Rudelle Blogging

My company Criteo has launched AutoRoll, a widget for blogs.

What is 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 and browse a specific blog, the greater his affinity is with this blog.

In terms of benefits for blog owners, 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, another huge benefit for you ton install AutoRoll is to 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.
Last but not least, you will also get a complete private reporting module with valuable statistics on impressions and click through rates from and to your own blog.

To be part of this Beta, just sign up here
It takes 2 minutes to install and it's real fun to use.

With the opening a couple of weeks ago of Writely and the launch of Google Apps, Google takes a new step to offer a complete Office solution. There was already Google Spreadsheet versus Excel, Google Calendar and Gmail versus Outlook. With Writely versus Word, it still needs to offer (soon) a clone of Powerpoint and the panoply will be complete.
The idea is of course to offer a credible alternative to the 800 pound gorilla Office. And in the backstage, with the will to challenge, via Office, with the very principle of traditional PC (which made and to still make the fortune of Microsoft).
Is this strategy poised for success? I move on quickly on the fact that this supposes to have a permanent high speed connection each time one wants to work. With the generalization of Wifi (and soon of Wimax), it is reasonable to think that within a few years, high speed Internet connections will be as usual as electric plugs.
The problem of Google is above all to fight against the inherent inertia of any user. To make a user change his habits (what an absolute horror), one should offer enormous incremental value. However on the functional side, even overpowered with Ajax, Writely remains definitely below Word. But, given that 90% of users master 10% of Word functionalities, it is not really important.
Paradoxically, the interest of Writely lies in fact within two characteristics not connected with the text processing itself: centralized data storage (which protects from the system crash) and the option to share a document among several users (a little like a wiki).
Will that be sufficient to lure tons of Office users? In the short term, that appears not very likely. Indeed, the concept of centralized data storage is challenged by spectacular progress of external flash memories, say nothing of the delicate issue of data privacy. To accept that all ones private and professional life be to stored by the king of keyword search, implies very strong trust. Regarding sharing documents, even if this functionality is rather extraordinary, its usage is justified only in very specific (mainly professional) situations.
In short, Microsoft should concentrate at last on the eradication of its eternal crash issues (which still occurs too often on Word) rather than on endless increase in new functionalities. And if in addition, Microsoft keeps its soft policy on licences, Office should be able to resist fairly well against Google new assault.