Pimp your Blog

I'm sort of guessing anybody reading blog posts is halfway looking to promote their own blog, so this one's for you, kids. Blogrush is an interesting widget that is intended to mix up the gene pool a bit with regard to blogs. You basically place your blog in a category and then you put your own custom widget for that category on your blog. (See left pane.) The widget has links to other blog posts in your category. Every link is tagged with your blogrush id so that they know who sent a page to that other blog. You get points every time someone clicks the widget to see one of the related blog posts. When you have enough points then links to your blog will pop up in other people's blogrush widgets.

The other thing about Blogrush is that it works like those Multi-Level-Marketing (MLM) referral schemes that were all the rage in the late 90's and early 2000's. You can get referrals, and you get credit for basically any blog reading action that's caused by your referrals too. You've all heard the MLM line, join now before everybody in the world finds out about it and there are still blogrush virgins, so you can get this massive army of referrals and get lots of traffic to your blog. Some people believe that schemes like this are illegal. Indeed, the structure is the same as a pyramid scheme, which is totally illegal, but the intent here is different. As long as you're not moving money up the pyramid, it's OK.

Blogrush have very detailed statistics. It's worth it to join just to see those. It gives you an idea of how well-read your blog is. And it shows you all your referrals. For what it's worth, it's scored me a few reads.

Feed Blitz Chiclet

FeedBlitz Chiclet: What is FeedBlitz? And what is a chiclet (or chicklet, as it is sometimes spelled?) FeedBlitz is an outfit that creates and manages a subscription list for your blog FREE. And the term "chiclet" has come to mean any web third party dynamic thing that does interesting Web 2.0 stuff on the back end. Usually a chicklet is visually enhanced by placing it in or on a 3-d background resembling an old-fashioned chiclets brand of gum. Chiclets has been acquired by Cadbury Adams, in case you're interested. How it works: You tell Feedblitz the feed address for your blog. They provide a mechanism whereby people can request a notification via email --anonymously if they want!-- whenever the blog is updated. Feed Blitz also supports other notification methods as well, as it turns out.

I know email isn't very sexy, but it's a lot easier to get a non techie's head around email than RSS. "Get notified by email when this blog is updated" is something most people can understand. I know the youngsters are abandoning traditional email in favor of texting and IM, but the oldsters (35+) still use email, and I wouldn't want to leave that demographic in the dust.

What I did was steal the styles and layout that FeedBlitz uses for their little info panels and put their code on one. Unfortunately Blogger won't allow the whole chiclet in the post, but you can see the chiclet in all it's glory in the left pane, second down. Go ahead, give it a whirl and subscribe. You can always unsubscribe if you don't like it. No hard feelings.

I just found out another thing about the Feedblitz email. It actually contains a link in the email to a place that will read the article out loud (in a robot voice) for you, courtesy of Talkr. Well, I successfully captured the links, but there's even an easier way: If you sign up at talkr.com you can get it automatically installed at the beginning of each blog post. also radio.talkr.com allowed me to create the audo summary select that you see in the left panel. It too is dynamic. KEWL!