Its a way better service than BlogRush, its based on content.

http://www.arkayne.com

These guys are doing everything BlogRush is not, mainly caring about your content and the users.

There’s got to be a happy medium somewhere – to give any new service (or anyone in life, for that matter) the benefit of the doubt, yet not go all the way and commit blindly to something that is not tried and tested.

I would say there is not much in life you could fully put your trust in (in fact I think I know what Darren would say if it came to the crunch, and I would agree), but I’m all for giving something like Blogrush a chance, and even recommending it to others, at the same time without building unrealistic expectations in myself or others. When we trust in something on the basis of our own expectations, that’s generally a recipe for disappointment..!

If that something does disappoint, we don’t have to feel stupid for having “fallen for it” – we just gave it the benefit of the doubt and it didn’t measure up… The jury, I see, seems to be making a fairly rapid return after its deliberations on Blogrush. I’m going to give it just that little bit more of a chance – the same as I would like others to give me…

There are some problems with the stats still, maybe they were not tracking bonus stats correctly in the early days.

When I added it up yesterday, the internal stats show 202 visitors with up to a 0.5% CTR, and even more current posts achieving 0.25% (which is over 1% for the widget possibly)

The thing is my 3rd party tracking reports over 260 visitors.

Don’t forget you can use plugins to optimize feeds used by Blogrush so it possibly points to a highly converting landing page.

Then the phase 2 email comes so I think I might try again, log into my account and see they disapproved my blog. It’s a 3 year old blog with 1400 posts and updated regularly. WTF, I can’t say much positive about these people.

I seriously don’t get much traffic from blogrush alone, i guess even if i were to just drop a comment on a blog, i can easily hit the traffic given from blogrush to me. That is how bad it is, so it’s out for me.

I also find the prospects more interesting than MyBlogBlog which has been around for many, many months and still sends little traffic my way. I actually just wrote a post speculating that MyBlogLog would be replaced by BlogRush (website link above points to this post).

I have to say that this whole Blogrush debacle made me lose respect for a few of the bloggers I used to respect. I can’t lie and say you’re not among the people I lost respect for. I just felt like every blogger in the universe was trying to shove this thing down my throat in order to benefit themselves because of the pyramid thing, and you were posting about it just like everyone else. Although you weren’t quite as “this is the best thing since sliced bread sign up now by clicking this link” about it as many of the other bloggers were, it did add to the echo chamber effect.

That’s a difficult thing to say, especially to you, but I wanted to make the point because I feel it is really important for all bloggers to realise what kind of effect their posts can have.

I don’t blame the bloggers for it as much as I blame Blogrush for putting in that ridiculous multi-level-marketing style pyramid referral system. That is precisely what caused the problem because bloggers felt like if they didn’t post about it and encourage people to sign up using their referral then they would miss out on a lot of traffic. I believe that is quite unethical for any company to do that. They created themselves a lot of buzz – and then it backfired on them.

If a blogger supports something new, something untried and untested and it turns out to be the dismal failure that Blogrush turned out to be – and there is no denying it is a dismal failure – then bloggers who post about it like it is a cure for Cancer put their reputations at risk.

I have no doubt you’ll earn that respect back as time goes by. That’s why I am still here reading. Many of the other bloggers will not be able to earn it back and I will find myself questioning their motives with every post they write now. I’ll be thinking “Why are they telling me about this” and “What’s in it for them”.

Like I say in the post – there are a few promising signs that they will improve and it’s just early days for BR – but even I (the post patient and optimistic man in the blogosphere) am getting a little weary of waiting to see conversion.

It’s pretty sad.

I mostly agree with your assessment, but there were a couple of things mentioned in the video explaining phase 2 that I thought had potential.

The first was John’s mentioning how while clicks are low, they are probably coming more often from other bloggers. That might make the traffic a little more valuable since other bloggers are more likely to talk about you and link to you. So one blogrush click could conceivably lead to many more links and clicks from other sources.

Is that what will happen? I don’t know, but I can understand the thought process behind it.

The other thing mentioned was the concept of your hot posts. It wasn’t entirely explained what made a post hot, but some factors would be how often it’s seen and clicked and how long people who do land on the post stick around to read it.

There’s going to be a second site launching (in a month?) that will be a list of hot posts. I guess it’s a new spin on a social news site where the content is submitted based on what people are interested in on the BlogRush network.

Assuming the second site does present good content and gains traction I can see where it would have the potential to drive a lot more traffic than the widget. A couple of my posts are catergorized as hot even with just one click so you don’t need clicks to go hot and be included on the proposed new site.

Again will this work? I don’t know and it will certainly need some work and time, but it does sound like it has more potential. That potential might be enough to keep the widgets around for at least a little while longer.

It is interesting though to be able to see which of your posts are being syndicated and how many times. It would be nice if you could have more control over this. Unfortunately the most widely syndicated of my posts is one with a misleading headline. It is one of the weaknesses of the widget that a reader is supposed to make a judgement on a post purely from the headline.