Vocino Labs

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.