Contextly Joins SXSW Interactive Accelerator Competition & Brawl

fightThe first rule about tech journalism startup fight club is that you must blog about it, so here it goes.

Contextly has been accepted into a fight to death with seven other news-centric startups as part of the SXSW Interactive Accelerator competition.

We’re super-excited for what we’re calling Death Match 2013. Three judges will decide the fates of the news candidates. John Cantarella, Vivian Schiller and Andrew Rasiej.

For those unfamiliar with the names, John Cantarella leads Time, Inc’s digital efforts; Vivian Schiller was the CEO of NPR and now is NBC’s chief digital strategist, while Andrew Rasiej co-founded Personal Democracy Media, which produces the Personal Democracy Forum and TechPresident.

In an interesting sidenote, the emcee is Tony Conrad of True Ventures, who sold his pioneering related links startup Sphere to AOL.

Each company gets two minutes on Monday March 11, then four survive until Tuesday, where they’ll each get 5 minutes to explain how they plan to save journalism (whether it wants or needs saving).

The winner will be crowned on Tuesday evening. I’m not sure what the prizes are or if there are any, though I’m pretty sure the winner gets some big bragging rights and a year’s free subscription to Techmeme.

I’m excited to meet the folks running the other startups:

Audio Tag – The company looks to be finding a way to connect the audio in ads with a listener’s smartphone so the ad can be interactive.

Guide – These folks are figuring out how to turn your favorite online news sites into television – with what looks like a robot newscaster.

InfoActive – Data is getting easier to collect, but finding ways to display it in beautiful, infographic form to readers is labor-intensive. These folks are looking to solve that problem for publishers.

Meograph – This application helps news sites and educators tell stories visually with YouTube embeds, Google Earth images and links to relevant stories.

Phone2Action – I’m not exactly sure what these folks do, but the gist seems to be they create a phone-based platform so companies and causes can educate and mobilize their followers. They get bonus points for correctly using the word “effect” as a verb in their web copy.

ShoutAbout – It’s easily to rile readers up, but when they finish a story that enrages or engages them, it’s not always clear what to do with that energy. ShoutAbout lets readers suggest to one another ways to learn more and ways to take action, via an embeddable plugin. And since it’s readers, not the site, suggesting action, new sites don’t look like advocacy organs (even if they really are).

ShoutAbout Screenshot

Watchup – This iPad app lets you quickly curate a set of online videos to make a morning newscast geared towards your interests.

We’re looking forward to sharing the stage and duking it out with these folks. The last three months since I left my editor job at Wired have been awesome and a learning experience, and we’ll have a bunch of exciting announcements in the coming weeks.

We hope to see you all there at SXSW.

And finally, I need to give big thanks to Jennifer 8. Lee of Plympton, who pushed me to enter. You have checked out Plympton’s serialized novel service, right?

P.S. If you run a publication or blog — from the New York Times to a local blog focused on new restaurants in your city, we can turn your publication’s readers into loyal readers (or even customers). Drop us a line at info@contextly.com or sign-up for the beta.

11 Lessons Learned Launching Contextly on My Final Day at Wired

launch button

What happens when you press this button? Credit: StevenDPolo/Flickr

Friday was my last day of work at Wired as a full-time writer and the editor of Threat Level. It was also the public launch of my editorial tools startup Contextly.

It turns out doing both *on the same day* is a potent combination, emotionally and logistically. I don’t recommend that anyone emulate it – unless, as in my case, it’s the best way to launch.

Contextly, whose current products help publishers increase page-views and time-on-site via related links and sidebars, got nice write-ups in TechCrunch, VentureBeat, The Next Web and Wired (yes, a little unfair there). I heard from a number of fantastic people via e-mail and Twitter, wishing me well. The launch led to a solid number of publishers signing up for our beta; headhunters calling; and in a fit of bad timing, unrelated to the publicity, I got a partnership inquiry I’d been hoping for for weeks.

That made for a crazy morning and day, trying to respond to all of them, while, at the same time, saying goodbye to colleagues and finishing out the day’s work, including editing articles that needed to be published that day.

Here’s what I learned (so far) from the day:

Continue reading

Introducing Contextly

Contextly Home PageToday marks both the public debut of Contextly and my departure from editing and reporting at Wired.

Ten years of writing and editing at Wired, covering everything from the NSA to Y Combinator, has taught me many things: that privacy and transparency matter, that journalism is hard and fascinating, and that, while the future of news and publishing is the Web, the tools for online journalism remain frustrating.

Writers must move faster than ever and are now often their own editors, photo desk and publicists — though the tools they use are too often kludgy and inadequate.

That’s why today is my last day as an editor at Wired; and why I’m leaving to run my start-up, Contextly, full time.

Readers crave context in news, even as a reporter’s job of putting the day’s story (and more often stories) into a larger picture is hard to do when speed is essential and the news cycle never stops. But writers – good ones — know that the day’s work is just part of a long-term story that they and their co-workers have been telling for years.

There is deep institutional knowledge stuck in writers’ heads — for instance, knowing that today’s story about Twitter competitor App.net has deep resonance in earlier, but still relevant, stories about the open-source challenge to Facebook, Diaspora. But that’s not something algorithms or tags are good at surfacing.

And what about the readers that come to your older posts via search – how will they know that you’ve written more recent pieces on related content?

In my early days at Wired, we tried to deal with this by hand-crafting related links using HTML and a text file that we’d copy and paste into our stories. That model was, to put it in kind terms, inefficient and non-dynamic.

From that frustration and others, came Contextly. We’ve built an editorial solution to this problem that marries editorial control with serendipity. Our related links widget has been running on a number of sites, including across all of Wired.com, in our stealth beta for months. We’re not at liberty to say how much we’ve increased page-views and time-on-site for Wired, but it’s been *interesting* and we’re very happy with our start.

Contextly Related Links

Related links chosen by a Wired Science writer that point readers to the best and most relevant earlier coverage of similar topics.

It’s an exciting time for online journalism, with a wide range of innovation, and there’s still so much that’s yet unexplored — even basic things.

For instance, adding links in the body of stories to previous work and to other sites around the web benefits readers. Links are what makes the Web a web and they even help with SEO. But adding links is a mind-numbing drudgery of tab switching, searching and cutting-and-pasting – even just to link to your site’s previous stories.

So Contextly comes with a tool that makes adding links of all stripes simpler and faster than ever.

We’ve also made analytics tools that produce reports are readable, designed for publishers and writers. We send out daily, weekly and monthly reports that sites love, and we’ve only just gotten started with building data tools that are designed for the needs of publishers and writers — not e-commerce sites.

There are other related links widgets out there, but none have been designed by a journalist for journalists. Contextly combines ease-of-use and dynamism and serendipity, while making sure that editorial control is not lost.

Contextly "You Might Like" Links

Algorithmically chosen links to other great content on Wired – for when readers are in the mood to explore widely, not deeply.

We’re also building tools that help companies with blogs to present to their readers non-annoying offers to join an e-mail list, buy a conference ticket or sign-up to join a beta or read a whitepaper.

With invaluable testing help from sites like Wired, BoingBoing, Cult of Mac and others, we’ve had a great stealthy beta, and we’re ready now to expand it by opening up our beta invite sign-up to the world.

We’re proud of what we’ve already built and hope that the tools are a solution to challenges that many sites are facing.

Those who self-host WordPress can install the plugin in minutes, simply by searching for “Contextly Related Links” in the Plugins section of WordPress. We don’t strain your database and are nimble on your site. Those on other platforms can drop us a note and we’ll talk with you about our API and how we can work with you to get Contextly working on your CMS.

That said, this is just a beginning. Our roapmap is long and exciting – filled with big data challenges, tools that make publications and writers’ workflows simpler, and tools that help sites learn about their readership and try things they’ve never done before.

We’re called Contextly because we believe context is everything and that current CMSes largely treat each new story or post as if it has no connection to what came before it. We have an expansive conception of what context means and believe new tools can make news better for readers, more fun to publish as journalists and more profitable for publishers, big and small.
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Leaving Wired was a tough decision, especially now.

Wired has published some amazing work over the last year, including Mat Honan’s gripping story of his epic hack, Kim Zetter’s piece on the recruiting e-mail that unraveled a massive phishing hole, Wired Enterprise’s work that makes data centers and servers gripping to read about, Spencer Ackerman’s award-winning stories on the FBI’s anti-Muslim training courses, Wired Science’s outstanding coverage of the Mars Curiousity landing, and Playbook’s wickedly fun series on the physics of Olympics sports.

Time also recently named the section I edited at Wired, Threat Level, one of the top 25 blogs of 2012, thanks, in no small part, to work like David Kravets’ must-follow legal reporting and Quinn Norton’s deep dive into the world Anonymous.

It’s not easy walking away from such co-workers, and I’ve only been able to do so thanks to the support of Wired.com’s Editor in Chief Evan Hansen.

But I’m taking with me the commitment to storytelling and journalism that I learned at Wired. It lives at the heart of Contextly, which will support great sites around the Web, helping them get great content to readers who want it.

We’d love to have you join us on the adventure and work with us to build tools that make news and online publishing better.

Foursquare Gives Readers Way to Save Locations from Stories

Foursquare is offering publishers a button that lets readers “save” a location mentioned in a story — say a cool, new boutique or an interesting restaurant, and users can choose to have their phones remind them of it when they get nearby.

The idea of this is fantastic, and fits in with how Contextly thinks about media content. In short, this feature gives a story life outside of the content management system and gives it longstanding context in a reader’s life.

In fact, I’m not a FourSquare user, but if publications in the Bay Area started using these, I’m pretty sure I’d start.

“Save to Foursquare” buttons now appear alongside web content at New York magazine, Time Out, and a variety of other publishers, allowing users to send places they want to go to their phones and get alerted when they’re in the vicinity.Foursquare actually introduced a version of this feature last year, but it didn’t catch on. The company says the new “Save to Foursquare” technology is easier for publishers to implement. The new version also supports recently added features like Radar, which buzzes users’ phones when they’re near places they’ve saved.

via Foursquare Teams Up With NY Mag, Time Out, Other Publishers | paidContent.

Stickergiant/Flickr

CNN Turning iReport into Social Network

Stealing a page from Facebook, CNN is transforming its innovative five year old iReport service, which has enlisted readers to send in stories, tips and photos that CNN has used as part of its news reporting, into a full-fledged social network.

Users will be prompted to create profile pages pictured below that feature a photo, bio, groups and interests. Visitors who create a profile can “follow” other users, as well as CNN personalities, and can earn awards and “badges” for accomplishments. Depending on the interests and location of users, they may be prompted to participate in a story. For example, if a user is interested in politics, they may be asked to watch an upcoming debate and comment on it.

The idea is that readers and submitters will visit more often if there’s something they can do and connections they can make on the site. It’s a smart evolution in strategy. If CNN had tried to launch a social network originally, they would have faced the tough problem of landing users in what would have felt like an empty shell of a network. But with iReport’s popularity, CNN is right to gamble that they can turn it into something bigger – a daily destination centered around news.

via CNN iReport Gets Major Relaunch As a ‘Social Network for News’ – TVNewser.

Get More Traffic from Google News (And Good Karma!)

Contextly is proud to announce our first publicly available tool – Standout Stories by Contextly.

The tool allows sites that are indexed by Google News to tell the search engine about the site’s best stories. It also lets you get karma by giving praise to other sites when you reblog or write about their content.

Google’s idea is that it will know better what stories to feature if sites give it some metadata about which of the site’s stories are really good. And though Google doesn’t come out and say it, it seems that there’s some good karma (read SEO bonus) in giving a link to other sites’ great stories.

Google suggests you only label 7 of your own stories a week “Standout Stories,” so the plug-in counts for you.

But you are free to give as many shout-outs, plaudits and compliments to other people’s stories as you like, so we built that into the Visual editor bar as its own button.

Give Standout Stories a try and let us know if how much you think the tag helps in Google News. Hard data would be very interesting to see if you gather it. Also if you have any feedback about the plugin, please let us know!

Google News Offers Publishers Tool to Promote Original Reporting

Google took a significant step this weekend to adding more signal to the noisy world of online publishing. Called “Standout,” the system allows news publishers to tag up to 7 of their stories a week as their best work.

As a carrot, Google says it will use the tags to help determine stories that land in a “Featured” spot on its popular Google News homepage.

The simple tag <link rel=”standout” href=“http://www.example.com/scoop_article_2.html” /> goes into the header of your story, where bots can read it.

The system is also intended for the increasingly common situation where news sites follow-up-on, syndicate or aggregate outstanding stories from other news sites. In that case, the writer citing earlier work can give an unseen-to-the-reader shout-out to the original source, which news aggregators can use as a signal to figure out which publication had the scoop.

In the latter case, it’s not clear what incentive publications will have to pass on that juice — other than their own interest in a news ecosystem where original work is rewarded. That’s something that’s increasingly at-risk when aggregation blogs get more traffic for a 4-paragraph re-writing of an original story than the originating publication did.

Perhaps Google and other news aggregators can come up with a fair-play score so that sites get rewarded (say an extra bump in their original stories) when they consistently give props to other sites when they aggregate their content.

That’s what the esteemed Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb thinks is going on:

Google seems to imply in its announcement, though it doesn’t say it explicitly, that its algorithm will reward publishers who engage in the best practice of generously applauding great content on other sites with recognition.

Ethan Klapper at MediaBistro also wrote up the announcement from the Online News Association’s annual convention.

We at Contextly think this is a great innovation and to help it take hold will be building in the next week a simple way for writers to give shout-outs and call out their own work.

If you are a publication looking to add this and you also happen to want a better way to show related stories, please drop us a line at ryan@contextly.com

via Google News Blog: Recognizing publishers’ standout content in Google News.

Photo Credit: EvelynIsHere/Flickr