News after Newspapers: Circulate enters the fray: holistic, user-centric content discovery tool.
Again with full disclosure up front: this is a venture in which Martin is personally involved:A
few weeks ago in Washington DC, my partners and I announced the
formation of CircLabs and the intent to develop a product "code-named"
Circulate, incubated at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at
the University of Missouri. But the announcement stopped short of an
explicit description. We've now unveiled the
CircLabs Inc. website with more details about our plans for Circulate on the
About Us/FAQ page.
Circulate
is a holistic, user-centric solution aimed broadly at sustaining
journalism in a digital world, with specific relevance to the ongoing
exploration of paid-content models for newspaper Web sites. Circulate
enables experimentation with subscription and per-item user charges,
but as a user-centric content discovery tool, Circulate goes well
beyond the announced features of other systems that have been proposed
in that space.
Circulate will be rolled out in phases.
Initially, it will be a browser add-on that you can have always handy
as you move around the Web. Circulate will function on multiple
platforms to allow full portability: a mobile application is planned,
possibly first as an iPhone application, along with user start page and
e-mail notification options.
We describe Circulate on our site in these terms:
Circulate
will be present whenever and wherever Web users go online. Circulate
learns the user's preferences and becomes an intelligent, indispensable
Web assistant that replaces the hassle of search with on-target
recommendations and social interactivity....
Circulate travels
with you, at your option, wherever you go online. Using your expressly
shared interests and preferences, along with your current browsing
path, it suggests where you may want to go next, or later on. Over
time, you can refine your content interests so that Circulate gets to
know you and becomes an even better personal guide to the Web....
Before
Circulate, you had to know where you're going online or use
unpredictable search engines. And you needed to do all the work by
typing search terms or by scanning links. This hasn't changed much
during all the time the Web has been around.
Circulate solves
this problem by bringing the Web to you simply and quickly. With
Circulate, you can take a big step into the post-search, Web 3.0 world.
Circulate is a personal information agent that works just for you....
When
you begin using Circulate, you'll probably want to tell it a little bit
about yourself. As you continue to interact with it, you can allow it
to learn more about you and your preferences, and it uses that
information to deliver Web recommendations to you.
Eventually,
you'll find that Circulate brings you what you want to see, learn
about, and interact with online, before you even think about it. In a
real sense, it will become an intelligent personal information agent.
As
a Circulate user, you'll be able to have an account with a home-base
publisher, like the local paper, and optionally profile yourself. Then
the Circulate system will go to work and discover and present to you
information that’s really relevant to your interests. You'll be able to
set alerts if you want, but you don't have to. Circulate won’t start
out carrying advertising, but eventually when it does, you'll see
advertising that matters to you, not blindly-aimed mass-market ads. And
it sets up the possibility that you could optionally subscribe, through
your home-base publisher, to valuable information at hundreds and
eventually thousands of news and other websites, all at a low monthly
blanket rate.
Circulate will feature social functionality, so
that you can share and discuss content (but its content recommendations
are not sourced through "collaborative filtering"). Over time, you will
be able to select additional features on Circulate as they are
developed.
Importantly, a core, fundamental value at CircLabs is
user privacy. While Circulate will work best when the user shares
information, that will happen with the user's explicit permission, not
by virtue of obscure language buried in user agreements no one reads.
For publishers, we see Circulate as a game-changing solution that can enhance revenue in a number of ways:
- Local branding
- Increased high-value site traffic
- Local advertising on Circulate
- Subscription revenue
- Per-item revenue
- Other forms of commercial revenue
We
invite publishers to contact us and to explore the features of
Circulate in more detail. We've begun software development, but
Circulate will improve even faster if we can work with publishers in
various ways, including technical collaboration, refinement of the
end-user experience, marketing to end users, local and national
advertising sales, and paid content options.
Besides myself, the
CircLabs leadership team consists of Jeff Vander Clute, President; Joe
Bergeron, VP, Product Development; and Bill Densmore, Co-founder. You
can read more about us
here.
We expect to begin beta testing Circulate this fall.
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