As you may have read by now, NewsGator has released the Related Content services as part of the media-targeted offerings. This is available either using a widget, or also available via API for data services customers. The widget (or API) will serve up content that is related to the content the user is reading; that content can be from across the web, or restricted to just your own site (or a set of sites you choose). In the latter cases, it can be used to drive additional traffic from existing visitors.

The system can also automatically create topics pages, whereby the user can see a list of articles matching a specific topic of the currently viewed content.

The system uses our online database of over 3 billion articles, which sees over 8 million new articles per day. At the moment, it matches content based on tags/categories, including categories derived from analyzing the content. You can also specify “fallback” tags to use in the case where you have, say, multiple unrelated articles displayed on one page, and still want to have relevant content.

Two blogs you can look at that are using the widget are the NewsGator Widget Blog, and the NewsGator Daily blog.

Give it a try, and let us know what you think!

Update: here is a tutorial on creating a related content widget!