PopURLs is on Fire
Single page aggregator PopURLs may be a few years old, but this side project of Austrian entrepreneur Thomas Marban just keeps getting cooler. Now Marban has partnered with Intel to create one of the most interesting ad campaigns I've seen in awhile, Blue.PopURLs.com. The site is a single page aggregator about hot enterprise IT news. Calm down, I know enterprise IT is boring - but the site is cool.
The general PopURLs service is remarkably feature rich. Users can hover over items for a preview of the feeds from a long list of social news and media sites. There's a mobile site and many other platforms, from the Wii to Facebook.
The PopURLs blog (the Pophub) has recent announcements about the addition of story voting, user profiles and individualized recommendations. The whole site is beautiful.
Customization is limited but the PopURLs sites aren't intended to serve as your entire feed reader. Marban says the site compliments his full reader, he just checks in on PopURLs to see top stories throughout the day. I use Netvibes similarly because customization is important to me. I'm probably not the intended audience for any of these sites, but I sure do admire what Marban is doing. This 2006 interview with him from Folksonomy.org is a fun read.
The Intel partnership in particular is remarkable as a simple way for advertisers to deliver value to audiences in exchange for a little bit of mindshare. Next to the top enterprise software stories from around the web, you'll find links to Intel white papers and blogs. Intel is advertising the site heavily, which is interesting as it appears to be an ad campaign itself.
I'm not sure how many people in the enterprise world will find the service truly useful over time - the ability to add at least one or two other feeds from your own personal life seems pretty important. None the less, the campaign is an interesting one that could serve as a model for social media advertising in the future. It's also nice to see the PopURLs project progressing so well still.
Disclosure: The Blue ad campaign is being run through FM publishing, who also sells ads here on RWW. I just found the site through an FM ad on BoingBoing and thought it was worth writing up.
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Awesome! Interesting.
This sounds really cool. I wish I knew more about how to use/add these types of things to my blog.
Marshall, check this new aggregator out - do some kind of keyword detection for top news:
http://www.newsflashr.com/topics/technology_blogs.html
This ia great idea and reminds me of techmemes sponsored news sources.
This is smart marketing move by intel, more companies should look at sponsored branding of sites like this. I should imagine they are getting a good return on their investment.
I can just say that CSS looks cool ;) nothing else !!
This is a great move for both publishers and advertisers. Happy to see the marriage of relevant and sponsored content!
See more:
http://datainsightsideas.com/post/30402311
Perhaps could be compared to how IBM are using Digg technology to promote their latest research docs:
http://diggableresources.com/ibm/
As large corporates realise the power of new 'social media brands' (digg, popurls, reddit, newsvine etc.), partnerships like this will inevitably be more commonplace. I have to say though, the PopUrls partnership with Intel took me by surprise.
Another Feed mashup
186 kps Politics MashUp
I love Popurls !!
There is another site which is also similar and quite interesting, which is www.irintech.com
This is a great idea, thanks for sharing this.
-W3g
Just want to post a shout out to Hipolitical.com, which is a PopUrls for politics.
http://www.hipolitical.com