BlogRush Review and Rant …

If you are looking to promote your new Internet property after you purchased that brand new domain, a blog is a perfect way to do it. Wordpress makes it incredibly easy. Once you do, you’ll want to start driving traffic to it so that you can make your domain more valuable when you sell.

One of those ways is through developing backlinks. There are good backlinks, and there are evil backlinks. Evil backlinks will kill your google ranking, kill your readership, and make you a pariah among the blogging elite (not that thats important).

So , thus comes my rant on BlogRush.

BlogRush is a twist on blogroll and feed widgets that provide links to other people’s blog feeds. In this case, BlogRush is simply a feed aggregator, so you are receiving a random selection of feeds with a certain category that is in theory a category similar to your blog.

NomKit is a new blog, so I’m (desperately) eager to drive traffic to it. My goals in driving traffic are to 1) learn a little SEO and 2) drive interest to my soon to launch site, NomStock.com . It is not currently one of my goals to generate Adsense or similar income.

So the promise of BlogRush is to drive targeted traffic to your site for free. Someone reading another blog with a blogrush widget on it will see feed links that for the same category that the blog that hosts the widget. They click on the link, bingo, the destination blog receives that reader’s ‘targeted’ traffic.

Great idea; I’m not sure how unique it is, but very nice. I like it.

Bad implementation.

Here’s what it looks like on my blog (keep reading past the graphic..):

Whats wrong with this picture? Put another way, How many BlogRush links are shown, and how many of them are obviously SPAM?

I see 5 BlogRush links, 3 are SPAM , or look like SPAM ( I am not going to click the links to find out; tip: if you write a blog post, don’t make the title read like SPAM if its not ) Thats 60% of the displayed links, not counting the 2 plugs for BlogRush itself.

(aside: Why is it so damn ugly? Adsense spam is bad enough but even adsense allows you to customize the look.)

Ok, if the other 2 links aren’t spam, they certainly come close to what i will refer to as sausage- links that may be of interest to the same demographic that reads my blog, but they are not in any way even remotely related to domaining.

Note: Don’t take the above rant as an implication that I’m not going to ad advertisements to the blog some day… but if I do, hopefully it will be in a way that enhances the site, or at least doesn’t detract from it. What a concept…

SourceForge.net just approved my LAMPcheck project, which grew out of a need to validate that my hosting met the requirements of the Elgg social networking script. In short, the script will check for the correct versions of apache, mysql, and php and their associated modules for a given application’s requirements.

You can read more about LAMPcheck at the project’s home page, which I’m hosting on NomKit.

http://www.nomkit.com/welcome-to-the-lampcheck-project-home-page

Alledia provides a sweet comparison between these two platforms. Drupal has a reputation of being more difficult to grok but is a platform built to last. Joomla is known for its eye candy and add-ons.

http://www.alledia.com/blog/general-cms-issues/joomla-and-drupal-%11-which-one-is-right-for-you?/

Make sure you check out the IBM link at the bottom, a great run down of whats needed to implement a collaborative website quickly.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/osource/implement.html