Welcoming the Los Angeles Times and Clearing Up a Few Questions

Many of you have seen that we recently partnered with the LA Times. As they demonstrated with their recent coverage of the CA wildfires, their reporting is second-to-none, so we’re excited to have such a great content partner join us in the Mixx.

We’ve had a few questions about the partnership, particularly with one sentence that was in the press release. That sentence in question included: “cross-promotional traffic will be maximized by optimization of Times content for searches from within the Mixx site.”

Understandably—but incorrectly—some have interpreted this to mean that we will somehow change our search algorithm or results to favor LATimes articles and that LATimes content will be booted to the top of the “popular” stories. Both of these conclusions are incorrect.

To put an end to the rumors, I would like to remind to everyone that Mixxers have always determined what becomes popular on Mixx: one-person-one-vote.

If the content submitted doesn’t resonate with the Mixx community, it will go nowhere—even if it is from one of our strategic partners. We choose our partners because of their overall outstanding content, but we don’t expect you to vote for something simply because we signed an agreement. And I can assure you that LATimes doesn’t expect every story they publish to resonate with such a diverse group of people.

And about that “optimized for search.” Everyone who submits something to the Mixx can optimize their content for our search, which is very simple and works within the following fields:

• Tags
• Titles
• Descriptions
• Comments

In short, these are the only things we host on our servers. So if you fill out those fields completely, your submissions are optimized.

The LATimes has coded the Mixx buttons on their site to pre-populate titles, description and tag fields. This is the only way they are “optimizing” the content. Beyond this, nothing is done to handle those submissions any differently than any other submission from any other source.

Let’s look at a concrete example.

Suppose you are submitting in a picture of a very cute kitten sitting on a couch. If you submit the title “Very Cute” and the description as “awwww” then its going to be awfully hard for anyone to find that great picture in search if they are looking for pictures of kittens.

If, however, you title the submission “Very Cute Kitten” and the description “Picture of a very cute cat sitting on a couch” and add the tags “cat“, “kitten“, “couch“, and “cute“, you can see that it will be much much easier for someone to find if they search on “kitten” or “cat” (or even “couch”). By adding a title, a good description–one that really summarizes the content—and lots of tags to reflect the content, you are “optimizing” your submission for search. (Just don’t spam into every category and/or tag, because that’s a violation of our Terms of Use.)

I hope this clears things up, and as always, if you ever have questions about the way things work, please feel free to ask!

-Chris McGill

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Mixx. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.