Ryanair gets Nooked with new blogging technology

Ryanair has emerged as one of the first customers of Sligo software company Nooked's "feed commerce" platform, which uses a popular blogging technology to connect online shoppers and retailers.

Nooked has created a desktop widget for Ryanair called Ryanair Bargains which users can download to their desktops in order to get live updates of special offers on up to five routes of their choosing.

Nooked's platform uses the Really Simple Syndication (RSS), which up to now has primarily been used to distribute content from blogs and online news sources.

This will form the basis of its Feedshop product to be launched later this year.

Nooked's chief technology officer, John O'Shea, says that this will enable website publishers to list the inventory of online retailers on their sites using embedded widgets. Nooked will provide the tools for publishers to create their own widgets and will take a commission on any transactions which occur over its platform.

"We will be giving online retailers a standard interface for publishing product data," says Mr O'Shea. "The products could be flights, hotel vacancies, tickets for events or even contact information from a dating service."

Nooked will have enough granular control over the platform to enable publishers to be paid on the basis of a variety of actions, such as web users viewing a particular page, and not just on the basis of a completed sale. "Our role will be as a mediator between publisher and retailer," says Mr O'Shea.

Widgets are small software applications which can be easily embedded in web pages by even non-technical users. Championed by the current crop of Web 2.0 companies, they have become popular thanks to the success of social networking sites such as Bebo, Facebook and MySpace, which allow them to be embedded in profile pages.

Widgets are becoming increasingly popular and are considered a central part of the Web 2.0 way of doing business on the internet as they separate content from the medium it is viewed in.

Underlining the recent focus on their importance, travel site TripAdvisor last month acquired Where I've Been, a Facebook application built by an independent developer, for $3 million.

Mr O'Shea is a recent appointment at Nooked, which was founded in 2004 to help marketing professionals use feeds to distribute special offers and other content.