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I’m excited to share the first as part of my Toronto Tech Week Interview Series, in this interview I had a chance to talk with co-founder of TheGoodBlogs.com, Vernon Lun.

Where did the idea for The Good Blogs come from?
My partner and I wanted to create something around ideas we could be passionate about. We’ve always been fascinated with how we could build a network platform that would facilitate many to many relationships. eBay was a great inspiration. When I first started blogging over a year ago, I realized who difficult it was for bloggers to get their blogs exposure on the Internet. It would be hard to start a portal and be essentially a blog directory. Instead, we thought letting the long tail work for itself by getting bloggers to promote each was a better idea. Since we launched in November, our bloggers have promoted each other 30 million times, which is more than we could ever have achieved we did that solely based on one site.

What is the business model behind it?
Advertising through the widget and on our site is currently our revenue model. What we’re finding is that advertisers want very focused communities to target their ads. While a single major blog can advertise a particular product, the brand is reinforced when that product is seen on multiple blogs in the same community. In future, I think there’s opportunity for bloggers to participate in the revenue by companies sponsoring a series of conversations within a community. I believe the dialog about a product across multiple blogs is probably more effective than paying a blogger to put up a single post. Paying bloggers to post is a thorny issue, I think it can be mitigated by running contests and giving prizes that are not directly tied to a blog post that may or may not favor the sponsor.

I’ve seen the widget on many popular blogs around the world, why is the little guy so popular?
I think most people get ‘bloggers promoting bloggers’ idea. It’s not new, they already do it with the blogrolls. We make it really simple by pasting a small piece of code on their blog. Then, in addition to being promoted, they get to be part of some really terrific communities, discover blogs they’ve never seen. We love it when we see comments on blogs that start with “I found you through TheGoodBlogs”. Our value prop is simple, promote your blog, discover new blogs and connect with bloggers. And we do it consistently day in day out.

What can we expect next from the service?
We launched two new features recently. The first one is a called conversations. A lot of bloggers already tag their blogs for Technorati etc. Our tag goes one further by being able to combine blog posts across different blogs to form a common conversation. It’s better than linking to an article or a comment because you see all the conversation threads on one page on our site relating to that comment. The second feature is called the miniblog, just a scratchpad for bloggers to put a thought, idea or rant that doesn’t quite make a blog post.

Since launching TheGoodBlogs, what have been some of the biggest changes that you’ve seen impact Toronto’s technology industry?
I’ve been involved in software industry through the 90’s dotcom boom and bust and now Web 2.0. There are a lot of smart people walking around with great ideas. Mesh 2.0 which is one of premier events is growing year over year showing that there is no shortage of startups or smart people thinking about starting something up.

If you were to start all over again, what would you do differently?
That’s a great question, we have learned so much about social networking and community building by doing TheGoodBlogs. You get a total different perspective because you see trends and statistics across many blogs instead of just one. I think the biggest change would be focusing on the blogger earlier in our development and not just the blog and it’s content. Most blogs have poor exposure not because of content but because the blogger hasn’t promoted himself or herself as a brand first and foremost. For a growing and regular readership, you have to create a relationship with your readers. For example, recently we started to promote the bloggers more and more by putting their pictures up wherever it makes sense. People connect to people not to content.

Have you seen any major changes in Toronto technology community over the last 2 years
I think the demise of the dot com era hurt Toronto and Canada more than people realize and with a stronger currency, many US companies have turned to alternative outsourcing avenues instead of starting development teams in Canada. But you can’t keep good ideas and smart people down. From our statistics and I’ve seen similar numbers else where that says Canada has more blog readers per capita than anywhere else in the world. So Canadians are as digitally/internet savvy as anyone else which bodes well from a technology advancement/adoption point of view.

Categories: Social Media, Toronto Tech Week