Gilpho: New Blogging Platform Worth A Look

Interview With Glipho CEO Roger Planes

A new blogging platform has launched: GLIPHO.  The company says: “While over 200 million people worldwide are currently blogging, only a  fraction are  gaining  traction or recognition, leaving the internet as a vast, disconnected space for so many writers.  Glipho is the solution for increasing visibility and connecting the social media dots.  The state-of-the-art publishing platform provides all necessary social sharing tools and a ready-made audience of like-minded bloggers and visitors to guarantee your voice gets heard. Posts are grouped by shared topics to bring similar users -- aka Gliphers – together to ensure maximum exposure of your Gliph.  Gliphers love other Gliphers. Gliphers share articles, compete to be trending writers, “like” each other’s content, and use Glipho's radical discussion tools to grow the conversation. Already have a blog? No problem! Glipho’s unique technology allows users to import existing blogs from other platforms and automatically tag the page in such a way that search engines don’t crawl them – removing any problems with duplicate content for the originating blog.”

BookMarketingBuzzBlog recently conducted this interview with Glipho CEO Roger Planes:

Why did you see a need to launch a new blogging platform? When I had a blog I would find myself spending more time with the design, social plugins and using external platforms trying to get an audience than actually writing anything. I needed a community where I could simply focus on writing and sharing my thoughts with other writers and readers.  While the way we use the internet has changed a lot in the past 10 years, publishing platforms have remained the same. It was only logical to bring the community and power of social networking to traditional blogging.

What advantages/features do you offer that other blogs don't? There are 12 main differences between Glipho and traditional blogs:

1.      Glipho is a community and a social publishing engine as well as a blogging platform.  Traditional blogging platforms provide a site or space to blog but interaction with the rest of the internet or other users on the site is limited or complicated.

2.      Glipho writers can import blogs from other blogging platforms.  This functionality is unique.  Blogs are imported but automatically tagged in such a way that search engines don’t crawl them.  This removes any problems with duplicate content for the originating blog.

3.      Unlike old school platforms Gliphers create a profile and not a blog.  They then write Gliphs on their profile.  Today’s internet is about personality and voice.  Twitter and Facebook show us the importance of individuality and Glipho brings that ethos to the blogosphere.

4.      No Design – Glipher’s  join the community and get writing!  No design, no branding – it’s all about content and personality.  Traditional platforms look terrible unless you happen to be an expert graphic designer (most bloggers aren’t)

5.      Quality Content  – Traditional publishing platforms have no focus on quality.  Glipho is a hub for quality text, video and photos.  A minimum 150 word count on ALL posts  provides a barrier to junk.  Great quality content ranked better and is shared across social media more than low grade posts on traditional platforms

6.      Glipho is all about traffic and audience generation.  Traditional platforms don’t focus on bringing readers to posts.  In Glipho this is baked right in with relational content , onsite followers and powerful social sharing applications.  Blogging is a dispiriting game if no one reads the content! The average Gliph gets over 150 views.  No traditional platforms have metrics that can compete. 

7.      Ease of Publishing – Glipho’s  “Desk” publishing system was designed by bloggers for bloggers.  Unique drag and drop functionality from linked YouTube Instagram, Picass, Flickr and accounts is seamless.

8.      Automated Twitter and Facebook  and Linkedin Publishing – whilst this can be set up on traditional platforms it is complex and completely automated on Glipho!

9.      Trending Writers – again Glipho is all about the people and Glipho’s  proprietary algorithm displays current most popular Gliphers.    No traditional platforms take this approach and our users love it!

10.  Trending Posts – a feature more commonly associated with social networks and never on blogging platforms.  This functionality is a huge hit on Glipho.

11.  Whilst traditional platforms allow comments often powered by clunky third party applications Glipho’s proprietary discussion system encourages real community engagement and discussion.  A sophisticated and unique version system allows Glipher’s to create alternative content versions (reviews and recipes are particularly popular).

12.  Highly Search Engine Optimized – the relational nature of the content (Gliphs are all connected to other Gliphs), extensive social sharing and the optimized infrastructure of the site means search engines rank Gliphs higher than posts on traditional publishing platforms.

What is your background that positions you to offer this new mechanism? I have spent the early years of my professional life working as a developer / social media strategist / SEO analyst in the media industry, helping to create sites and platforms for journalists to achieve their goals.

I wanted to provide the simplicity of the tools I had been creating in the past not to small group of journalists but to anybody who wanted to take advantage of them. Glipho combines a powerful editor with a real social experience that writers haven’t seen before. Every piece of content is connected to other content, so it is easy to discover new writers, new topics, and to get lost reading interesting gliphs.

What do most bloggers need or look for in a platform? Bloggers blog because they want to write and to some extent have their writing be read. They don’t want to blog alone, spending most of their time on designs, social plugins, and trying to find an audience that will read them. We designed Glipho from that point of view. We wanted to create a place where people could simply write and communicate with their readers and other writers, a site where people are already waiting for what you have to say.  All you have to do is write something and you will see how many people read it and, most importantly, engage with you. We are bringing the power of social networking to traditional blogging, something nobody has done before.

How will you be profitable? At this stage we are privately funded and we are only focused on refining the platform to provide the service bloggers want and growing the existing community of writers. 

Glipho is a publishing platform, a social network, and a content site all in one. The question is how a site like this could not be profitable for us and for our users.

How should authors work with you? Actually the author community is one of the biggest we already have on Glipho. Indie writers publish excerpts or chapters of their work and receive a great amount of feedback on the stories they are publishing. If you publish original content on Glipho, it gets picked up by search engines, giving authors more exposure than any other blog could give you. The future of content is authorship and that’s what Glipho is about, your profile, your content, and you can easily set up Glipho with Google Authorship in less than a minute.