BlogRush: WTF?

If you look toward the bottom of my right sidebar you’ll see a widget for BlogRush. BlogRush, for those that have never heard of it, is a system where one blog, such as this one, signs up, puts the widget someplace prominent and earns credits each time the page is loaded. The credits then are spent each time a headline from said blog appears on another blog’s widget. So, in theory, I should never see “Chipped Polish” in the widget and the headlines should change with every page load. In theory.

I discovered today that’s just wrong. I happened to see an interesting headline in the widget on my front page, so I went to that post. Here’s a screenshot of the widget as it appeared on my blog.

(click to make bigger)

You’ll notice the arrow and where it’s pointing. The headline to which I was referring was “Not the f*$^ing bathroom!!!!” from Twisted Visage. (Very funny post, by the way)

While I was there I noticed her widget. The headlines on her were nearly identical to the ones I noticed on my blog. Her widget even included her headline! Wow. Just wow.

The problem isn’t Twisted Visage*. That blog is very interesting and the post is hilarious. The problem is the BlogRush widget. It’s obviously not doing what it’s been hyped to do. To make sure I wasn’t seeing a glitch just this once I surfed the widget (so to speak). I took a couple of more screen shots to share. One if from a dating site that’s been prevalent on the widget this evening and the other is from a fitness site.



The dating site


You’ll have to click on the images to make them bigger.


The fitness site.
Take a minute to notice the headlines in these.

You can see that there isn’t much difference in the headlines of the widgets. I’m pretty certain there are a lot of health/life blogs that are using the BlogRush widget, and many of them probably have thousands of credits. So where are they? I know Chipped Polish has around 300 credits, but I’m not seeing this blog popping up under this category. What’s going on there? Shouldn’t the widgets be rotating with each page load?

I’m not sure if I’ll stop using the widget just yet. I know that it’s a baby and things need to get worked out. But, really, I don’t think it’s living up to its hype. I just got a letter telling me that the widget would bring me so much more quality traffic because it’s in Phase whatever of its rollout and they just purged 10,000 blogs that lacked quality and content and, well, just more hype. I guess I’m just a little let down.

Good news though. I did spot a couple of blogs on the headlines that wrote they were kicked out of BlogRush. So, if you were kicked out, you might still be getting traffic from that funny little widget.

_{I want to that very clear, because of some past reading comprehension issues from some investigators visitors.}

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