PubSub Sandbox

June 06, 2006 09:00 AM US Eastern Timezone

PubSub to Offer Blog Search Functionality for BurrellesLuce Media Monitoring Services

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–June 6, 2006–PubSub Concepts, a New York based company that uses proprietary matching engine technology to track online blog and news sources, will be employing their prospective search technology to further expand the online coverage provided by BurrellesLuce, the nation’s leading media monitoring service.

“BurrellesLuce has been monitoring the media for over a century. We have a long history of employing the most current technology to ensure that the media monitoring services we provide to thousands of customers is both accurate and timely,” explains BurrellesLuce senior vice president Art Wynne. “By using the technological resources that PubSub provides, we are able to expand our media monitoring to over 24 million blogs. Once we receive the blog entries that contain our clients’ keywords, our editors will review each one for relevancy and then, as is always the case, transmit to our clients only the news that matches the intent of their search.”

The combination of PubSub’s technology, which is constantly searching the Web for specific content and delivering it in real time, along with the trained eyes of editors who are screening the content and transmitting all relevant news, addresses two key needs of media monitoring clients - speed and accuracy. BurellesLuce’s clients will receive unlimited access to their content through MediaConnect(TM), a media management platform that also offers interconnected access to a comprehensive media database and related customized media measurement data.

“Monitoring blogs to protect corporate reputations has become increasingly vital. PubSub’s prospective search is the perfect tool to use to be informed of what is being said on blogs and other syndicated content as the information is published,” said Bob Wyman, CTO of PubSub Concepts. “Building this customer relationship with BurrellesLuce, a giant in the media monitoring industry, is a milestone achievement for PubSub that further proves the value of our services and the demand from corporate America for the tools which PubSub successfully provides.”

About PubSub Concepts, Inc.:

PubSub Concepts, Inc. is a New York-based company founded in 2002. The company develops Internet-scale Publish/Subscribe systems and plans a series of product releases designed to make prospective searching a vital element of the Internet experience. PubSub.com provides a free prospective search service that continuously monitors more than 24 million blogs and syndicated Web sites, over 50,000 newsgroups, all SEC Edgar Filings, press releases from major wire services, earthquake data from the US Geological Survey, and FAA airport delay information to instantly alert users whenever material events occur. PubSub’s prospective search provides a real-time notification service made possible by PubSub’s proprietary “matching engine” which, each day, performs hundreds of billions of matches between subscriber requests and newly-published items. Visit http://www.pubsub.com for more information.

About BurrellesLuce

BurrellesLuce is the world’s leading media monitoring company, which offers the most complete coverage and analysis of all media through advanced technology and proven editing processes, providing customers with the knowledge and insight they need to stay ahead of the competition and on top of the marketplace. Visit http://www.BurrellesLuce.com for more information.

PubSub was featured in Walt Mossberg’s personal technology column today. Here’s what he had to say about PubSub and Rollyo (a really neat “Roll Your Own” search engine).

A few quotes:

“The Internet search business is a hot topic. But most of the talk centers on the advertising revenue it generates, not on what is happening in the actual search process itself. And most of the attention is paid to the search giants, like Google and Yahoo, rather than to smaller companies that are tinkering with interesting new techniques.”

“These small sites are aimed at refining search, improving its accuracy and making it more convenient and more personal. I’ve been testing just two of them, PubSub and Rollyo, and I have found they add a dimension that goes beyond what the main Google and Yahoo search sites offer.”

“PubSub is an automated system that constantly matches your search terms against millions of blogs, online discussions, news releases and SEC filings, and notifies you when there is a match. Rollyo allows you to create your own little search engines, focused on topics you care about and sources you prefer. Both do things standard searches can’t.”

PubSub has been profiled in an article appearing in the National Post (in the financial post section):

“This technology, once expanded, will be able to tip off users the instant specific automobiles, jobs, concert tickets, cheap flights or goods and services are published.

“For example, if you want to know the instant U2 tickets come up for sale near where you live, the technology will be able to let you know; there’s no point finding out about it a month later on Google, Salim said.”

Salim Ismail was interviewed this week by Craig Peterson for his syndicated radio show.  The show should air within the next few weeks.  We’ll update the Sandbox with the time and date (and audio) from the show as soon as we are aware of it. 

BROAD NEW INITIATIVE TO SUPPORT STRUCTURED BLOGGING ANNOUNCED

MORE THAN 30 COMPANIES AGREE TO STANDARDIZE HOW WEB DATA IS CREATED AND ORGANIZED TO DEVELOP BENEFICIAL CONSUMER APPLICATIONS

SAN FRANCISCO – December 13, 2005 – Leading Web search, blog and development companies including PubSub, Bloglines, Feedster, Meetup, Sxip, CommerceNet, Broadband Mechanics and others today announced the start of an initiative to keep burgeoning structured content standards in sync at the Syndicate Conference in San Francisco.

“A new era in blogging is upon us. We’re expanding the ways we create, share and syndicate content – and we want to make sure that all the emerging standards are interoperable.” said Salim Ismail, Co-Founder of PubSub Concepts, a leader of the initiative.

“The code we’re submitting is for peer review,” said Marc Canter, CEO of Broadband Mechanics. “We’re making sure that all appropriate existing standards are being supported in this plugin ‘compatibility box’”.

This initiative is being launched with the release of plugins for WordPress and Moveable Type platforms. The plugins will provide bloggers the ability to create Events, Reviews, People and Group Showcases, audio and video media posts and Lists. These structured blog posts can then be routed to any destination.

Companies involved in the Structured Blogging Initiative include:
Attensa, Bloglines, Bloqx, Blogg.de, Bryght, CommerceNet, Cordance, Edgeio, etribes, Feedster, 5ive, FreeRange, GoingOn, Indeed.com, IntelliCal, iUpload, iVillage, Meetup, NetVibes, Newsgator, OpenBC, Pluck, PubSub Concepts, Qumana, ReadSpeaker, Reger.com, relevantNOISE, Rojo, Sphere, Sxip, Tribe Networks and Yiibu.

The Structured Blogging Initiative uses microformats and other similar open standards to freely move and share structured content between different vendors’ products and services on the web, as well as in the off-line world.

The new software has been created so that any publisher, from the individual blogger to institutions, can make content more intrinsically searchable and self definable on the Web without giving up ownership of that content. This means that search tools can easily access this content and new, exciting consumer-based web services can be created.

“With Structured Blogging, millions of blogs or web sites can post structured items like job offers or offers to sell and have those recognized, indexed, and searched on any number of search sites, just like HTML pages are today,” said Pubsub’s Ismail.

“RSS, Aggregators, and the blogosphere show that we can all work together – united for common standards. This collaborative effort takes blogging to the next phase by enabling end-users to create structured content”, said Canter.

Others involved with this initiative said the following:

- “Imagine someone publishes an offer to sell Ping golf clubs for $300. When they press ‘submit’, it’s published on their blog and the offer is syndicated out into the FeedMesh. Five golf portals are aggregating similar offers and their users quickly find the new clubs. Someone else has ‘subscribed’ to Ping clubs for $400 or less and is instantly notified about the offer. – Salim Ismail, PubSub.

- “My favorite example of an end-user benefit is the notion of a shared XML repository – say a “San Francisco restaurant review server. Folks could contribute to the server from their blogs, cam phones, kiosks or other web services. Mobile carriers could then build ‘Reviews’ into cell phones. – Marc Canter, Broadband Mechanics.

- “CommerceNet believes strongly in the vision of bootstrapping a more intelligent Web by embedding semi-structured information with easy-to-author techniques like microformats. Through our own research in developing tools for finding, sharing, indexing, and broadcasting microformatted data, we appreciate the challenges these companies have overcome to offer tools that will interoperate as widely as possible. We applaud their recent decision to support the microformats.org community in all of the core areas where commonly accepted schemas already exist, such as calendar entries, contact information, and reviews.” – Rohit Khare, CommerceNet.

- “Both writers and publishers will benefit from easy to use plugins, but, even more importantly, publishers and indexers of data will be able to share information based on the use of interoperable tools. This has the potential to be amazingly useful.” - Susan Mernit, 5ive.

With the advent of semi-structured information in blog posts and syndication feeds, users can expect new and useful web services and applications based on the data embedded within their posts. For example, a blogger reviewing a product with these plugins would create enough information in the post for a browser plugin to do a comparison shopping search. New kinds of aggregators could add friends’ calendar entries into your personal calendar or new Web services could track feeds from everyone attending the same conference.

GoingOn Networks also contributed to the Structured Blogging effort by contributing the user interface (in conjunction with Broadband Mechanics.) GoingOn will include full Structured Blogging compatibility in its platform when it ships by the end of Q1 2006.

Further development will be supported by the entire community—with open standards and common microformats.

To learn more about Structured Blogging and to download the plugins, go to http://structuredblogging.org/. For information about joining the initiative contact: info@structuredblogging.org.

About PubSub Concepts, Inc.:
PubSub Concepts, Inc. is a New York-based company founded in 2002. The company develops Internet-scale Publish/Subscribe systems and plans a series of product releases designed to make prospective searching a vital element of the Internet experience. PubSub.com provides a free prospective search service that continuously monitors more than 18 million blogs and syndicated Web sites, over 50,000 newsgroups, all SEC Edgar Filings, press releases from major wire services, earthquake data from the US Geological Survey, and FAA airport delay information to instantly alert users whenever material events occur. PubSub’s prospective search provides a real-time notification service made possible by PubSub’s proprietary “matching engine” which, each day, performs hundreds of billions of matches between subscriber requests and newly-published items. Visit http://www.pubsub.com for more information.

About Broadband Mechanics
Broadband Mechanics is a SF based developer of ‘digital lifestyle aggregators’ which helps to create and promulgate open standards such as ‘ourmedia.org’. BBM is providing strategic consulting and is building systems for Avid, AOL, EMI, GoingOn Networks, Visual Media, Laszlo systems and Ruckus Networks. The company was founded by Marc Canter – who previously started a company called MacroMind – which became Macromedia (which recently merged with Adobe.) Marc helped develop the world’s first multiple player, cross-platform authoring systems and multimedia authoring tools.

Our very own Salim Ismail was interviewed twice by Tom Raftery. You can read the blog posts and grab the podcasts here and and here.

Salim talks about the Pubsub service, structured blogging, and much more. Enjoy.

We are honored that Larry Chase has chosen PubSub Linkranks for one of his top sites for marketers for 2005. Here is what he has to say:

“This year, Internet marketers finally realized the impact of link popularity on search engine optimization. What this site can do is update you on a daily basis of new sites that have started linking to you. LinkRanks is PubSub’s method of measuring the strength, persistence and vitality of links appearing in the sources that PubSub monitors. It can tell you how influential a particular site is on a particular day and over time. With LinkRanks, users can estimate the reach and influence of a website based on the sites that link to it, which enables one to measure the effectiveness and impact of a link popularity campaign. In essence, if you score a link to your site from CNN.com or thousands of other major sources, PubSub will tell you what it’s worth. For example, at the time of writing three new sites were pointing to WDFM today; looking back over the past 30 days, our home page had a high of new daily links numbering 10. Not only that, LinkRanks tells you who they are. Thereafter, you can examine how important they are by seeing who links to them. Check out the home page to see who the winners and losers are in terms of daily incoming links.”

Thanks Larry.