Nick Wilson on the Hyperlink Hot Seat

Nick Wilson is the founder of Threadwatch, my *personal* favorite blog. If you read this blog, you know what Threadwatch is... enough said ;-)

1) Ask Jeeves: Up and coming 4th player, or forever 'B Team' material?

If Diller just sits on it, "B Team" all the way. If he pulls his finger out and actually does something with it then they stand a good chance of increasing market share, but even if he pulls out all the stops, i'm not convinced they'd be in with a shot at third place.

It's all about image. If they dumped that bloody stupid butler, rebrand as ASK, take a leaf out of Yahoo's book and open up to the rah rah blogpuppy mania movement, and promote a newer image, they could actually be dangerous. I don't see them having that much gumption or courage, but you never know, Diller could pull a rabbit out of the hat at any time with ASK.

2) In last week's Hyperlink Hot Seat, Aaron Wall commented on how Threadwatch has achieved a high level of success in a relatively short time (e.g., it's been blogrolled on sites like Search Engine Watch, Yahoo! Search Blog and Ask Jeeves Blog). To what do you attribute Threadwatch's steep growth curve of readership and recognition?

Being a bloody minded, egotistical, rude bastard. Didn't you know?

Seriously, I think people are bored of corporate suck up sites, any muppet can use an RSS reader and scan for news, but who wants to read the bland, boring, opinionless "commentary" that most sites in this space spew out?

I'd sooner stick my head in a bucket of cold sick...

3) You're responsible for inserting the words "bollocks" and "wanker" into my daily vocabulary. How do you feel about that?

Very proud. Fine british swear words! You'd not want your 12yr old child to be calling people wankers, but it's pretty mild and harmless really.

4) Sites like ClickZ and CNET are STILL extremely niggardly in re to their linking policy. Will this ever bite them in the butt? Or will they just get away with it forever?

I think both are way behind the curve regarding news, and the way it's reported. But I also think they'll probably get away with being arses for quite some time to come. CNet's latest attempt to catch up, "Blogma", is a farce, it only serves to prove how badly they misunderstand the current climate. As for Clickz, despite some of their staff being deeply unhappy with their non-conversational policies, they're about as clued in as CNet.

Who cares though?

5) The next time I have meat and mashed potatoes, I think I'll put a very large blob of potatoes on my plate with just a little piece of meat. And if someone asks me why I didn't get more meat, I'll just say, "Oh, you mean this?" and pull out a big piece of meat from inside the blob of potatoes, where I've hidden it. Good magic trick, huh?

Yeah! You know, if you did that with minced meat in gravy, you'd have Shepards Pie - And that's LEGAL :)