Those two Posts could not be more different. The Washington Post has Woodward and Bernstein and an assortment of Pulitzers in its trophy case. Huffington Post writers like its namesake founder Ariana Huffington probably have the powerful Pulitzer family in their personal lists of contacts.

They both have something in common now – search services implemented by a revamped Inform, which now provides publisher services to those clients.

Inform announced a total of six new clients will partake of its publisher services. The company said its technology “will enable these publishers to further establish themselves as a news destination, rather being relegated to a search result.”

This takes place through the automated solution of content indexing and tagging, as Inform described its approach:

The meta-tagging is of particular interest. Inform has enough confidence in its systems that the tagging process will happen without human editors performing it.

Once content has been identified and tagged, it will be available to sites using the Inform solution. The approach focuses on keeping visitors within a news site by providing more access to similar results from that site.

Most people who visit an article from a news aggregation site like Yahoo News tend to go back to that portal for more stories on a similar topic. If Inform can keep people within a news site’s real estate for additional page views, it increases the advertising profitability for the publisher.

Inform’s solution will offer an assortment of features to benefit readers. A SmartLink makes each entity mentioned in an article a link to a page of results for that entity. Visitors can see related entities, topics, and articles displayed with an article.

The search capabilities from Inform can understand what a searcher likely means from a query. A list of “Did you mean?” alternatives appear as clickable terms atop the search results.

Inform’s success depends on how well its usage keeps visitors viewing pages and generating ad impressions for sites like the two Posts. If it is successful, it will be interesting to see if top search advertising company Google tries to develop a competing product.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

A throwaway line simply won’t get the job done; or more correctly, won’t help your employees to get the job done. Motivation, here we come.

To get employees to achieve the company goals, people must know and understand what the business is trying to accomplish. You’d be surprised how many companies don’t tell their staff where the business is going, either in the short term, or in the longer term. Perhaps it has something to do with trade secrets, or more cynically, with not telling anyone, especially those who might face layoff, too much information. Instead of looking at the company in that glass half empty format, think in terms of filling the glass full to overflowing.

Involve staff in goal setting

For many independent business organizations, the staff is all at one location, and can be accommodated in a staff planning session. The object of the plenary is to involve the staff in the setting the goals for the organization. At the very least, the employees should create targets for their own departments. Either approach is good for personnel motivation as people will work much harder to reach levels of success that they marked themselves. People will internalize the company’s success and equate it with their personal career success. Numbers sent down from the top, as if written on stone tablets for the great unwashed, are far less likely to be met, as no one had any voice in their formulation.

Teach the personnel new skills

Share your knowledge and expertise with other members of the organization. Make it clear that skills are being added to each employee’s abilities to help them achieve their goals. Emphasise that people are not training their replacement for a layoff, but are preparing someone to take on new responsibilities, so the more experience staff member can also move up the job ladder to an even higher rung. No longer saddled with less valuable uses of their time, higher level staffers can be taught more intensive management skills. Teach them to work on the business and not in it, and to help them delegate routine tasks, and to mentor other employees.

Create an exciting workplace

Make your business a great place to work. Establish feedback loops to keep employees in the know about the company’s present and future plans. Have the employees set their own goals and provide a monitoring opportunity for each person to assess their strengths and weaknesses. Help them to overcome obstacles to reaching their personal targets. Instead of the traditional employee evaluation, substitute an individual meeting that focusses on achievement and goals. Empower your people. Be free with praise for jobs well done. It costs nothing, yet is worth more than gold. Create a workplace where people can’t wait to get to work and to do great things on the job.

Conclusion

Involve your staff people in the company planning and goal setting. They will surprise you with their new enthusiasm and will to work. People want to be seen as important and highly valued members of a great organization. If you hire quality individuals, they will help your company to grow and prosper. Good people are the most important asset of any organization. Treat them well.

Don’t forget to thank them lavishly for their assistance in your business success story. They deserve it.

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Wayne Hurlbert provides insigtful information about marketing, promotions, search engine optimization and public relations for websites and business blogs on the popular Blog Business World.

Check out Blog Business World for yourself.

New York-based Inform has launched a beta version of a free online tool that collects stories from a variety of online sources. It’s much more than a feed reader or news aggregator. The company describes its technological differences from sites like Google News or Yahoo news:

Users can create news channels as desired. Next to an article, two icons appear. One allows a story to be flagged for later viewing. The second icon triggers a search for stories related to the topic.

Once those results have been returned on the left side of the page, two check boxes for News and Blogs appear at the top. These appear to serve to filter the results if they are checked or unchecked, but they currently don’t seem to do anything whether they are checked or not right now. Inform is in beta, and this might be a bit of planned functionality.

On the right side of the result page, Inform displays content it calls Discovery Path. Options to start new queries based on Topics, People, Industries, Places, or Organizations related to the story can be generated by clicking on them.

Inform plans to keep four days of news in its index. It draws content from registration and subscription sites and designates content from them as such. Users still need to be registered or subscribers with sites that require it for viewing their articles.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.