Wagging your Long Tail with Just for You

What if you could ask each reader that came to your blog what they were interested in and show them a list of posts from your archives that matched those interests? I’ve been blogging for over five years and as posts roll off the front page they fade into the archives to be mostly forgotten,.

Today MyBlogLog published a WordPress plug-in that grew out of a concept that I’ve been playing around with for the past year. Forget contextual matching for relevance and targeting, what if you could match against someone’s stated interests? Blow past trying to parse out meaning from the other text floating around on the current page and reach through the glass and query against the tags that people attach to their MyBlogLog profile. Target the Reader, not the Page. It’s a vision of programming that says, “OK, now that you’re here on this site, did you know there was a series of articles this author wrote about your passion for Harley Davidson motorcycles last year?”

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb writes,

There are countless companies that have raised millions in venture capital to offer publishers recommendation systems for their readers – commercial publishers pay big money for this functionality. Now bloggers can have the same type of thing for free

The Just for You plug-in works with hosted WordPress and, once installed, looks at each visitor to your site to see if they are a MyBlogLog user. If they are, the plug-in looks up the tags on that user’s profile and searches through your blog’s archives and presents a list of headlines pointing to posts that match those tags in a widget that runs in your blog’s sidebar. For more details and sample screenshots, see my post on the MyBlogLog Blog.

If you look to the right, the Just for You widget is right there, five headlines fresh from my Archives for your reading pleasure. If you’re a MyBlogLog user, let me know in the comments if they match the tags on your profile. If you’re not a MyBlogLog member, what you see is a collection of headlines based on the the tags of the most recent MyBlogLog visitors to the site so hopefully there’s some connection to why you’re there as well. Either way, I’m interested in your thoughts.