Blogosphere Can And Will Influence

I invite all of you to partake in a discussion I started on Performancing.com in relation to the influence of the blogosphere. In this post (5 Events The Blogosphere Influenced) I highlight five seperate events in which the blogosphere played a major role in the outcome. While performing research for this article, I discovered that politics and blogging appear to be the most widely used method of measuring influence. Another thing I learned is that, in this realm of blogging, the Army Of One attitude need not apply. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you do, if the blogosphere decides one way or the other, thats just the way it’s going to be, no questions asked.

Imagine being on the receiving end of a blogosphere ass whooping!

Blogging By The Numbers

BlogHeraldLogo Anne Helmond of the Blog Herald has wrote an interesting article that questions whether or not, the number of blogs within the blogosphere still matters and if anyone out there is still bothering to count.

Anne asked a number of questions within her article such as:

Is the medium mature now? Is that why nobody seems to be counting blogs anymore? Do we no longer feel the need to count blogs because we have established their importance?

I think the reason why no one is counting blogs anymore is the simple reason that no one can come up with an accurate number. Using numbers that are published by Technorati should not be a single handed way of measuring the blogosphere. There are more blogs on the net than one could imagine, but there doesn’t appear to be a way to accurately measure the difference between a blogger, scraper or splogger. This problem of accurate metrics appears not only in the blogosphere, but it’s a severe problem within podcasting, advertising, and just about anything else dealing with the internet. Therefor, I think the problem is that no one cares how many blogs there are. No one cares how many of this or how many of that there are. How can they, when the numbers have no way of being proved accurate.

The comments that have appeared on this blog herald article are a good indication that people understand that this is a metrics problem, a problem that inherently has no single solution. There are so many variables to consider when trying to accurately determine the number of blogs on the net, that it’s mind boggling. Metrics is a science that we have yet to figure out. Until the problem of metrics is solved, I don’t see how anyone could take any numbers that are published without a block of salt.

Is The BlogRush Over With?

When I initially became aware of BlogRush and it’s associated claims of rushing traffic to blogs, I became extremely interested. As a blogger myself, I’m always looking into new ways to generate traffic. As we now know, BlogRush has itself experienced a rush, a rush that I believe is bigger than any smalltime blogger currently using their widget, has experienced. Their system is simple and at face value looks like it would work for everyone, but after reviewing my stats, it looks like it won’t work for me.

Out of 2,401 impressions or appearances on various sites, only 4 people have clicked a headline attributed to my site. If you ask me, that’s not exactly a rush of traffic. Now I know it could be possible that the headlines to my articles suck, but is that really the case? My blog is currently competing within the Computers and Internet category and I myself have clicked on a few of the links within the widget on and have found some really cool sites. However, till this day, I have yet to see any of my posts appearing on anyone else’s widget. I even spent half an hour, clicking on various posts from one widget to the next, and I never saw one post from my site.

It’s also worth mentioning that I have checked both my Entry pages, and my Exit pages for the widget url. As we’ve seen earlier, at least 4 people have used the article headline on the widget as an entrance page to my site. However, there are 25 hits for the widget url being used as an exit page. Although I don’t know how many of those exits are attributed to myself, I really feel as if I’m doing everyone else a favor, by having this widget published on my site versus helping myself out.

The only people that seem to be benefiting from this service are the big blogs who most likely have quite a few referrals. BlogRush has stated in their latest email that:

We’ll soon be adding a bonus credit system that gives certain bonuses only to our low traffic members since they need the help the most!

That may be enough to help us small timers out, but only time will tell. So far, I’m experiencing lack luster results with BlogRush and apparently, these people are too although I’m not sure why Darren is using Blogrush as his blog gets enough traffic as it is.

ProBlogger.Net

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BlogRush What Is This New BuzzWord

Theres a new buzzword in town that is sweeping across the blogosphere like wildfire, but what is it? That word is, BlogRush. A new way of generating traffic to your site or blog.

As I was monitoring my RSS feeds on a very early Saturday morning, I read a post that discussed BlogRush and what it was suppose to do. I saved it in my news bin as I was interested and wanted to give it a try. Here we are, two days later and this BlogRush widget is appearing on just about every site that can be considered a blog.

Background Info:

BlogRush in it’s simplest form is a content syndication network. If you add the widget to your blog, your own site will appear on other blogs with the widget installed. I know it may sound like one of those other blog advertising deals but this service dives into the equation a bit deeper.

BlogRush works like this. Users signup and install the widget and display it somewhere on their site. If your site receives 100pageviews a day, your blog links will appear 100 times on other BlogRush widgets across the network. That’s great and all, but here comes the juicy part. If a user who is browsing your site clicks on the tab underneath the widget that reads ADD YOUR BLOG POSTS FOR FREE and they signup for an account, that user is added to your own BlogRush account as a referal. Now, when that user installs the widget to their site, your blog content will appear on that users widget 100 times in addition to the 100 times your site would appear across the network. As you add more referrals to your account and gain more traffic to your site, your traffic grows exponentially.

What I’ve Noticed:

Throughout the day on Saturday, I noticed that the same links would appear on my BlogRush widget, no matter how many times I refreshed the page. I think this was due to the lack of websites that were added to the same category as mine. However, the links have changed each time I have loaded my front page today, so that problem appears to be fixed. I also want to let you know that I myself, have clicked on a few of the links that appear on the widget that is published on this blog because they have been relevant and interesting. So in a sense, I have demonstrated to myself how this syndication network works.

Since displaying the widget, I can attest to seeing at least 5 people who were visiting this site who were referred by a BlogRush widget. The reason for this varies. Either the headlines to my articles suck or, it was early in the adoption phase. Considering this widget is gaining in popularity extremely fast, I expect to see the referral links increasing as time goes by.

Improvements Needed:

I’d like the ability to edit the width of the widget. The one on this site is just a pixel or 2 too big and it’s crunching the left sidebar. Right now, there is no way to edit the size of the widget. There are also no reports or stats as of yet. Apparently, that part of the service is still under construction. At first, I wanted to suggest a way for us to customize which sites appear on the widgets based on tags, but I have to admit, the BlogRush algorithm seems to be doing a pretty good job displaying related content.

At times, there are blog headlines that appear in my widget which seem screwed up. The headlines appear as all question marks as if I don’t have the language pack the headline was written in. It could also be the case that the blog entry was spam. Speaking of blog spam, it will be interesting to see if BlogRush actually syndicates blogspam which in my opinion would send this service back to where it came from.

Conclusion:

This service has come out of no where and is really taking the blogging world by storm. John Reese hit the nail on the head with this service although, I’m not sure what the revenue model is just yet. If you own a blog or a website and you need traffic, definitely give this service a try. It’s free, it’s easy to install, and so far, it seems to be working. If you would like to take part in this blogging phenomenon, be sure to visit BlogRush.com and sign up for your own free account.

If you are currently using BlogRush, I’d be very interested in hearing your experience with it thus far.

New Month Means New Poll

During the month of August, I asked readers if they would like me to produce a podcast based on the content that has been featured on this site. The results are in:

Should I Produce A Podcast For This Site?

Yes (57%, 13 Votes)
No (43%, 10 Votes)

Total Voters: 23

It was close, but it looks like I better put my podcast hat on. So with that in mind, I’d like to present to you my idea for the podcast. I was thinking of calling the podcast, AROUND THE BLOGOSPHERE. The podcast would be produced LIVE every Friday Evening at 9PM EST on Talkshoe and would last anywhere from a half hour to 60 minutes. The interviews will be open to discussion on various topics such as what the blog author covers on his or her own blog, blogging in general, their thoughts and opinions on various subjects, tips and tricks for other bloggers, discussion of topics in the news, and anything else that comes to mind. It won’t be a tightly arranged format. I want guests who appear on the show to feel like they are entering a relaxed environment without all of the stress or expectations that may accompany other shows.

If you are a blog author and want to appear on the show, please contact me and tell me which Friday you would be available. As it stands, all slots are empty, but I’d love to fill them up. I’m looking to produce the first show on Friday September 21st, 2007. Who is going to be the first guest on the show?

With that out of the way, it’s time for a new poll question. I’ve been thinking about adding forums to this site, but I’m still not sure if they would be productive or counter productive to the web site. The decision is now in your hands. Vote yes if you would like to see forums attached to this site, or vote no if you could care less.

Track Web 2.0 Startups With StartUp Search

Track the crazy Web 2.0 startup race from an investor perspective by using StartupSearch.org

StartupSearch.org is a directory of startup companies, products and investors that are changing the landscape of the web. At the time of this writing, there are 76 companies, 86 products, and 136 investors that are being tracked. StartupSearch takes information about new startup companies and compiles the information into easy to digest profile pages. Let’s use Twitter as an example.

Twitters profile page displays information such as, company founders, funding, photos tagged with Twitter, company address, Twitter specific news brought you by an RSS feed, and a Googlemaps image showing the location of their headquarters.

Each company that is profiled on StartupSearch receives a Startup score. A Startup score is made up of two parts, buzz and traffic. The buzz score is a measurement of the conversations taking place on the net involving the product. StartupSearch tracks unique citations excluding the originating site, total and unique links from the blogosphere, mentions within blog posts, and other mentions.

The traffic score measures a site’s visitors as well as the site’s visitor behaviour as reported by StartUpSearch’s traffic sources. Here are the elements that make up the traffic score: total unique users, total visits, visists per users, and other metrics which help to determine the overall behaviour of the site’s visitors.

One last thing to mention before I let you go. StartUpSearch provides an RSS feed which contains a weekly wrap-up of news related to the companies being tracked. This could be a nice addition to your feedreader to stay ahead of what’s happening.

Overall, StartUpSearch does a wonderful job in presenting company specific information. I have to imagine that there are more than 76 companies online that need to be tracked but because the site is maintained by only one person, it’s probably a moot point in trying to track every startup company that comes online.

If you happen to visit this site, let me know if you like the way StartUpSearch displays company information when compared to CrunchBase Techcrunch’s version of company profiles.

Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff

The Musings Of Jeff Chandler

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