BlogRush: Blog Syndication Network
- The Business, Technology entry posted on September 15th, 2007.
One thing I hate about blogs is too much non-styled crap on the home pages and side bars. In an effort to generate traffic a lot of bloggers sign up for all kinds of widgets and other nonsense.
When I first heard about BlogRush, the blog syndication network, their concept was pretty good. It’s basically a multi-level marketing type of system where bloggers can refer other bloggers and add to the amount of impressions they earn for their own blog. It goes 10 levels down the line even. So if someone that was referred by me then refers a very popular blog, those hits will still benefit me.
Not at all a bad idea. I could definitely see how this could build up rather quickly.
The Widget
Here’s where it gets annoying. In order to generate these views, you have to stick this ugly widget on your page. Obviously, you want to give it as much exposure as possible, while not destroying everything of your design you worked so hard for.
This might be fine for most people — the blogger.com people, the template users, the sploggers, etc. For me though, it’s not that great. I don’t want this thing on my pages. Is that so hard to believe? Do they expect to get approval from the Kottkes or the Zeldmans with that kind of thing?
Think About Advanced Bloggers
Now I can understand that a lot of people just want drop-in javascript that looks decent and works. Boom, done.
However, in order to capture a higher-end user for a service like BlogRush, you’re going to need to offer fully customized solutions. That is to say, complete control over style and implementation.
Del.icio.us is doing it right. The code output from their widget is completely customizable (this is what I use for my “Links” section on the bottom of the homepage). Every element in their output has a class or id assigned to it and the output is nice and neat standard HTML. What’s wrong with that?
Although Del.icio.us offers the ability to completely de-brand their output, I would be happy with it even if there were a little branding attached. Something like that — with a bit of branding — but still decently customizable output, would be great for BlogRush.
That way I could have it live somewhere on my sidebar and integrate it how I want. In most cases, when considering the internet-savvy of my and other higher-end blog readership, I believe a fully integrated widget would actually get much more traffic overall than something which seems completely detached from the site.
Sorry, Not Yet
As much as I’d like to grab some of the free traffic, I can’t live with myself while having the BlogRush widget abortion on my side bar. If something akin to the Del.icio.us (and others) widget is in the works, I would most definitely stick around.
7 Responses to “BlogRush: Blog Syndication Network”rss
John Reese, on September 15th, 2007, said:
Hey Travis,
John Reese here, the creator of BlogRush.
Thanks for the candid review of our service. You raise some valid points about what we are doing. I just wanted to mention a couple of things…
We are in the process of adding color customization to the widget so people can match it better to the style of their blogs — we just wanted to get out a “neutral” black style, that seems to look at least decent on most blogs, for our public beta launch.
You raise an interesting point about not being able to have control over the SIZE and format. While I completely agree with you about the advantage of being able to do that with widgets and other 3rd party data, the problem with what we are doing is that the only way for our system to be FAIR to all users in such an ‘exchange’ of content distribution is to have it UNIFORM so all members are providing the same format of an “impression” — even, though, certainly some may give the widget more exposure (higher up, for example) than others. Since our system is based on impressions and not clicks, it would be extremely hard for us to run a BALANCED system with users using it in many formats — some giving a lot of exposure and others giving very little depending on their integration.
But THANK YOU for your feedback. We have made a note of all your comments and suggestions!
A Fellow MacBook Pro User,
~John
Travis, on September 15th, 2007, said:
Ah, the impression system does make it difficult but I think to a certain extent you need to trust the user. I could just as easily hide your widget from human visitors and still get impressions. Doing this on a bunch of spam blogs would really start racking up the numbers.
Ultimately, I think having a higher potential for capturing the interest of top-teir bloggers with advanced customization outweighs the inevitable cheaters.
I do really like the concept and I hope to be able to integrate it into my sites when/if the customization changes are available.
Stop Rushing Me about BlogRush! | Ian Fernando, on September 15th, 2007, said:
[...] Vocinno.com says: Here’s where it gets annoying. In order to generate these views, you have to stick this ugly widget on your page. Obviously, you want to give it as much exposure as possible, while not destroying everything of your design you worked so hard for. [...]
MaxBlogPress, on October 16th, 2007, said:
I recently developed a free wordpress plugin called “BlogRush Click Maximizer”. By using it you can vastly improve your Click Through Rate.
This allows you to control what you want to display in BlogRush. You can even write alternate - short and catchy title just for BlogRush.
You will have total control of what appears over the BlogRush Network.
Check it out here:
http://www.maxblogpress.com/plugins/bcm/
Idetrorce, on December 15th, 2007, said:
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
Futon-Matt, on January 14th, 2008, said:
I have blogrush on both my blogs and I don’t get much traffic from them.
WTF is an Entrecard? from Travis Vocino, on May 9th, 2008, said:
[...] I get nervous. Well, “nervous” isn’t the right word, more like skeptical. I mean, remember BlogRush? Don’t get me started on that [...]
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