from the blog post into the list of related content.

So those are our findings thus far based on CTR and we thought we'd share them with you! Every blog is different and we all have our own preferences, but we hope this was helpful.

New Searchles For Bloggers Page: Starring Widgets, Blog Partners and SEO!

We've created a one-stop shop with links to all of the cool gadgets we've built to help enhance your blog and reach a wider audience! Check out the new Searchles For Bloggers page. Here are the highlights:

* Plug & Play Related Content Widget to surface related content from your archive next to your blog posts, kick up your page views and earn incremental revenue with in-widget ads (see widget installed below posts on this blog!)

* Take advantage of our great SEO by installing the widget on your blog. Your content will be automatically be pushed into our index and featured on our partners page with our other blog partners - soon to feature partner content on the Searchles homepage as well!

You put in the effort as the content-creator - let us help you take full advantage of your archive and have a great reach on the web!

Speaking of our blog partners - here are a few more blogs that have installed our Related Content widget and have done a great job customizing it to their site!

RealTrix: Rendezvous with Computing, Web 2.0, Blogging

KevinMD Medical Weblog: The home of provocative physician opinion and commentary on breaking medical news.

And because we're all about 'buy local', some great partner blogs from good old DC!

Beyond Bread: Official Blog of "Bread for the City" whose mission is to provide vulnerable residents of Washington, DC, with comprehensive services, including food, clothing, medical care, and legal and social services, in an atmosphere of dignity and respect.

Bellweather: a native Washingtonian who loves-loves-loves fashion. This is my record of the fun, creative, and stylish things I like to do, see and buy here in the D.o.C.