EchoFactor Bridges Have, Have-Not Content Gap

Welcome Guest. | Log In| Register | Membership Benefits

August 29, 2000 (4:24 AM EDT)

EchoFactor Bridges Have, Have-Not Content Gap

Ask most webmasters what their biggest problem is and most won't say technical glitches. It's content, they'll say.

EchoFactor, a company spinning off from Infonautics hopes to erase this problem by finding relevant headlines from top websites and making them available to third parties at no charge.

"We see all this pain from webmasters. Sites can easily become static and boring. They need help. At the same time, we talked to colleagues at content sites who wished they had affiliate marketing for their websites. This [offering] addresses both needs," said Joel Gehman, co-founder and chief marketing officer for EchoFactor.

EchoFactor, which launched its own site three weeks ago, "scrapes headlines from content websites, organizes them topically into thousands of categories, and provides them in the form of feeds to small, vertical webmasters for inclusion on their sites," said Andrea Michalek, co-founder and chief technology officer.

Both Gehman and Michalek are from Infonautics, also King of Prussia, Pa. The company gained fame with Companysleuth.com and Sportssleuth.com, sites that seek out and aggregate information from many traditional and non-traditional sources. Users register to have the sites track companies (or teams) of interest.

EchoFactor uses technology developed for CompanySleuth.com to find news on 14,000 topics from more than 6,000 sources "all updated on the fly," Michalek said. Spiders are key. The company typically has its spiders return only to sites that are updated often and load quickly and well. And, it designed its spiders carefully to avoid site meltdowns. Michelek acknowledges that poorly- or mischievously-designed spiders can bring a website to its knees. EchoFactor also respects sites that do not want spiders.

"Many sites, such as IMDB for example, have sections that are actually off-limits to spiders and we respect that protocol. We're a well-behaved agent. We go to all the same places AltaVista, Google, and Inktomi go," she said.

When it comes to development, EchoFactor is striving to be a model open-source citizen.

"If we're going with the premise that topic enthusiasts are getting information for free, let's take it to the extreme and use open source for all development, Apache, Linux, PHP," said Michelek.

The site uses Netscape's open directory to help determine how different categories interrelate. PHP, which started out as Personal Home Page tools, is the open-source alternative to such website development tools that can be quite pricey. "What Linux is to Windows, PHP is to ColdFusion," said Gehman. ColdFusion is a website development tool from Allaire Corp. (stock: ALLR). PHP ships with such products as Red Hat Linux and is used in more than one million websites, according to researcher Netcraft.

EchoFactor hopes to profit with per-click charges from participating content providing partners. "The have-nots want content, the haves want more traffic -- so when we build a feed, we only put each headline up one time. There may be many headlines for the same story. If that's the case, we choose which headline we run based on who will pay us more," said Michalek.

So far, websites using EchoFactor include www.pennstateworld.com. Dyed-in-the-wool Penn State fans logging on there can view a wide variety of headlines from such sources as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, CNN/Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News, and The Carlisle Sentinel.If a user clicks on a headline, the original content site gets the hit, while pennstateworld.com gets relevant, up-to-date information about -- and only about -- what its users are interested in.

"Before this, the only other way to do it was via iSyndicate but you had to do it [use their material] in frames. It wasn't seamless. You also got a lot of stuff about college football that wasn't necessarily about Penn State. This is much more topic specific and fits into the site really well," said Mark Steinruck, webmaster for www.pennstateworld.com.

Mark Harrington, webmaster for another Penn State-related site also using EchoFactor, agreed. "It's a win-win. ESPN, CNN gets the traffic, our site gets the content." He also said EchoFactor's plan to "grow virally" could pay off. Webmasters running other Big Ten football sites are looking at the technology now.

Syndication of content will be a growing trend, according to Kevin Werbach, editor of Release 1.0, a New York-based newsletter covering high technology.

"If you think syndication, you don't have to drive all your traffic to the website, but derive an audience through a network of partners ... distributor sites that can attract traffic and monetize that either through revenue sharing via e-commerce or content. [The result is] high-quality content that make your sites stickier," Werbach said.

Earlier this summer Infonautics announced a merger with IBS Interactive (stock: IBSX) and a VC firm called First Avenue Partners. The three companies will merge into a new company, to be called Digital Fusion.

"EchoFactor is the poster child for what the new company hopes to do: Take entrepreneurial seed teams and give them the money and technological know-how to execute their plans," said Gehman.