A Look Into the Linkie Winkie Project Part I

August 3rd, 2006 | Joel | Interview

A couple of days ago I posted an article entitled What is Linkie Winkie? The article has generated much more attention then I thought it would in the past three days. Apparently many people out there, including my self, are interested in the Linkie Winkie project. With this in mind, I decided to interview Denise R., or as she is better known in cyberspace, Gurtie.

Gurtie and Chris Ridings are the two personalities involved with the creation and management of the Linkie Winkie project without any aid from out side sources. The project was conceived, created, and published very quickly, in one evening, due to the fact that some of the components currently used in Linkie Winkie were already being used, “in other ways on other projects.”

Many of the blogs following Linkie Winkie have speculated on the idea that the site’s ultimate goal is revenue. In fact, in my original article, I speculated on the idea that Linkie Winkie was out to gain a better Alexa ranking in order to become valuable to marketers. When asked about this issue, Gurtie made it very clear that the Linkie Winkie page will not make a profit for either her self or Chris.

Once the study ends, what will happen to Linkiewinkie.com? “We don’t know. We will not make money from it personally, is all I can promise. There has been speculation the site will be valuable but that may not necessarily be the case, depending on how the site develops. The uncertainty is a part of the experiment and we won’t be trying to influence that unduly.”

So what is Linkie Winkie studying? No one is sure of this yet but rest assured that one day you will know. When asked about the due date for the study, Gurtie replied that the study will end, “when we feel its run its useful course.” Of course, once the study ends, information about the study and possibly also information about the Linkie Winkie crawler will be published. “Either Chris or I may write a paper if we find the results especially interesting, but we don’t expect to draw formal scientific ‘findings’ from the project and make them public. We do expect to make information which will help anyone who’s been watching the project available, things like info from log files. Other people including those who were linked to, may also have interesting data to share but it will be up to them to either provide that information to us or to make it available in some way.”

Who will be interested in the data collected by Linkie Winkie? Gurtie feels that the information is interesting in both a SEO’s viewpoint and also a sociological viewpoint. “Personally I find the information interesting from both an SEO viewpoint (lots of linkage data and spidering data for anyone who’s looking at it) and a sociological viewpoint (how people consider Linkie Winkie, the way they react and interact with it) but I’m sure that other people are also finding it interesting for different reasons.”

This concludes Part I of the interview with Linkie Winkie. More is to come in the coming days so stay tuned and visit often for more. Please leave your comments and thoughts, we all would like to know your thoughts.