“Injected” user content next social phenomenon
Posted by Jacque on May 19th, 2008
Free wiki app Wetpaint received an investor boost of $25 million for a new project called Wetpaint Injected that “allows online publishers to engage their audiences in completely new ways,” says the Seattle P-I.
Launching today, Wepaint Injected lets online publishers embed code to open up selected Web pages, allowing readers to “inject” videos, photos, reviews and comments alongside the professional content. They tout the benefit of new, fresh content, created by the readers themselves.
Some believe this form of social networking is the next wave in online publishing.
“In some ways, I think Injected is to social publishing what Mosaic was to the Internet,” said Frazier Technology Venture’s Len Jordan, a board member and early Wetpaint investor.
Why? Web publishers are increasingly looking at ways to combine traditional editorial content with social and community functionality, tapping into viewers insights about sports, travel, music or other areas.
With Injected, online publishers maintain the social aspects on their own pages instead of becoming part of someone else’s network. They control the design elements and get the search engine benefits of hosting that new content. Injected is fully customizable, allowing publishers to control which pages are open and how.
“Media companies have been incredibly interested in it, because they recognize that getting search engine results is incredibly competitive and this technology let’s them do that without having to pay authors,” said Wetpaint co-founder Ben Elowitz. “If you had to pay people to write every page of Wikipedia, imagine how expensive that would be.”
Wetpaint Injected is free to publishers that use the tools to generate fewer than 100,000 page views per month. After that, they plan to take a percentage of advertising revenue. Check out the brief video on the site.