AutoRoll – Find blogs on similar topics
I received a sort of a junk email the other day about this site called AutoRoll. The guy was pretty nice. He said he had read my blog and told me how he found my blog. So it wasn’t a bulk email but still it was kinda a solicitation to check out his new site. I thought it might be spam, but it said it was from the CEO. So I was curious. I sent it to some of my business partners and they said it seemed harmless enough and I should try it.
The idea behind AutoRoll is that you put some code on your web site and it tracks your blogs visitors. It also tries to compile a list of blogs your readers might be interested in. You can see it on my blog in the right hand column. It reads “Similar Blogs You Might Like”.
I can’t explain the technology that well 
How about I just paste in the original email I got!
I discovered your blog through Tino’s 2000 blog list and became a regular reader. I contact you directly today to tell you about a Beta test we are running. As you are a blog expert, I thought you might be interested in joining AutoRoll beta. It takes 1 minute to install: http://autoroll.criteo.com/
What’s all about? AutoRoll is a blog widget that displays links to blogs with a strong affinity with your blog. We trace the number of visits of each unique reader on each blog that has installed AutoRoll. This information is 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 this blog.
What are the benefits? First of all, you will provide your readers with a very entertaining blog roll, as it is based on other readers with similar reading habits. Moreover, you will get highly qualified incoming traffic for your blog. Indeed, as other similar blogs display your blog on their AutoRoll, they will feed you with new readers with a strong affinity with your blog.
I would be really interested in your personal feedback on this widget. Thanks for your help.
Regards,Jean-Baptiste
Jean-Baptiste Rudelle
CEO Criteo
www.criteo.com
So check it out!
If you are a blogger, the best way to make this thing work is for you to add their little widget to your web site. That way they can have more data and compile better recommendations for everyone.
It only took me about 3 minutes to signup for Autoroll and put the code on my site. Really fast and simple.
So what I thought was originally junk mail may turn out to be actually really good.
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Hi Ben,
Great post. Thanks for helping us with AutoRoll Beta.
Some additional hints on how AutoRoll works: the more regular readers you have in common with another blog, the higher the probability that this blog will appear on your AutoRoll. In reality, the algorithm is slightly more sophisticate (in particular to avoid abuse), but this is the board picture.
As a result, the more blogs we register, the higher the probability that we will detect other blogs with a high affinity with yours.
Links displayed on your AutoRoll can only improve over time. The quicker we will reach a certain critical mass, the better!
Thanks again for you great help.