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"If you\u2019re like me, you\u2019ve probably had Masters Live from Sportsline running in one of your browser tabs all day as the season\u2019s first major golf tournament gets underway from Augusta, GA.  Meanwhile, if you visit the PGA Tour\u2019s official site for Masters coverage, you may come across a chat feature, which is actually a byproduct of a partnership between stealth startup Knocknok and Turner Sports New Media.\nUnlike do-it-yourself chat solutions like Meebo Rooms or Userplane, Knocknok is offering a more comprehensive chat product targeting specific, large-scale publishers.  In The Masters example, the application features a variety of different topics, like \u201Cwho will make the cut?\u201D and \u201Cwill Tiger win?,\" each of which has its own specific room that you can jump to.  It\u2019s a throwback of sorts to the style of chat rooms AOL had back in the 90s, but with the leap forward of being a distributed web application.  \nAdditionally, Knocknok rooms allow you to peruse other chats from across their publisher network.  Thus, when Knocknok officially launches and powers rooms for a variety of publishers, you can jump from one chat to another, without leaving the site from which your originally joined the chat.  This creates a network effect - again, similar to that enjoyed by AOL back when their chat product was the coolest social networking product in town (several hundred years ago in Internet time).  \nLike other companies in the chat space, Knocknok\u2019s value proposition to publishers is user engagement, which in turn creates additional advertising revenue.  According to their own research, chat keeps people on a publisher site for an average of 29 minutes.  \nIn related news, we learned earlier today that Meebo has hired a Chief Revenue Officer to help monetize all of those minutes, and is also an initial partner testing VideoEgg\u2019s new pay-for-engagement advertising model."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/04/10/knocknok/>