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When I woke up this morning, I had an email in my inbox from a project manager at Criteo. His email invited me to try a new blog widget his team produced entitled AutoRoll. The idea is simply to share popular blogs within the same topic area with the readers of my blog, with other bloggers doing the same. Here’s some of the detail outlined from the email.

What’s all about? AutoRoll is the blog roll of your readers. It’s a widget that displays links to blogs your readers are visiting the most often.

How does it work? We trace the number of visits of each unique reader on each blog that has installed AutoRoll. The more often a reader visits a specific blog, the greater his affinity is with this blog.

What are the benefits for you? First of all, you will provide your readers with a very entertaining blog roll, based on other readers with similar reading habits. Moreover, you will get highly qualified incoming traffic for your blog. Indeed, as other similar blogs display your blog on their AutoRoll, they will feed you with new readers with a strong affinity with your blog.

I found the setup of the widget to be simple. I provided my blog name and URL, and I chose some basic layout options for the widget including colors, size, and positioning. After saving my changes, I simply had to place some JavaScript provided by Criteo into my sidebar.

Refreshing my homepage, I found that the blogs showed up almost as expected. In Firefox, list bullets are displaying beside each blog, and I’ve followed up with the project manager in an attempt to resolve this. It may be something that requires a change to my stylesheet; however, I doubt that I will be the only one encountering this issue, and it will be in the best interest of Criteo to ensure the widget displays properly for everyone regardless of the stylesheet settings.

In all, I found that it’s another widget similar to MyBlogLog in that it is intended to bring bloggers closer together as a community while offering relevant information to readers. It has the potential to be promising for both authors and readers, and I’m interested in seeing if it increases the number of visitors I receive.