• by Shankar Gupta , April 11, 2006

Social media firm Pluck is expected Wednesday to launch BlogBurst, a service that allows major newspaper publishers to syndicate posts from popular blogs around the Web and host them on their own pages.

Eric Newman, Pluck general manager, said the company had assembled a wide range of bloggers for the initiative. "We've been able to bring in traditional A-Listers and great bloggers who are blogging on great subject matter, but haven't been able to build that audience for themselves," Newman said.

The service, which began gathering blogger and publisher partners in February, has signed media outlets including the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Houston Chronicle, and blogs like Jossip, Steve Rubel's Micropersuasion, and TechCruch.

According to Newman, the initial recruitment focused on more feature-focused blogs, and eschewed political and news blogs. "We've been targeting our recruiting around the features areas--lifestyle, health, that sort of thing," he said. "That's where the publishers are interested in starting."

The syndicated blog posts will be hosted on the publisher's own site, with attribution and links back to the blogger's own page. Individual publications' ad teams will be selling ads against the blog posts, and in exchange, the blogger receives traffic and exposure. "We have a model where we are about driving exposure for bloggers," Newman said. "At the moment, we don't have a compensation plan for bloggers, but we absolutely plan to have one."