MyBlogLog + Amazon Personalized Recommendations = Criteo AutoRoll

March 20, 2007

The good folks at Criteo just alerted me to a neat widget they’ve created called “AutoRoll.”  I thought I’d give it a test spin.

2007-03-20_15-21-29-578.pngCriteo is a recommendation engine, and AutoRoll is a product designed using their open API.  The idea is much like Amazon’s “If you like this book, you might also like these other ones…,” recommendations, with blog substituted for book.  The idea is that by gathering and analyzing information on which blogs people are visiting, AutoRoll can recommend other blogs you might be interested in.  If 50 people who like my blog also spend a lot of time at, say, the Sacramento Real Estate blog, then that blog will automatically begin appearing on my AutoRoll.  Pretty neat.

Three questions I have:

  1. Compared to MyBlogLog, Is this different enough and cool enough to gain traction?
  2. How defensible is this concept — ie. what would it take Yahoo (which now owns MyBlogLog) to add this sort of functionality should it prove popular?
  3. Is there enough space in our sidebars for yet another handy little widget?  (Mary McKnight at RSSPieces asks the same question, as does about-to-join Inman Joel Burslem.

Final note:  The snapshot to the left is what the widget looks like on my blog.  The blog recommendations currently there are, I believe, basically placeholders for now.  There aren’t yet enough people using the widget for high-quality recommendations.

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Written by Kevin · Filed Under AutoRoll, Criteo, Industry, MyBlogLog, Real estate | 3 Comments