Outbrain is a ratings widget that allows you to rate posts and receive recommendations. We have it installed on this blog.

Just the other day, Outbrain released a neat little update that allows it to be aware if the blog is using Disqus. It then presents the option to comment to Disqus while rating the blog post. It’s a small integration, and a nice way to show how blog applications can interact with each other without the blogger having to explicitly choose to install both as a package.

We like Outbrain and hope to do more with them and other complementary services with this approach: simple benefits that don’t require additional fiddling with options.

This release includes trackback/pingback and pagination support as well as a couple of minor bug fixes. You can find the new version here.