Introducing all-new "panels", no blog should be without it!

Dear friends, investors, partners, former colleagues, bloggers, and those that may have just stumbled here for the first time…I am ecstatic to informally announce that our latest endeavor, “panels” is close to launch. We’re in a small private beta phase right now so if you’d like to try it out on your blog or web site please contact me ASAP and I’ll get you on the list at cbarnes@panels.net.

In the spirit of “show me” versus tell me... simply roll over any URL that has the panels icon (several are in this post after various company names) to see our standardized information panels.     < Yes, these little blue icons!

Panels appear for any company or organization ranging from the biggest public companies such as Apple, Ford, AT&T, or WalMart to up and coming startups such as WebDiet (launched at the Demo Fall 08 technology conference this week) and Yammer (launched at TechCrunch50 this week and chosen as winner!) By the time we go live there will be millions of entities in the system with improvements and features appearing almost daily.

About “The Panel”

Panels were inspired by the nutritional panels found on food that are mandated by the federal government. Like nutritional panels, our panels have a standard text-centric user interface that delivers consistent, predictable, detailed, real-time information from a variety of data sources across several categories.

Panels’ categories are organized as tabs across the top of the panel and so far we have exposed;

• “About” - Basic company and contact info, URL, logo, and summary (sometimes from aboutus)
• “Site” - A full preview of the home page, stats, tags and other goodies about the actual web site/blog
• “Map” - Beginning with Google Maps, and others to follow, a place for geographic data
• “News” - Headlines, Blog posts, News, Press Releases and more from a variety of sources
• “Jobs” - Employment listings across numerous providers such as monster and simplyhired
• “Financial” - If a public company, real-time info and quotes appear in several sub-categories
• Coming Soon over the next few weeks are “Reviews” and “Shop” - both with some very exciting and useful capabilities
• Site Search - Lastly, notice in the lower left hard corner of our panels, you can easily search just the target site right from here, with results opening up in a new window or tab. Give it a try.

What is the benefit of Panels?

It’s all about the reader, baby! However, everyone benefits in the panels ecosystem; users, publishers, and yes even advertisers. We’ve tested and the people have spoken. Panels make any blog significantly more useful for readers and more successful for the publisher/blogger/website owner because;

• Users will stay on the page because they can get deep information via panels and,
• Clicks on links - including ads - will dramatically increase (and we've seen 10-fold!)

We’re going to start testing it out quietly on a handful of selected blogs and websites in various markets before making a lot of noise or turning on the ability for it to “go viral” - which we hope and expect it will. Not all of the features are in yet, but the panels are already quite useful, and delivering a rewarding user experience and improved metrics by any measure.

Please drop us a line and let us know what you think, or request an invite from me at cbarnes@panels.net

P.S. For fellow Oregonians, tomorrow (Friday September 12) I’ll be at the Silicon Forest Forum at Intel, so please track me down. Same goes for former colleagues at Attensa and Extensis! Look for new features around linkedin.