Tool For Wine Bloggers: An Interview with Chris Golda, Co-Founder of Backtype

Recently, we were asked to provide more information on a blogging tool called Backtype. Backtype is a conversational search engine that indexes and connects conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media, whereby allowing us to find, follow and share comments. In that same article, we also received a very considerate invitation from the co-founder of Backtype, Chris Golda, to provide a detailed explanation of this incredible powerful tool. Clearly, we couldn’t say no to such a juicy offer.

What initiated the creation of Backtype?

Initially, we wanted to create BackType so we could see what blogs people were reading and commenting on. Now we have much greater ambition for BackType, and we’re working on many new products and services.

How can a wine blogger effectively use Backtype?

We offer a collection of widgets and plugins related to comments that bloggers may be interested in. The most popular is the BackType Connect Wordpress plugin, which finds and displays comments related to your content from blogs, Twitter, Digg, and much more. Alternatively, you can use BackType Connect on our website to see where people are discussing your content. Soon we’ll be offering the same functionality for publishing platforms other than Wordpress.

What are the most common misconceptions of the search engine?

There are two common ones: 1) that we are or compete with third party comment systems, and 2) that we only track comments on blogs. Our Wordpress plugin runs on top of the native Wordpress comment system, so we don’t compete with popular third party comment systems like IntenseDebate or Disqus. Also, we track conversations from blogs, social networks, social news sites, and more.

For a budding new wine blogger, how would you suggest getting their feet wet?

If you’re just getting started, you probably don’t have many people commenting on your blog. A great way to promote more conversation is to use our Wordpress plugin. Also, I recommend signing up for BackType Alerts, which e-mails you whenever a search term you’re interested in is mentioned in a comment. I use it to follow comments made about “Krug Champagne.” It’s a great way to find conversations to participate in; if you write good comments, people will visit the URL you publish with your comment and you can start building you own readership.