ScooptWords blog

Two weeks of stealth

A brief update of where we are with ScooptWords - a little over two weeks since we slipped into stealthy betaland. Great to see such postive feedback about what we're about. The biggest sticking points thus far are the ScooptWords initial 50% cut on sales and the potential use of your material by a publication without your byline. These are both features we will review over time, but which at the moment we feel are neccesary.

If a byline-less publication wants your words, we want to be able to sell them. We don't want to cut you out of those markets that never run bylines be it from staff journalists, freelance, editors or bloggers. We think it is highly unlikely we will ever need to push any editor to run a byline in a publication that ordinarily prints bylines.

In other movements, we're starting to approach bloggers who haven't already signed up for ScooptWords, but we would very much like to sign up. We're doing this for one reason only - we think we can sell their words. We already have publications and media buyers approaching us for niche content. Remember, we're still in beta and won't fully come out of it until we start aggregating, packaging and pushing to editors. So, please bear with us. We're also having some great converstaions with potential partners. We'll let you know more on those when we know more :)

Beta glitch

My friend Kieren Mccarthy tells me that's he's having difficulty using the new Scoopt site and signing up for ScooptWords using WinXP and Firefox - although he can upload snaps using Opera and WinXP. Webmaster Jon is on the case now and hopefully all will be sorted out shortly. If you're noticing any similar hiccups whatever your browser/OS setup, drop us a line or post a comment. Apologies to Kieren and anyone else this glitch has affected.

ScooptWords is live

The new look Scoopt website went, as they say, 'live' last night and we're now in a position to let bloggers sign up to ScooptWords. As you can see from the Scoopt frontpage screenshot above ScooptWords is clearly integrated into the main Scoopt site. You can add up to five blogs to your account. If this is your first visit to the blog, ScooptWords is a service for bloggers who want to sell content and editors who want to buy it.

And here is the ScooptWords site. Click on the image to have a look through and sign up. We would most definitely welcome comments on how easy, or not, you find the sign up process and on the general functionality of the site.

Give us a few days

Few last minute things to sort out and we'll launch. We were aiming for today and while that is humanly possible, it's not completely desirable. Sorry about that. We need to make a few minor changes to the site and integrate a decent bunch of links to NightCapSyndication.

We hope bloggers who sign up for ScooptWords will also sign up for NightCap and vice versa. It's a very tidy partnership. If bloggers select only their choicest posts and feed them into NightCap it'll wind up being a potentially very useful litle resource for editors and a snazzy bit of self promotion for bloggers. All very early days, but I can see a lot of interesting ways we can nurture this partnership. NightCap's ranking system is a good idea. It should help editors select material and keep bloggers real about what's saleable and what's not.

I just finished answering some emailed questions from journalist Robert Andrews about what we're about. It's useful to see these answers written down. Helps us see what we've got, what we haven't and what we'd quite like. I have more questions to answer from Mark Glaser, who I met in London on an escalator in Canary Wharf, a bit later on today.