As Chief Technology Officer for Polyvibe Entertainment Group, and the resident internet-nerd, I am a bono-fied stats geek. Every email we send, every myspace post, every blog post, every news update, every everything, I look to see if what we did made an impact on our site traffic and our visibility. So, as I was going through the list of bots in our feedburner stats, I noticed a new one. The one that calls itself Linkie Winkie. What’s interesting about this bot is that the corresponding page is decidedly lo-tech and quite spartan, only sporting a few links and an Alexa traffic chart. The only other text on the page is this cryptic description:
“Linkie Winkie is a bit of a social experiment and we want to see what happens. We’re not going to tell you much about it, except that its a very altruistic little site and loves to be talked about.
So if you can work out what it does, and get your timing right, then Linkie Winkie might help you out for a while.”
From what we can tell, by giving a shout out to Linkie Winkie, they will in turn to give you a shout out. How it does this, is still a mystery, but one blog discusses the effect of Linkie Winkie, while the other provides a bit on who is behind the experiment.
I’ll provide an update here if anything comes of this, but participating in a social experiment of the web 2.0 variety just seemed like a fun think to do on a Friday evening.
I’m not sure, but I suspect that 1) the amount of links following a post may or may not have an effect on whether you show up on Linkie Winkie’s page or not, and 2) the suspicion is growing in the blogosphere that the LInkie Winkie links function is NOT an automatic algorithm but a real person who sifts through what the bot finds and decides what to put up on the page or not.
According to the TribbleAgency forum, Linkie Winkie is an experiment in links, not unlike the early “let’s see how far an e-mail can get” experiments that ended in avalanches of email to the hapless experimenters. My guess is that the point is to see how many links get posted over the entire blogosphere by people linking to each other about Linkie Winkie.
At any rate, I’ve started a blog just for Linkie Winkie comments with links — I hope people will comment to the blog’s single thread and leave links to their sites from there, and visit other commenters’ blogs. Do visit: http://linkiewinkietracker.blogspot.com. The way I figure it, if the Linkie Winkie “algorithm” doesn’t pick up an entire blog devoted just to it, it’s probably a human.
I noted you’re already there, Eric, which was how I came to post here at your blog. Thanks for leaving the winks!
I’m starting to agree with you on the ‘it’s a person’ theory. maybe the timing thing part of the equation is when the folks are at their machines ; )
Want to know more about Linkie Winkie? Read our interview with its founder!