blogging

If you’d like a perfect example of why should think long and hard before leaving your blog in the hands of Guest Writers, take a look at the storm created over on TechCrunch when one such post by Dan Ackerman Greenberg apparently made it onto the very popular (one of my regular daily reads) tech blog without first being checked over by the blog owner.

Michael’s obviously keeping an eye on his blog whilst away, but not closely enough. His response was “I will post a longer response to this later, but frankly I’m disgusted by this.”

I’ve decided to give BlogRush another try. I’m not sure what it is, but there’s something about it I miss.

So, assuming they accept me back in (!), expect to see the return of the widget!

Further to yesterday’s post about BlogRush, they must have heard me, as their new Dashboard is now in place. I’m glad it’s there now, as it’s shown me what a waste of time it’s been having it on my sites. I mean, 1 visit from 15,000 impressions is not terribly good, is it? And that was one of the good ones!

So, farewell BlogRush. I’m now removing it from the 3 blogs I’ve been trying it out on. It’s really not worth all the space it takes on the blogs, given the very tiny amount of traffic it’s bringing my way.

Better luck next time.

Well, here we are, about a month or so past the point where the amazing new BlogRush dashboard and features were due to be launched and what do we have?

We have the BlogRush blog, which hasn’t been updated in the past 9 days and on which they have disabled comments - I guess they don’t believe in “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” - we have no new dashboard and we really have absolutely no real idea about whey might be doing which, on the surface, appears to be absolutely nothing.

I’ve so far survived the culling of blogs, although posting this might well add me to their list. Has anyone else tried it out? I’m still getting a small trickle of traffic from them, but nothing to write home about.

I’ll give them another week or so, but after that, I can’t see the point in flogging a dead horse.

I’ll confess now that I’m a serial widget abuser. Show me a new widget and it’ll be on one of my sites within seconds. (Witness my previous post for an example).

However, I had to ask myself a question today: “Who am I writing my blogs for?”. The harsh realisation was that, whilst I invariably write the content for the benefit of others, the actual layout of the sites is pretty much driven by my insatiable appetite for gadgets!

Whilst I might love the whizzy-doobery-search-widget-with-magic-pixie-dust-tag-cloud, marvelling at the ingenuity of the developers, is it actually of benefit to the visitors to my sites? I’ve got some more analysis to do (back to the stats obsession - you can see a pattern emerging here…), but my initial thoughts are that, on the whole, they probably don’t. I’m starting to slowly realise that a nice, simple but functional text search box is actually probably more useful to visitors than a mega-widget that takes up half the screen space. This also allows me to move other useful stuff up above the fold where visitors might actually get to see it.

Will I dump them all? Unlikely. Some are actually very useful but some, I’ll now admit, are really just eye candy and they’re beginning to clutter things up.

So, is this an upset for me? No. In fact, in some ways it’s quite a liberating realisation. For one, once I’ve thinned down the sites and got rid of at least some of the stuff they don’t really need, I can concentrate on the actual content which is, after all, why people visit the sites. I’m sure my regular readers don’t really return just to see my widgets collection.

More thoughts on this subject later.