• by Shankar Gupta , December 5, 2006

Aiming to make its syndication service easier for publishers to use, Pluck today will add several new features to the tool. Among the new offerings are "Burstwires," which collect blog posts on similar topics, widgets to incorporate the platform on publisher sites, and revamped analytics capabilities.

Pluck has quietly been testing the new version of the tool with several publishing partners, including USA Today, the Guardian Unlimited, the Discovery Channel, and Reuters, over the last six weeks. The original service, first unveiled in April, allows major newspaper publishers to syndicate posts from popular blogs around the Web and host them on their own pages.

The widgets allow publishers to include Blogburst content without any Javascript or style sheet coding, and the Burstwires collect content in easy-to-use bundles, said Pluck CEO Dave Panos. "The concept of a Burstwire was designed to make it easy for publishers to take down just the posts that have been vetted by Pluck's editorial team to be relevant and interesting and really well-written," he said.

The new release also includes an upgraded analytics package, which provides traffic reporting both to Pluck's blogger partners and its publisher partners.