New York/ Israeli startup Outbrain is a ratings and recommendation platform for blogs and news feeds.
The service works by users installing a plugin for their blog that adds a ratings button either at the top or bottom of each post (see the bottom of this post). At a base level it simply allows readers to rate a post, but Outbrain taps into these widgets to deliver a cross-blog/news recommendation system using collaborative filtering techniques. For example reading a post here about Blogging 2.0 might result (not yet, but in theory) recommendations of posts on Mashable , Centernetworks or Venturebeat , three large sites that are already using the Outbrain service.
It may seem like a small idea, but the company took $5 million Series A in a round led by Gemini Israeli Funds and Lightspeed Venture Partners back in February. If you like this is a Technorati 2.0 style service and all the data Outbrain is gathering has a tangible value outside of the front end service.
We’re going to give it a shot here at The Inquisitr and see what happens, certainly it wouldn’t seem to be doing much harm having it here, and if it shares some traffic out of the site, and even back in again all the better.