Jiglu

NY-based Outbrain has removed the beta tag from their service and opened it to the World. Outbrain is a service that helps you get ratings on your content. They offer 1-click plugins to TypePad, Blogger and Wordpress with a Javascript option to meet all other blog platforms. The interesting part about Outbrain is that it finds people like you and shows you ratings for the group it places you in (along with the raw score). This would be great for hotel reviews as many times you have no idea who the person is who is writing the review. If you are used to Four Seasons, any Microtel will look like a dump and vice-versa.

Outbrain has relationships with several of the rss feed tools which have integrated the ratings widget directly into the rss feel tool. Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai sent over this description of the personalized ratings feature:

For each visitor, we look at their rating history, find like-minded people automatically, and adjust the rating scores based on that. In other words – you and I might be looking at the same blog post, but each one will see vastly different scores based on each one’s personal rating history. We think this far exceeds the functionality of all other rating widgets that just display the plain average because personal tastes are so important when consuming content (think about it… - if the average methodology used by the other widgets would be applied to, say, Last.FM - we would all be listening to Britney Spears and Hannah Montana all day long just because a ton of kids give it 5’s all day long……….)

We also think that this is the 1^st rating widget to give readers a real personal incentive to rate stuff (and rate it honestly), as they get long term value from the personalization. When your ratings have no effect on your future experience with the widget, there is absolutely no incentive to rate (+a nice incentive to abuse it…)

In my interview with Outbrain, one of the suggestions I gave them was to allow a site to not show how many people rated the item, just the rating itself. I still believe this is very necessary for smaller sites because if you read every story with zero ratings (or one), it makes the site look tiny and unappealing.

Ratings and tagging are hot right now. Check out our coverage of Outbrain, JS-Kit and Jiglu, all providers who help you find more content that might appeal to you. Each attacks the ratings process a bit differently.

Jiglu was one of the demopit companies at Techcrunch40 last month. They made an immediate impression on everyone as they had $1,000 in a clear briefcase which a man from NYC won at the end of the conference. Today Jiglu will announce that they have moved from a private beta to an open beta. In fact you can go signup now if you wish. To learn more about what Jiglu offers, I spoke with co-founder and CEO Nigel Cannings.

Jiglu's goal is to help a blog recirculate the content that might be deep within the blog and to find hidden relationships between the blog's content. This is similar to JS-Kit and Outbrain in their mission to help draw visitors deeper into a blog. While JS-Kit and Outbrain focus on ratings as their collection mechanism, Jiglu uses tagging for collection.

To use the Jiglu widget, you place a simple script code within your blog template. That activates the Jiglu engine and it begins to crawl your blog. Jiglu then determines the tags that match the content and provide similar content in the widget which allows your readers to discover new content. I asked the difference between the tags I set and the tags Jiglu creates - Nigel said that Jiglu uses an advanced algorithm to find the right tags - it's pretty intense.

Revenue generation will come from the search results they serve on the Jiglu Web site. The team originally worked on email applications and then moved into user-generated content with Jiglu.

One thing they can improve on (as frankly with many startups) is their company information - there is nothing on the site about who they are, what they do, location, bios, logos, etc. Make this information accessible for jounalists, bloggers, investors, etc. Users want to build trust with a company and this information is critical for creating relationships.

Jiglu was founded four years ago and they spent the majority of that time on research. The team is made up of four people with HQ in the U.K. and a "tiny, yellow" office in San Francisco.

Update: Chris at VentureBeat and Oliver at Blognation have some good insights on Jiglu as well.