What the heck is Linkie Winkie? That’s the question everyone is asking. As it turns out though, even the two founders of LinkieWinkie.com are still learning the answer to that question themselves.

Denise (AKA…) was kind enough to answer a few questions about the social experiment and internet phenomenon known as Linkie Winkie. Enjoy!

#1 - What gave you the idea to start Linki Winkie?
Linkiewinkie.com was a name that I mentioned as a joke when I was explaining something to someone at SearchGuild, but I registered it ‘just because’ and then we wondered what to do with it. We threw a couple of ideas around and Chris (Ridings) came up with the basic idea, which we both found interesting so we refined it a little, wrote the code and put it live.

#2 - How do the amount of links coming into your site compare with your original expectations?
We really didn’t know how many links we’d get. I wasn’t really expecting things to happen the way they have but I was expecting the site to be picked up by a different group of people and ‘used’ in a different way to how things have turned out - this is a genuine ‘what will happen?’ experiment and its really interesting both socially and from an SEM/SEO viewpoint (to us at least) .

#3 - When do you think your experiment will be finished? Or is it ongoing?
Its ongoing. It will finish, at least the experiment will, at some point because useful data and feedback will stop, but we haven’t set a date for that.

#4 - Do you ever plan on using this domain for something other than the Linki Winkie experiment?
We don’t have any plans for it. Specifically, we don’t plan to turn it into a site to profit from large numbers of back links! (NOTE from FPF: She saw right through our sneaky journalism tricks…lol)

#5 - Tell us a little about yourself, and/or anyone else involved in the project.
Its a joint project between Chris Ridings (of the original PR paper fame) and I (Gurtie of, erm, a few forums and places but mainly SearchGuild and GHN). For many many people playing the Linkie Winkie game who we are isn’t too relevant and while our identities and what we do is in no way hidden we’ve also tried not to use our names or influence other than in a couple of initial posts so we don’t bias the experiment any more than necessary.