Yaron Galai's dashboard

Yaron Galai replied on October 10, 2009 05:14 to the discussion "not supported on wordpress.com blogs" in outbrain:

Yes - we do enable you to show the ratings both on the front page and on the specific post pages.

However, I don't see how you could use us (or for that matter - any other rating system) on Flickr and Picasa as they don't allow you to embed any HTML in your galleries there...

A comment on the discussion "not supported on wordpress.com blogs" in outbrain:

Outbrain ties together the ratings and recommended links in one coherent service. The feedback received from your audience (via 5-star ratings, or thumbs-up) goes into our algorithm and is used to make better, more personalized recommendations for each of your readers.

The PollDaddy service looks pretty nice - probably covers your needs on ratings. But it is not tied to the "possibly related links" service, and any feedback received does *not* improve those recommendations. In fact, those 'possibly related links' are only matched on context and are one-size-fits-all regardless of what each of your readers is interested in.

I hope this helps. Now you are *much* more informed!... ;-) – Yaron Galai, on October 09, 2009 19:18

A comment on the discussion "not supported on wordpress.com blogs" in outbrain:

Thanks for stopping by to comment here, Raanan. These links are very useful. I'll keep bugging you about ways we can get Outbrain and WP to work together... ;-) – Yaron Galai, on October 09, 2009 18:42

A comment on the discussion "not supported on wordpress.com blogs" in outbrain:

Hey bangkok photographer - thanks for your comment! I agree with you that this situation is borderline ridiculous. The guys at WP are indeed very nice and we're very friendly with them, but for some reason it is nearly impossible to get approved by them as a widget for Wordpress.com hosted blogs.

Our performance is outstanding and we have rarely had any complaints from our tens of thousands of bloggers, so any technical reason would be nothing more than an excuse. I am as mystified as you are by the reason for Outbrain not being approved for WP hosted blogs.

A direct nudge with them would be greatly appreciated. I will try to find out what's the best way to do that.

Thanks again for your comment here! – Yaron Galai, on October 08, 2009 01:50

Yaron Galai set one of GabiD's replies as an official response to "Impossible Rating" in outbrain

Yaron Galai replied on September 10, 2009 23:36 to the question "how can you change the code in our blogs?" in outbrain:

Angelica- just to clarify -
We can't actually change the code on your pages. As Kate mentioned, the only thing we can change are the widget's settings which are stored on our server. Even though it seems like the result is a chance in your web pages, that is only because the widget you installed asks our servers for your settings. We have no access to your server or your pages and cannot change anything there.

I hope that clarifies this!

Yaron Galai replied on July 31, 2009 17:32 to the question "Outbrain rating results - avg ratings only, not recommended ratings or people who have rated like me?" in outbrain:

BTW - your site is beautiful!

Yaron Galai replied on July 31, 2009 17:30 to the question "Outbrain rating results - avg ratings only, not recommended ratings or people who have rated like me?" in outbrain:

Hey substudio - 1st - thanks for using the outbrain service!

The 'rated by X people like me' language is part of our score personalization, which is intended to give registered users a slightly better user experience as it tweaks the average based on other like-minded people. However, this only shows up for registered AND logged-in users which is a tiny fraction of the people on the web.

Almost all visitors to your site will see the plain averages that you'd like them to see.

If you want to see the same, simply go to our website - www.outbrain.com - and log off from there. Then all personalization of the scores will go away.

Hope this helps!

A comment on the discussion "not supported on wordpress.com blogs" in outbrain:

Thanks Dilip... we agree! Comments like yours will help WordPress understand this eventually and make us an approved widget... But we have no idea when they will finally do so... :-( – Yaron Galai, on May 23, 2009 12:06

Yaron Galai set one of Yaron Galai's replies as an official response to "How is the star rating determined?" in outbrain

Yaron Galai replied on May 21, 2009 13:42 to the question "How is the star rating determined?" in outbrain:

Hey Peter - I explained what's going on with the average rating calculations here:
http://getsatisfaction.com/outbrain/t...

Hope this helps clarify.

Yaron Galai set one of Yaron Galai's replies as an official response to "Unwanted Ads showing up with outbrain raitings." in outbrain

Yaron Galai replied on May 20, 2009 11:40 to the question "Unwanted Ads showing up with outbrain raitings." in outbrain:

Hey Drew -

If it's the specific ad that you don't want to show on your site, you can easily zap it by clicking that little red [x] next to it. This works the same for regular and sponsored links. Once you [x] a link, it will not show up again anywhere on your site.
(note that you have to be logged in to outbrain.com in order for the [x]'s to show up)

If you don't want any ads showing up, go to your account settings at outbrain.com (http://www.outbrain.com/ln/ManageBlogs), select your blog, and in 'Sponsored Recommendations' box choose the 2nd option.

Hope this helps!
Yaron

Yaron Galai replied on May 18, 2009 14:05 to the question "Can I ask you a support question in private?" in outbrain:

Absolutely! Drop us a note here: support@outbrain.com and we'll get back to you.

Yaron Galai replied on May 11, 2009 11:13 to the praise "Outbrain is awesome" in outbrain:

Thanks Subby! We debate that often, and will probably eventually do something of this sort. The reason we haven't yet is that we wanted to avoid a Digg-like situation where the whole world tries to manipulate ratings in order to show up on our home page and get traffic. If/when we find clever ways to mitigate that so ratings remain genuine, we will probably add some sort of top-X functionality.

Yaron Galai replied on May 08, 2009 23:48 to the question "I dont ask for promoting other blogs" in outbrain:

Once we resolve the account access question and you log into the dashboard, you can easily change the link setting to stay only within your site. Watch this tutorial (jump to 2:30 min for this specific setting:
http://www.vimeo.com/2430458

Yaron Galai replied on May 08, 2009 10:14 to the praise "Outbrain is awesome" in outbrain:

Yay - we agree!!... ;-)

Thanks Subby! - we'll absolutely keep supporting you guys.

Yaron Galai set one of Kate's replies as an official response to "Most popular / recommendations won't go away" in outbrain

Yaron Galai set one of Yaron Galai's replies as an official response to "become employee ???" in outbrain

Yaron Galai replied on April 04, 2009 12:40 to the question "become employee ???" in outbrain:

Sharad hi - We're currently only hiring the best engineers located in Israel. If you qualify, the details on how to submit your resume are available here: http://www.outbrain.com/jobs