Single page aggregator
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,
. 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.
