Blog News Watch

John Reese announced today that BlogRush will soon be available in new “flavors” - different color schemes that will help bloggers integrate the widget into their blog design more seamlessly.

He also takes on the “pyramid scheme”rs. One thing I never understood about this complaint - how can it be a scheme when no one’s out any money? This is a free tool, and as one of John’s commenters pointed out, either it works or it doesn’t. If it works, you keep it and so much the better. If it doesn’t, you aren’t out anything. You just take it off. What’s the problem? (And “you lose integrity” is soooo not an answer. I’m sorry - if a potential reader thinks I have less integrity for trying to offer my readers something extra, then that’s a reader I can do without.)

I’m not yet ready to call myself a BlogRush cheerleader yet but I’m certainly failing to see the support behind the complaints, at least so far.

I’ve delayed writing about BlogRush here, though I installed it on my Inspired Solo blog last weekend, because I wanted to give the blogosphere a few days to suss it out and see what the reaction was going to be, so I could sum it up.

What’s BlogRush?

BlogRush is the brainchild of John Reese, who blogs at Income.com . It debuted last weekend to much fanfare, and mixed reactions (see next heading). BlogRush is part sidebar widget, part affiliate/referral program. The widget is created by free code, generated by the BlogRush site upon completion of the sign-up process, which you insert into your sidebar. Then, it displays headlines from other blogs in your BlogRush category (Inspired Solo’s is law and legal.)

Of course, the other side to the value equation (besides the value to your readers of seeing other interesting headlines) is that your headlines get syndicated likewise on other blogs. How much exposure your headlines get depends on an impressions-based formula. You’re rewarded for traffic, clicks, and referrals to the program; the more exposure you give BlogRush, the more exposure it gives you in return.

Summing Up The Blogosphere’s Reaction

There have been several less-than-positive reviews of the service. The main complaints seem to be:

• Repeated headlines that don’t rotate in the widget window (this seems to have been fixed);
• Poor “match up” between and among some categories (BlogRush indicates it’s working on this problem by carving up too-broad categories even further);
• Low quality traffic;
• Low quantity traffic.

The last two problems depend partially on user behavior, as several commenters have pointed out. Many articles lately have focused on headline crafting. This makes ultimate sense, of course - it’s the headline that’s going to draw the attention of your would-be reader on some other BlogRush-enabled blog. You want to make sure that it meets several criteria, as I mention in this article at TIS.

A Note to Michael Martine

Here’s why I think BlogRush isn’t working, and most of the marketing category headlines on it are crap: Nearly all of the people who have signed up for it are too lazy to do what it takes to build their traffic the correct way. And that means that they’re also too lazy to create quality content that would result in getting clicked in the widget and that would benefit a blog’s readership. This lazy get something for nothing mentality compounds itself and the result is that the headlines that appear in the widget are crap. Given more time, more lazy people will sign up and there will be more… crap! So I don’t see how more time will help anything. There are so very few excellent blogs using BlogRush that it’s basically just a rush of crap.

No. I am not lazy. I do not skimp on creating good content for my readers. I also do not find “paid links” and “crap” in my widget. Finally, you really goofed by insinuating that if you’re not Problogger, DoshDosh, or - I guess - you, then your posts are “crap.” That might have been far from what you meant to say but that’s what it sounds like. And you know better. (You also don’t need to resort to some manufactured controversy to gen up your own traffic - you’re too good for that.)

Where I Stand

At TIS, I have experienced about a 10% uptick in traffic since installing BlogRush. While not all of that is due to the service, some of it is. I’m still monitoring the impact. I don’t know whether I’ll keep it up there, or take it down but right now, I don’t see a downside. The posts that are coming through seem to be of interest to my readers, even if tangential at best to my content (frankly, that’s a good thing - I wouldn’t want anything too directly competitive).

Anything that offers my readers more value that they might enjoy is fine with me. I don’t have the all-too-common fear (usually found in beginner bloggers - and it’s understandable because it all goes so contrary to our intuition) of sending readers away. I know they come back when I give them something of value. Although I took Michael to task earlier for some of his post on this subject, I do agree with him that the real value for bloggers is dependent on the quality of the posts featured in their widgets. If that changes for me, then it will definitely be hard to justify cluttering up the sidebar real estate with it on an ongoing basis.

As for “How To Geek”’s comment about “writing for a widget” - well, yeah, that would be stupid. I would hope my readers see the difference between being aware of a fact and chucking all previously held wisdom over in favor of said fact? My practice is quite simple: I write (or try to) good headlines. Then again, good headlines ARE short and contain no extraneous words. They also contain strong, active words; aren’t cute or gimmicky; accurately lead into the post; and have strong emotional impact. I just don’t see the difference between writing good headlines so you get noticed in a feed and writing good headlines so you get noticed in the BlogRush widget.

So, I am still going to maintain BlogRush on TIS, and see what the long-term impact is - whether the rise in traffic sticks around, and whether it leads to better conversions.

If you want to sign up for BlogRush, just click here and follow the simple instructions (note: not an affiliate link; if you want to throw some love my way, you can find the affiliate link in this post).

According to King Ramon and Problogger, Google’s webmaster tools have added the ability to track how many subscribers your site has through the Google readers (Google, Google Reader and Orkut). From King Nomar:

If you want to check how many of your RSS Readers are Google subscribers go to subscriber stats, select the site from which you want to check the number, click statistics and than click on Google subscribers. There you have it, the number of RSS readers that are subscribed through Google on your site.

Yep, I tried it and yep, it works!

Claremont, California finds itself embroiled in a dispute with a would be local expose blog, the Claremont Insider. (Personally, I’m always leery of anyone or any publication that labels itself an “insider” but perhaps I digress.)

Somehow, the Insider found copies of city employees’ pay stubs, according to this site on the city’s own web site. The Insider posted the stubs on its blog. The city, predictably, said “We think not,” sent the City Attorney to pay a call, and the Insider (predictably) balked. This is the version according to Slashdot; it should be noted that an attempt by the city to duplicate the web search that yielded the stubs in the first place, according to the blog, met with no success, as reported in the Daily Bulletin piece.

Slashdot attempts to portray this as a freedom of information/freedom of the press issue. Maybe it is. The Daily Bulletin quotes people involved (including Google and Blogger reps who pulled the post in question) as referring to Google’s terms of service and copyright interests in the paychecks.

Frankly, as a former public employee in South Carolina, it’s a privacy issue to me. Would you want your pay stub (which often carries personal information like social security numbers, addresses, and tax/health info via specific deductions for pre-tax programs) posted online? I wouldn’t. (It should be noted there’s no indication from these two pieces that there was private personal info involved but … dang, folks, it’s a paystub.)

The Slashdot argument that California law makes salary information public is meaningless, by the way; SC has a similar law, but what those laws mean is that the information itself is public. You can ask the city what a specific employee makes and the city has to disclose it. It does not mean you have a right to view that information as published on the paystub itself.

If you’re a business blogger, you might want to pay attention to this story. If you’re a business owner, and think blogs are silly new-fangled things that will pass and you don’t need one, by God, you definitely need to read this.

Last week, a reader blogged at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer website of a very disappointing experience she had with a local spa who refused to honor a gift certificate that had “expired” 11 days prior. She recounted the snippy, rude receptionist’s response (I especially love “I’m not sure what you want me to say”), and expressed her disappointment. Now, business owners, pay attention - she didn’t even name the spa. That’s a classy blogger, you’re thinking. Well - maybe. But she had zero obligation to be that discreet, and many other bloggers wouldn’t have been that nice. They’d have disclosed the name, location, name of the receptionist, time and date of the call, and address.

There was a happy ending, of sorts. The blogger updated that readers had encouraged her to call back and speak to the manager, which she did, and although the manager wasn’t “exactly chummy,” she did agree to honor the certificate until the end of the month.

Now what is the outcome for the spa? It’s tempting to think it won’t be impacted. After all, it wasn’t identified, and even if so, it did the right thing in the end, so what’s the harm? The harm is that this is already out there, and it’s a bell that can’t be unrung. Every potential customer is thinking, “That could be me. And I don’t go to a spa to be treated like that.” In fact, it might even be worse that the spa wasn’t identified. Now, every spa that offers gift certificates or used to is suspect. Is that a risk you’re willing to run for your business?

You’d better be aware that your business, and every single one of its employees, is on display for public consumption, and what used to be minor customer service scuffles that you could quickly rectify and sweep under the rug are now going to be immortalized on the web forever.

Here’s an interesting article from Information Week - Richard Martin writes about an experience he had asking a question at a Web 2.0 conference he attended:

I got a surprising answer today when I asked a question during today’s “Web 2.0 Gets Business Chops” panel discussion at the InformationWeek 500 conference in Tucson. My question was, “How do you handle off-topic discussions or inappropriate postings on corporate blogs and Wikis?” I expected the panelists, who included executives from Dell (Dell) and from Wells Fargo, to say that some form of moderation was needed to prevent flame wars, fantasy football discussions, and so forth. Instead they came down almost unanimously in favor of open, unfettered discussions and letting the power of the group steer the discourse. “You want to err on the side of letting people open their mouths and discuss things, without fear of being censored,” said open-source pioneer Brian Behlendorf, now the CTO at CollabNet.

Seriously, that was an executive talking. Granted, one well-known for advocating open-source technology, but still. This is good. Martin acknowledges later that he recognizes Behlendorf’s comments aren’t necessarily reflective of the consensus - that many CEOs still resist blogging at all. But, as he points out:

But it’s clearly a new day when executives at major companies are willing not only to launch their own blogs but to encourage free and open-ended discussion both within their organizations and with external customers, shareholders and so on. This in turn could help lead to the reform in corporate governance that many business analysts in this country consider long overdue. You can add blogging, and blog management, to the lengthening list of abilities the 21st-century CEO needs to have.

Information Week - Is Your Corporate Blog Flame Resistant?

Here’s a profile about Fort Lauderdale-based business man Jeff Block, who sells origami flowers from his JustPaperRoses.com site at the South Florida Business Journal online, and how his blog helped turn his business around.

If you’re looking for ammunition to convince your company to get into blogging, you really can’t do better than hard numbers and direct experience. Accumulate enough stories like Block’s and perhaps the old school holdouts will cave.

Business blogs get the word out - South Florida Business Journal

Yahoo has purchased BuzzTracker, o site that tracks stories based on how popular the stories are among bloggers, from former owner Participate Media out of Chicago, Illinois this past week. The site claims to track over 1000 topics on 90,000+ blogs, which gives Yahoo! an edge in competing with social sites like Digg.com, as well as other search engines like Google’s increasingly-used blog search function.

Read more about it at the link below from the San Jose Mercury News.

Yahoo buys blog content tracking firm - Mercurynews.com

San Francisco-based Six Apart, publisher of popular blogging software Movable Type and Typepad blogs, announced the CEO and Chair Barak Berkowitz is stepping down. The head of the software division, Chris Alden, will be taking Berkowitz’s place.

More here from Reuters UK - Executive shuffle at blog software maker Six Apart

Breaking news! According to this MSNBC.com article, Joan and Melissa Rivers are skipping the live presentation on TV this year and taking the Emmy fashion trashin’ routine to the blogwaves. They’ll be seen in two vidcasts and a specially produced video at VH1Eyecandy.com.

In other news, the apocalypse is right on schedule.