Newspapers looking to capitalize on their online stories and distribute their content more efficiently have another option from Mountain View, Calif., software developer VeriSign Inc.

VeriSign’s Real-Time Publisher Services lets papers exploit and organize constantly updated content and distribute it as they wish, said Gus Ezcurra, director of the service.

Newspaper sites, he said, have been losing mindshare to the aggregation sites such as Yahoo News, Google News and Topix.net. 

“(Newspapers) are increasingly not the first place someone seeking news on a topic visits,” he said. “Our services enable them to offer their own aggregated experiences, cross-promote their other online properties and re-establish themselves as the single, trusted source of all their readers’ information needs.”

Search component

A key component of RTPS is VeriSign’s CI-Newsdesk app, which lets users search public news and blog information sources.

“It is complementary to traditional print syndicated research offerings like Nexis,” Ezcurra said. 

VeriSign also offers another service, the CI-Metabase, which allows features such as “Stories Like This,” news search, and the ability to create microsites built around customizable niche topics.

“The ‘Stories Like This’ feature is particularly interesting in that publishers’ articles are compared to articles from other sources to find similar ones,” he said. “Where the relevancy of the original article to other articles is high, links to those other articles are provided to the publisher for display.”

This service is currently in use at the BBC’s news site under the title Newstracker.

VeriSign’s Headline syndication tool, meantime, enables newspapers to syndicate headline links of their articles to third parties that want to display them on their own Web sites. Any visitor to the third-party site can also access the tool in order to place headline links on the site.

While similar to RSS syndication, Ezcurra said Headline doesn’t require the same amount of coding necessary to enable RSS feeds.

Easy to implement

“VeriSign’s syndication tool generates JavaScript, something that every webmaster understands,” he said. Secondly, Headline is engineered as a “one-to-many” communications service, Ezcurra said, as opposed to RSS, which is more of a “one-to-one” conduit.