Bloggers have long used the blogroll as a way of linking to their compatriots and sharing traffic. But a blogroll has always just been just a static list of links, that on some blogs (especially among political bloggers, where they might be most popular) have become so bloated and long there is very little incentive for readers to click on any of it -- or even pay it any attention. Enter: rollSense. rollSense touts itself as "the Google AdSense of content," but that's actually a very poor description of what the service is.
Put quite simply, rollSense is a replacement for your normal blogroll. Instead of a static list of links, however, rollSense delivers related content from trusted sources to your readers via a javascript widget. The service accomplishes a similar goal for bloggers that the web 2.0 news ticker, which Webware launched last week on their site, does. Further, the widget attempts to tailor itself to whatever content your readers are actually reading.
Setting up a rollSense widget is easy. Really the only step is to add your sources (i.e., the blogs whose content you admire/relates to your blog -- or in other words: your blogroll). Because rollSense uses RSS, you have to add blogs to your blogroll as feeds (auto discovery would be nice!). Once you're done with that, you're pretty much ready to go. You can customize the width and colors of the widget, as well as how many related links it shows at once.
In action, the rollSense widget uses semantic analysis to pull related stories from the sources you defined. As your readers click on stories on your blog, rollSense reloads the widget to pull new content to match what they're looking at.
rollSense's business model appears to be advertising that it could sell inside users' blogrolls. They don't mention this anywhere on their site, but their demo web site includes spaces for "Sponsored Links" on its rollSense widget. They don't appear to be used currently for adverts, but it looks like the demo site provides a hint at the future. If rollSense did some sort of revenue share with their users that might actually make sponsored links inside their blogroll an attractive prospect to bloggers as a new means of monetization.
Comments
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We use a Newsgator product for our ticker at Webware. I like it because it keeps me, the editor, mostly in control. If I leave it alone it gets items from the blogs I've configured it with. But if I want to, I can remove and re-order items. Also, it's not sensitive to user behavior. That's a cool feature, but it wasn't what I was looking for.
I also experimented with Google RSS, which can also create a feed widget, although the editor has to manually "share" stories for them to show up.
Posted by: Rafe | August 2, 2007 4:24 PM
How is this different from MineKey
http://www.minekey.com/
MineKey looks way better than RollSense.
Abhishek
Posted by: Abhishek | August 2, 2007 4:27 PM
I'm checking out Minekey now. Looks like Minekey is for YOUR content, while Rollsense is for blogroll content.
Posted by: Rafe | August 2, 2007 4:34 PM
Correction: Looks like both systems can read from multiple blogs.
Posted by: Rafe | August 2, 2007 4:39 PM
I glanced briefly at Minekey today, but hadn't given it enough of a look to offer a fair analysis (and so left it out of this post). But I do plan to look at it more closely.
The services to appear very similar, but it's hard to say which is better. At first glance the Minekey widget is perhaps prettier (and perhaps more customizable), but what really matters is which delivers the best recommendations. And that you can't take with just a cursory pass. ;)
Posted by: Josh Catone | August 2, 2007 4:53 PM
The sponsored ads section you see doesn't just hint at future ad support, rollSense states it will be rolling out a for-pay option that will be ad-free:
If they add revenue sharing, like you said, this will be a very attractive move on their part. I'm sure that MineKey has something like this in the works as well.
Posted by: James W. | August 2, 2007 9:35 PM
I'll have to try this out, I like the idea of it. Blogrolls are cool but they aren't really that useful, this will make them a bit more usefull.
Posted by: Michael | August 3, 2007 2:01 AM
Josh, thanks much. Actually, another tag line we thought of and we use too, is "your smart blogroll". Well understood. And you are right, try and test, the best way to see it rolling. (by the way, rollSense front end runs on the fantastic ruby on rails framework, we love it).
@ James W., yes and definitely it is our intent to share ads revenues with rollSense users. We're working on it.
Patrick
Posted by: Patrick Ferran | August 3, 2007 2:54 AM
Very nice...rollSense (and MineKey) will add life to the traditional Blogroll.
Seems MineKey has gotten a jump but with over $70 million blogs, rollSense will still have a lot of room to grow.
Posted by: Adrian Keys | August 3, 2007 8:23 AM