Another new blog-centric service has recently emerged, called BlogRush. I guess it’s still pretty new, judging by the look and feel of their website — plus the fact that there are still a few “Under Construction” pages in there. It looks promising, though.
What BlogRush does is to provide bloggers with a way to get their content displayed in other blogs of similar topic. The whole thing works in a I’ll-show-yours-if-you-show-mine kind of system. Basically what happens is, blog feeds (post titles and blog names only) appear in a widget that you display on your sidebar. Five feeds to be exact, and each is clickable to the actual blog post.
A somewhat similar service that I used to use was BlogExplosion, which aimed to do just about the same thing as BlogRush: to increase exposure to more blogs out there.
BlogRush’s options / user settings aren’t very sophisticated yet, and there are still no statistics reporting. But like I said, they’re still new. But I do have a wishlist:
- User control over the widget’s dimensions and colors
- User control over the number of blog feeds to display
- More granular categorization of content
- WordPress plugin (although it’s actually peanuts to publish the code using a Text widget for self-hosted WP blogs)
Try it out — who knows, BlogRush might just be the next big thing!
8:09 pm on 17 Sep 2007
Hi Blogie - There is a lot of speculation out there that BlogRush may be a violation of AdSense Terms of Service, so I would advise moving slowly until Google clarifies their position on this.
11:00 am on 20 Sep 2007
Hmm, interesting. I’ll look around this new Blogrush thing.
10:32 am on 28 Sep 2007
I still don’t know where I stand on this really. but it seems a great idea.
9:10 pm on 28 Sep 2007
I don’t really like anything looking broken on my sidebar, so I felt I had to remove the widget for now. Until BlogRush comes up with ways to control the widget’s dimensions, it stays off my sidebar. I like the service, though, so I hope they improve soon.