Q&A: Alex Bloomingdale of Enotes.com

eNotes.com is an online service that connects students and teachers both to each other and to high-quality reference content. It is a comprehensive educational resource and their goal is to be the ultimate destination site for studying and teaching, a place where people can come together to discuss and study a wide range of academic topics.

On the site you will find literature study guides featuring a cross-section of classic novels, lesson plans, literary criticism and the ability to chat, discuss and debate various topics, from the meaning of a quote in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the differences between realistic prose and naturalistic writing. Students can join the Othello Group or the Huckleberry Finn Group; the To Kill a Mockingbird group clocks in with 438 members as of late April.

Enotes also features a vibrant blog that includes commentary and often hilarious gossip about authors as varied as Thomas Hardy, Norman Mailer, and Augusten Burroughs.

I sat down with Alex Bloomingdale, co-founder of enotes:

Who primarily is your subscriber base?

Our 450,000 registered users are individual students, teachers, and families. We don't deal directly with institutions; we focus on the consumer market. Roughly, we are 50 percent college kids, 20 percent high school kids and 25 percent teachers.

Who did you look to for inspiration during the development of enotes? Are there precedents?

We like simple websites which connect people such as craigslist and wikipedia, however we try to take what makes sites like that strong and marry it with an equally strong commitment to accuracy and mutual respect.

What is the relationship between enotes and traditional libraries? Do you see public libraries as a threat or an ally?

Ultimately libraries are a huge ally because they can direct people to the best reference and community sites online. There is a massive untapped value of traditional libraries that we would like to help unlock in the future. One day we hope to create a version of eNotes which is available to libraries, but for now we are focusing on the consumer side. We do feel that librarians and libraries will down the road be an important component of the site.

How does enotes positively affect students? Is there a way one can abuse the system?

eNotes provides a service to students by giving them huge amounts of carefully checked, accurate, easy-to-use reference content in one place. This minimizes time spent searching and maximizes time spent understanding and analyzing a work. Our groups and question-and-answer section allow students to check in with teachers and with their peers and get a sense of what others think about a particular topic or text.

Any system is open for abuse, but with teacher access to enotes and to services like turnitin.com, we feel that the potential for abuse is minimized. We now live in an era where massive amounts of information are freely and easily available. Rather then fight this, teachers need to embrace it and realize that a crucial skill they will teach their students is the ability to find, filter, and apply information to the texts they're studying.

Who writes the lesson plans and lectures?

We hire free-lance writers, most of whom are college professors or high school English teachers. So far all of our writers are actually current or former subscribers, so they intimately know the site and what our needs are.

What are some past goals achieved? what are some future marks you'd like to hit.

A big goal was launching our q and a system, which has now answered more then 10,000 questions, and been an unqualified success for both our students and teachers. We'd now like to bulk up our "study groups"
area with more features.

Technically, what type of system do you use to manage content and analyze traffic?

For managing content we have an in-house solution which integrates vastly different types of content from a wide variety of publishers as well as managing our interactive features. We started developing the system in 2004 and it continues to get more complex yet at the same time easier to manage. For analyzing traffic we use both an in-house tracking system and Google's Analytics product.

Do you have goals for expansion?

We are continually expanding the site's offerings, and are working to bring even more reference content to the site, along with adding to the basic feature-set available to users. Our goal is to have significant amounts of content for both teachers and students in all academic areas.

Who are your competitors?

We don't have a single competitor who competes with us in all areas, but some other sites with similar pieces are Sparknotes, Britannica, Answers.com.

Enotes continues to chisel out its home in the marketplace: today, they have 3 million monthly unique visitors and 11 million daily page views. Log on and check it out yourself.