Kimengi.com, founded by Dutch entrepreneur Lucien Burm, is providing a „short widget based recommendation technology“ called f»dforward. Lucien explains: „You insert a widget in your blog and it creates recommendations automatically for your own website. You can tell which other blogs you like and start recommending them on your pages – and they can recommend you as well. It’s a bit Twitter-like, following people and blogs.“ According to Lucien, Kimengi will not only grow your own blog network, but serve you more and more interested readers. It provides you with information tools that „make you write more and better stuff“ by offering insight into what other subjects your readers are interested in – today, this week, last month.
Furthermore, Kimengi is about to build „a very new recommendation engine, a bigger thing that takes more time“. Lucien points out that „very personal and real-time recommendations are difficult to do on a large scale.“ Other than content-focussed Semanta, Kimengi has „the network thing that they don’t have“ says Lucien „on the other hand we don’t provide tools to get your Flickr pictures on a certain kind of subject.“ After having tested Kimengi with some tens of blogs in Holland, Lucien reveals „some very rudimentary figures“: „15% of people that have been served recommendations follow them. We found that quite high and were not expecting it.“
Kimengi is a „free service for blogs forever“ says Lucien and hopes to monetize its technology by providing the same kind of tools on corporate websites.
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