Het Parool and ILSE Media Launch Smart Publishing Networks with f»dforward
AMSTERDAM (July 22, 2009) -- f»dforward (feedforward), a widget-based recommendation network, announced today the international launch of its new service. Two Dutch media companies, Het Parool and ILSE Media, already use f»dforward to improve and expand their publishing networks.
Het Parool, a Dutch newspaper founded during WWII with a readership of 89,000 serving greater Amsterdam, is using the widget to create connections to blogs that can complement their content and expand and enrich their network. ILSE Media, which manages more than 230,000 blogs, integrated f»dforward into their free blog network web-log.nl, the Dutch wordpress/typepad.com, to create more traction across their blogs, to give readers the opportunity to expand their content from any of their blogs.
f»dforward is a widget based recommendation network that increases readership of blogs by more interested and relevant readers. f»dforward lets you connect with new blogs based on similar content and incorporates social elements like the "follow me" tools of Twitter, where they will follow content around the web instead of following conversations. f»dforward lets you grow your own blog network in a natural way by bringing you related and recommended articles connected to what you just published. f»dforward lets the blogger see who has been reading and makes recommendations visible and viral for their readers. In addition, f»dforward can help publishers improve reach and revenue through the analysis of what people are reading on and off their sites, which helps publishers like Het Parool and ILSE Media to create better content and make better connections with it.
Martijn Wuite from Het Parool says this kind of content recommendation allows the paper to provide links not only related to the subject of the current article, e.g. other sports articles, but also to the interests of the user based on the preferences of similar readers.
According to Lucien Burm, CEO and co-founder of f»dforward, there is not enough lateral navigation on the Web today. "'The web is currently failing because people are not really surfing anymore, they just log in and out of search engines and portals and do not connect enough to related content or pass along content that is related to what has been published", said Burm. "That is because when we all started out with the web, authors created links to other articles to read more. These first hyperlinks were recommendations in a way. The current state of the web doesn't allow for publishers to cover that in full anymore. This is why we get confined to certain channels of content and we don't get much back out."
Burm concludes: "With f»dforward, we are creating a smarter fabric for the web to enable smarter Lateral Linking, and it lets bloggers/publishers connect based on what they read, write or recommend". f»dforward has three key elements that enable Lateral Linking: the social web, the semantic web and the read/write web. The social web is a result of activity within social networks and not the social networks themselves. We use the trails of people across the web to distill the best destinations for certain topics. The semantic web is used to allow connections between similar and complimentary content. For f»dforward it serves to hold the social web together in a logical way. The read/write web is used to take both the publishing and reading activities from people into account. Lateral Linking incorporates these three new layers to create personal, realtime, contextual recommendations for any content, at any time at any place.
f»dforward is available as embeddable code for all blogs hosts, including Typepad.com and Blogspot.com. For Wordpress.org, there is already a native plugin available.
About f»dforward
f»dforward (http://getfeedforward.com) is a widget-based recommendation network powered by Kimengi. Kimengi, (www.kimengi.com) is a recommendation technology company that builds a smarter web with Lateral Linking. The f»dforward widget creates a recommendation service for all your blog posts, similar to related content sections, but based on both social and semantic algorithms. The advantage of f»dforward is that all widgets are webapps that can work together in a network. This enables serving suggestions not only from your own blog, but also from your friends blogs and other blogs you like to read or endorse. f»dforward was launched in September 2008 and is currently in public beta. Partners include ILSE Media, Het Parool, several blogs and Amazon Web Services. The company is headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and is privately funded.
# # #
Media contacts:
Jennifer Hicks for f»dforward
+31 611 278 358
Jennifer [at] theinkstudio [dot] com or Twitter: Jennalee
Alexandra Crabb for f»dforward
+617 956 2214
Alex [at] theinkstudio [dot] com or Twitter: Alexcrabb
