AUSTIN, Texas -- Sept. 12, 2005 -- Pluck Corp., a leader in Web 2.0 technology, today unveiled a suite of service offerings that allows publishers and leading destination sites to improve and expand audience reach by embedding community blogging and personalized RSS-based news reading services into their web sites. These new interactive offerings, called Pluck InSite, provide online publishers and web sites with new ways for their readers and community members to stay informed and participate in the citizen journalism process around their communities and topics of personal interest.
Separately today, the Austin American-Statesman, Austin's leading daily newspaper, and a Cox Newspaper, announced that it has launched an innovative local blogging service using Pluck InSite Blogging. (See "Austin American-Statesman Embraces Citizen Journalism with Launch of Local Blogging Community.") The Statesman's blogging community is designed to provide a place where citizen journalists in Central Texas can easily express opinions and create dialogue around local and national news, events, sports, politics and life in general. The Statesman also announced that it has licensed and will deploy Pluck InSite RSS in order to offer readers an online personal news portal.
The Pluck InSite suite of solutions offers interactive blogging and industry leading RSS capabilities as fully-managed, hosted services ready to be embedded into any web site. By building blogging communities around geographic or topical content using Pluck InSite, publishers are able to improve key web metrics, including increased page views, time spent on site pages, and repeat visits. Pluck's InSite services also drive new user registrations and new content pages for contextual monetization.
"We live in an amazing time where individuals are creating valuable content and controlling how they consume the media," said Dave Panos, co-founder and CEO of Pluck Corp. "Pluck's InSite solutions help publishers participate in the transition to this open content model, while increasing audience reach and creating new revenue opportunities in the process."
Key components of the Pluck InSite Suite include:
-- InSite Blogging: A hosted, managed solution that enables publishers to offer community blogging as part of their web sites. The service allows publishers and web portals to offer readers a fully-featured citizen journalism program complete with photos, community tools, tagging, categorization, management and reporting. Once embedded into a web site, the service opens new sources of content and contextual advertising space while building reader loyalty and page views. InSite Blogging is built on technology Pluck acquired earlier in 2005 from EasyJournal, a third-generation community of hundreds of thousands of active bloggers.
-- InSite RSS: Allows publishers to provide their readers with personalized news services that leverage millions of available RSS feeds. With InSite RSS, portals can deliver a "My News" style offering, giving users control over feed discovery, subscription and consumption. InSite RSS keeps sites on par with major web portals and ensures that all feed source providers are referenced and linked to appropriately. InSite RSS leverages Pluck's award-winning consumer RSS technology and Pluck's FeedFinder service for RSS feed discovery.
-- Management Services: Includes a range of professional services to help publishers conceptualize, create and rapidly deliver open content capabilities. Services include RSS and Blogging strategy development; custom RSS feed creation, transformation and promotion; hosting services; management and more.
About Pluck Corp.
Pluck Corporation transforms how end-users and Internet publishers consume and create information online. Providing RSS, Blogging and Community Search software and related services, Pluck helps its customers leverage the open content model that has emerged as the cornerstone for Web 2.0 services. The privately held company is based in Austin, Texas with funding from Austin Ventures and Mayfield. More information on Pluck offerings can be found at www.pluck.com.
