Word of Blog (continued)

I wrote a post about this cool web service called Word of Blog back in mid August.

I have been using Word of Blog here on my blog since early July to power my House Ads.

And I love it.

It allows me to upload small "tile" style graphical ads to a central place. From there anyone can put them on their blog. In some cases, I may be the only one running these ads. But in other cases, the ads will get picked up by others on their blogs.

See what has happened with the Tedstock ad or the Hackoff.com ad for examples of how this can spread.

It’s a social network for sell side advertising.

A couple things have happened on the service recently that caused me to want to post again about Word of Blog.

First, they have an ad up for Recovery 2.0 which is an effort of many in the Web 2.0 world to come up with better disaster reaction and recovery web services.

I know a bunch of people who are working on Recovery 2.0 and I support what they are doing and so I’ve added a Recovery 2.0 ad to my blog.

But I am even more excited about the ad rotation system they have implemented at Word of Blog.  If you register, you can build a portfolio of ads. First you put the "portfolio code" on your page.  Then by simply clicking on "add to my portfolio" whenever you see a cool Word of Blog ad, it goes into rotation on your blog.  When you tire of the ad, you go to your portfolio and delete it.

Very nice and very simple.

I was starting to build a very large tower of Word of Blog ads on my right sidebar.  And so I moved it below my Adsense ads.  But now that I can rotate ads, I have moved my "House Ads" which are World of Blog ads back above Adsense.  And you’ll only see one each time you come to my blog.  I think this is great. 

One thing I’d like to see the Word of Blog guys do is let you pick the number of ads you want in your rotation scheme.  For example, I might want to run two ads on every page instead of one.  Or three.

Word of Blog is still in its infancy.  They have about 150 ads up there now.  And about 500 bloggers using it.  But because its so easy to join, easy to use, and easy to submit ads, I think it has the chance to spread virally and scale quickly.

There is no payment system in place now.  It’s just a cooperative effort at this point. Which is the way a lot of these things start. If it turns into something real, I am sure a commerce system will follow.

If you want to run some Word of Blog ads on your blog, go check them out.  I hope you like them as much as I do.