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eHub Interviews WordofBlog.net

Thanks to Matt Turck, founder of Word of Blog for this email interview posted November 30, 2005.

eHub: What is your web application/service about?

Word of Blog: Word of Blog.net is based on the concept of sell-side advertising.  It enables bloggers to choose the ads that appear on their page, because they know better than anybody else who their readers are.  As a result, ads get a higher degree of relevance and appear as a recommendation from the blogger, ensuring higher click through rates.  Here’s how we’ve implemented the concept: Word of Blog .net contains a central listing of ad-sized “badges” posted on the site by organizations; it provides a bit of HTML code for bloggers to copy and paste into their templates to promote groups, products and issues they support, and recommend organizations doing work they believe in. The site tracks all clicks, so that organizations can see which bloggers post their badges, how many click-throughs they generate, and also take out the ad from any blog they don’t want to be associated with.  Right now, there is no commerce mechanism; we’re heavily focused on nonprofits, grassroots and political organizations and all ads are free.  We’re very happy with how quickly it’s been spreading, considering it’s all through word of mouth.

eHub: Why did you start this project?

Word of Blog: The project was born out of fascination for peer-produced content and networks such as Craig’s List and MySpace.com.  We were also inspired by the discussion on sell-side advertising that took place a few months ago in the blogosphere, and involved some of the smartest technology and media bloggers, such as John Battelle, Fred Wilson, Jeff Jarvis, and Ross Mayfied in the U.S., and Stephane Lee in Europe.  There were those exciting concepts floating out there, and it didn’t seem that anybody was really doing much in terms of implementing them, so we launched Word of Blog.net this summer as an experiment.  Now that it seems to be taking off, we’re getting very serious about it.

eHub: How much time do you devote to its growth?  Do you have a day job?

Word of Blog: Yes, we have day jobs.  As tends to be the case for projects born out of passion, Word of Blog.net takes pretty much every minute of my time that’s not allocated to my day job.

eHub: How large is your team and what are your backgrounds?

Word of Blog: I (Matt Turck) have a background in technology entrepreneurship, having co-founded an enterprise search software company five years ago, which we just sold to Oracle in June of this year.  I have two very talented engineers (Stefan Nobbe and Imran Ahmed) working with me on this project, and we’re getting a few interns on board to help with the ever increasing amount of work.

eHub: What is your design philosophy?

Word of Blog: Keep things simple, focus heavily on the problem we’re trying to solve, and execute as perfectly as possible on that one specific aspect. 

eHub: What technologies are you currently using?

Word of Blog: PHP and MySQL.

eHub: What are the most requested features from your users/community?

Word of Blog: We got requests regarding badge rotation (so that a blogger can post several badges on their page in the same spot, the badge changing each time the page is refreshed) and open tagging (so that any registered user can tag the badge), which we just accomodated.  Now we’re getting requests regarding RSS feeds.

eHub: Does your user base reside in a primary geographic location or is it distributed?

Word of Blog: While most of our user base resides in the U.S., we’ve had organizations from China and India post badges on the site, which was unexpected and great!  We also seem to be getting more and more activity from Europe.

eHub: Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months?  The next 2 years?

Word of Blog: Over the next few months, we’ll continue to be heavily focused on the nonprofit world.  We may then decide to introduce paying ads for businesses, possibly on a separate site.  However, I’d be very happy to see this just grow to be an alternative ad network for nonprofits in the blogosphere - we’ll see how it evolves, but “just” that would be a great success as far as I’m concerned.

eHub: What is the greatest challenge to your success?

Word of Blog: As all networks, the main challenge is reaching and maintaining a critical mass of users.  We seem well on our way considering it’s only been a few weeks, but this is clearly a challenge.

eHub: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?

Word of Blog: Continue adding users.

eHub: Do you have a business model?  If so, what is it?

Word of Blog: Yes, that’s the easy part. If/when we do introduce paying ads, the business model will be an online ad agency model - while we have some interesting ideas as to that model applies in the context of sell-side advertising, we don’t necessarily plan on reinventing the wheel here.

eHub: If you’re able to disclose this information, how much traffic or usage do you see on an average day?

Word of Blog: In terms of usage, we already have hundreds of badges that organizations have posted on the site, and hundreds of bloggers who posted those badges on their blogs, resulting in thousands of clicks through to the advertisers, at no cost to them. 

eHub: What is the one thing you’re most proud of about the project?

Word of Blog: It’s going to sound horribly self-serving, but what I’m the most proud of is that all users (organizations or bloggers) who’ve actually used the system seem to be extremely enthusiastic about it.  It’s one thing to build a system and offer a service; it takes a completely different dimension when you get feedback of that quality.  Also, I’m very proud that some very smart bloggers (including Fred Wilson and Tom Evslin) are so supportive of our efforts.

eHub: How would you describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?

Word of Blog: There are many ways things are shifting, so let me choose just one: from a web entrepreneur’s standpoint, I’m amazed by how much the broad availability of open source tools has changed the game.  It used to be, come up with an idea, write a business plan, raise money, spend months in pre-launch, launch.  Now it’s really, come up with an idea, launch, then make it better based on early user feedback. Not necessarily less challenging, but a very different way of proceeding.

eHub: What site(s) do you visit everyday other than your own?

Word of Blog: I try to not exceed 50 blogs in my RSS reader - Wilson, Battelle, Jarvis, Malik, Evslin, Godin, etc. are all daily must reads.

eHub: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?

Word of Blog: Clearly not enough, but that’s part of the fun!

Thanks to Matt Turck, founder of Word of Blog for this email interview posted November 30, 2005.

Visit Word of Blog.net
Originally added to eHub on Oct 11, 05

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eHub Interviews is a series with the creators of Web 2.0 applications and services by Emily Chang, author of eHub, designer, and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes, a strategic web consultancy in San Francisco that she co-founded with Max Kiesler.

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