Word of Blog
I had a nice little email conversation today with the Word of Blog folks. They addressed my concerns regarding their service, specifically the reason for the redirects through their site. From their email:
Regarding the redirects, they indeed serve multiple purposes: a) It enables Recovery 2.0 to track clicks (if you take a look at http://www.wordofblog.net/info.php?id=291, you’ll see on the left side the list of the blogs which posted the badge and how many clicks they generated so far), so that they know who their supporters and well wishers are. b) As a related matter, it enables Recovery 2.0 to exercise some control over who posts the badge — the beauty of sell side advertising is that bloggers get to pick and choose whichever organization they want to support; however, the obvious danger is that the badges get displayed on blogs that the organizations wouldn’t want to appear on. So by hosting and serving the Recovery 2.0 badge, we enable Recovery 2.0 to potentially take out the badge from any blog or site they don’t want to appear on. c) Finally, because we host the badges ourselves, we can offer attractive user features such as badge rotation — if you want to support several organizations on your blog but don’t want to sidebar to look like a “christmas tree”, you can have several badges rotate on your page ( i.e., change each time the page is refreshed) — that’s the option that Jill, who commented on your blog post, chose, for example.
That all sounds pretty reasonable. Thanks, guys, for clearing that up. I can’t wait to read your blog. Let me know when it’s available ;)
October 31st, 2005 at 8:22 pm
I was kind of suspicious, too, but Fred Wilson likes them ( http://avc.blogs.com/avc/2005/10/wordofblogco.html ), and I started using them, and I like them, too. I didn’t realize they were sending out e-mails asking people to use their buttons, though. I’m not so sure that sounds good at all.
October 31st, 2005 at 9:00 pm
Yeah, it was weird. The email basically said “hey, you talked about Recovery 2.0. How’s about a link?” I guess I’d feel a whole lot better about this sort of thing if the link were direct instead of bouncing through word of blog’s servers.
I think I’ll just put a link to Recovery 2.0 on the site. Easier….
November 1st, 2005 at 4:01 am
I don’t konw who emailed you; it sounds like someone wanted to just follow the link to check it out — link etiquette and all that. Recovery 2.0 is just what it appears to be: a very small group of people came together for a meeting to discuss making this better and we’ll see where it goes.