Criteo Autoroll Widget (Yes, Another Widget...)
OK, I fell for the e-mail solicitation on this one... I got a message from a technical evangelist at Criteo and decided to try out their Autoroll widget. Why? Two reasons: Laziness and relevance.
I've always admired the various blogrolls others have created on their blogs. I've thought about creating my own but figured it would be a headache to keep updating it with new and interesting links. I enjoy posting regularly but I'm too lazy to build and maintain a good blogroll. There, I admitted it.
I'd also want to make sure I'm linking to new, interesting and highly relevant blogs in a blogroll. Criteo claims to display links to blogs that have an affinity to your blog. I'd like to think it will produce relevant links much like Google's AdSense does on the advertising front. Time will tell. It apparently takes a few days for their engine to fully integrate your blog and provide relevant outbound links. As an added bonus, my blog should start appearing in Autoroll links on other relevant blogs. We'll see. If I notice an increase in traffic I'll keep it; if not, well, I might need to make room for the next widget.
Speaking of which, I sometimes worry that I'm loading this thing up with so many widgets that I'll bring Typepad to its knees...and any longtime Typepad subscriber knows that wouldn't be too hard! Seriously though, I realize these widgets rely on other systems and servers to load all the relevant data. If you feel my blog's load time is becoming too long please let me know!
Joe- keep us updated on this, I'd be interested to see how it goes.
Posted by: Lucas | February 16, 2007 at 11:44 PM
Joe, came across a cool FREE service called box.net. They give you up to 5 MB of file hosting for free, but their ease of use, interface, and graphics make it "FTP for dummies" (pun intended). They also have a widget that you can plug into your blog for downloads (music, images, pdf files, etc.) Very cool!
Posted by: Tom Britt | February 18, 2007 at 08:52 PM
Hi Tom. Thanks for the tip. I'll take a look at it shortly.
Posted by: Joe Wikert | February 19, 2007 at 07:48 PM
Thanks for this nice review. We are working hard to ensure links are as relevant as possible. Of course, the more blogs will install AutoRoll, the better recommendations will be. ;-)
Posted by: John | March 01, 2007 at 04:04 AM
Hi John. You bet. I'm still waiting for that relevance factor to really kick in. I'm trying to give it more time because if too many people quit too quickly we'll never establish the proper linkage... Then again, I'm still seeing way too many irrelevant links in the list on my blog, so it's a bit discouraging. I'm also not seeing much in the way of inbound traffic coming from other Criteo-enabled sites, so my patience is wearing a bit thin! I'll leave it up for another week or two (at least) and see where we are.
Posted by: Joe Wikert | March 01, 2007 at 06:29 PM
Hey Joe,
Did you know that Google Talk, the IM client for google is now compatible as a widget on blogs? It's pretty cool, I'm only worried if you have to hire a "Chat Support Agent" in case all the visitors wanna talk to you.
Details on my blog.
Best,
Mani
Posted by: Mani | March 16, 2007 at 08:38 AM
Well, I'm now 6 months into this testing period with Criteo and I have to admit I'm disappointed for two reasons. First, the relevance is still way off base. I just did a sampling of some of the blogs linked to from my Criteo list and found that most of them are completely unrelated to what my blog covers.
Second, and perhaps more interestingly, I'm not seeing the reciprocal links from other blogs my Criteo box list links to; only 4 of the 10 I checked had my blog listed in their Criteo list. I realize it would make no sense to have 100% reciprocity on this, but a 40% rate seemed pretty low. So, in an effort to free up some of my surface space and have one less widget to load, I'm turning off Criteo until I can find a reason to bring it back.
Posted by: Joe Wikert | September 04, 2007 at 07:33 PM