Dudspuds Blog

The 2008 FSTA Winter conference went well. I received great questions and feedback from writers, publishers and other businesses in the industry. It’s been a while since the show, so I wanted to provide an update on where things are today.

After neglecting Dudspuds the last few months (while doing paying work), I’m building my plan for the rest of the 2008 and 2009. I believe in this marketplace concept, and will continue to prove it out. Here are some things on the agenda:

Steady Content Flow

One major challenge I face is having a steady flow of valuable content from publishers and writers into the marketplace. Getting their content on the site is labor intensive. While this can be resolved through technology (i.e. XML) the effort isn’t feasible for publishers when there is no guaranteed revenues. My challenge is to minimize their effort, while getting their content loaded quickly for readers.

This sounds like the job for a custom web crawler that turns the article into a marketplace offering for that respective publisher.

Republishing Content

I plan to expand the marketplace by allowing writers to sell articles to publishers. This will cover re-publish rights, exclusive rights, online/off line rights and limited number of sales per article – all controlled by the writer.

Private Label Marketplaces

We’re working on allowing 3^rd party organizations to create their own, privately-branded marketplace using Dudspuds technology. Everything will work the same, except the marketplace won’t look like Dudspuds – it will have 3^rd party’s logo, colors and domain (http://xyzsite.dudspuds.com/).