Thoughts on Auto Blogrolls
Traffic is one of the measures of a blog’s success. At least that’s what many will tell you. The more readers you get, the more accomplished a blogger you are (and you feel better, too). For starting bloggers, this could mean having to go through a lot of gimmickry and linkbaiting just so your blog can get a wider readership. After all, there are gazillions of blogs out there, and competition is stiff!
According to Performancing, one of the ways to boost readership is by signing up for automatic blogrolls, such as using the Autoroll widget.
AutoRoll is a blog widget that displays links to blogs that your readers should like. Based on each unique reader’s affinity for each specific blog, the Criteo Recommendation Engine will compute on a real-time basis the relative affinity of all blogs, and it automatically displays the Top 10 unique links on each blog.
How does AutoRoll work?
We trace the number of visits of each unique reader on every blog that has installed AutoRoll. This is achieved through a cookie and requires no action from the reader.
This information is then fed to the Criteo Recommendation Engine, which computes blog affinities in real-time. The more often a reader visits a specific blog, the greater his affinity is with that blog. The exact affinity formula is kept secret to prevent any form of abuse. Using the Criteo Predictive Engine, we determine and display for any given blog its instant relative affinity with all other blogs that have installed AutoRoll.
But then, some would avoid automatically-generated blogrolls like the plague. After all, blogrolls are considered personal recommendations too, so you might be personally recommending something that is crappy just beause the widget automatically published a link it thought might be relevant.
It’s like asking a computer to make personal recommendations to a friend. So where’s the human factor in that?
Personally I wouldn’t entrust my blogroll to a machine. I’d rather hand-pick my recommendations.
I guess that is why they say read the whole think. I thought I found the answer to improving my blog stats. I totally agree that something our better off done manually. Because , when machines do things made for manual labor it cheapens the experience. I remember when sprint did this with clarie.Hated that automation lady! That’s what people would probably say I hate that automation of their blog roll.
Bigrayvin said this on April 12, 2007 11:09 am
Thanks for your post. Autoroll does not really compete with your personnal blogroll. It’s different.
Your blogroll display the blogs you (as a blogger) recommend.
Autoroll display the top blogs that are read by your visitors. In other words, Autoroll is the recommendation of your readers. This can be significantly different from your own recommendations and somtimes it’s full of surprises!
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