Conversation with Jiglu CEO Nigel Cannings

Jiglu was one of the demopit companies at Techcrunch40 last month. They made an immediate impression on everyone as they had $1,000 in a clear briefcase which a man from NYC won at the end of the conference. Today Jiglu will announce that they have moved from a private beta to an open beta. In fact you can go signup now if you wish. To learn more about what Jiglu offers, I spoke with co-founder and CEO Nigel Cannings.

Jiglu's goal is to help a blog recirculate the content that might be deep within the blog and to find hidden relationships between the blog's content. This is similar to JS-Kit and Outbrain in their mission to help draw visitors deeper into a blog. While JS-Kit and Outbrain focus on ratings as their collection mechanism, Jiglu uses tagging for collection.

To use the Jiglu widget, you place a simple script code within your blog template. That activates the Jiglu engine and it begins to crawl your blog. Jiglu then determines the tags that match the content and provide similar content in the widget which allows your readers to discover new content. I asked the difference between the tags I set and the tags Jiglu creates - Nigel said that Jiglu uses an advanced algorithm to find the right tags - it's pretty intense.

Revenue generation will come from the search results they serve on the Jiglu Web site. The team originally worked on email applications and then moved into user-generated content with Jiglu.

One thing they can improve on (as frankly with many startups) is their company information - there is nothing on the site about who they are, what they do, location, bios, logos, etc. Make this information accessible for jounalists, bloggers, investors, etc. Users want to build trust with a company and this information is critical for creating relationships.

Jiglu was founded four years ago and they spent the majority of that time on research. The team is made up of four people with HQ in the U.K. and a "tiny, yellow" office in San Francisco.

Update: Chris at VentureBeat and Oliver at Blognation have some good insights on Jiglu as well.