It’s no secret I’ve been a BlogExplosion (referral) fan. Recently they hired my friend Forser from Sweden as one of their programmers. I encouraged him to apply there and to both our excitement he was chosen. It turns out that BE is really just a couple of guys. They have a lot of polish for a small developer operation. Lest we forget that services like de.licio.us was one guy (Joshua Schacter) and Flickr was a couple people (Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake) (see Ludicorp team).

I don’t write about all new BE features — and they have a bunch of new ones since December when I last mentioned them — but they sure seem to get the point of staying alive and prospering on the web: do new things frequently. Cool feature, function, interaction, whatever. Yes, there is such a thing as feature bloat for any one product/site but one way to avoid that pitfall is to launch new products/sites and attach them to the global arm. Sometimes the biggest and best feature can be an entirely new website.

Enter BlogCharm (BC) which at a quick cusory level could be written off as just another free blog hosting company. I rarely review these because so many of them are underwhelming clones, but a company can get my interest releasing a me too product if they can turn out some twists and have built a reputation of leading their field, which BlogExplosion (BE) has been out there quietly and consistently doing for over a year in the blog traffic generation niche.

The BC pitch
BC plans to share 50% of all the BC ad revenues with the BC bloggers and also let BC bloggers create their own ads and receive 100% of those revenues. It’s only recently, a full year after launching that MSN Spaces is finally starting to realize how important monetization options are for bloggers.

BlogCharm is currently in beta and expected to officially launch in March 2006.

Admin interface
Main screen layout (pictured above)
1. Banner promoting buying advertising for that slot, but leads to more of an about page which explains that everything is currently in beta. I didn’t see any advertising prices anywhere. Expected launch date is March 1, 2006.
2. Home returns to blogcharm.com
3. Signup page link for new BlogCharm users. Odd that this would be a link inside the admin area since you’ve already signed up, however, maybe folks will want to pass along links to their friends directly to signup.
4. Blog Directory leads to top level categories that each blogger must choose one — and only one — that their blog best fits. For my blog, I chose ‘Business’ but there are many others including audio blogs (podcasts), blog developement/templates, education, computer developers, internet, and many more. They look very similar to the BE top level categories so maybe there will be some tie-in in future versions of BC. When clicking through on a category the blogs are sorted old to new, so definitely an advantage to get your blog created earlier if it stays this way. No sorting options available.
5. Member Forums leads to the BE forums. There isn’t a special forum for BC yet, but there are a few posts in the general Blog Cafe section like this one which indicates that one should have at least a week’s worth of content on their BC blog before submitting to BE for possible inclusion. This one week minimum content rule is used to help keep spammers out.
6. Clicking the ‘Search’ link leads to a search form to search all posts made.
7. ‘Our Blog’ leads to the official BlogExplosion blog (helpmeblog.com)
8. ‘Advertising’ currently leads the same place as #1. Since it’s currently disabled no idea on pricing will be yet.
9. ‘About’ leads the same place as #1 and #8.
10. ‘Contact-us’ leads to the general BE contact form.
11. Features page listing 20 BC benefits including: WYSIWYG entry composer, subdirectory URLs, comments/trackbacks, friends only entries (good for group blogs), customizable date/time, draft entries, template customization and 100+ default templates.
12. ‘My Blogs’ (also see #20-25) lists all your blogs, similar to how blogger works with a summary view of #entries and #comments a link to add a new entry, adjust settings or delete. Beneath the summary is a listing of Who’s Online which I imagine will be going away if/when they get a significant number of users. I noticed during the beta betwee 5-25 users. Beneath that an Recently Updated Blogs list and links to each user profile. You can do this with a small number of users but it becomes rather useless once there are a significant number.
13. ‘Profile’ link allows editing your profile including: uploading/changing avatar with a generous max size 250k, first and last name, email address, display name, gender, birthday, city, state, country, and interests. Also, options to enable/disable showing real name, email address, team members and who to show profile to (everyone, only registered users, only friends, or only you). Password can be changed by clicking another page.
14. With the ‘Friends’ link you can manage a list of who your friends are (for certain settings). You’ll have to know their BC name. I noticed that when you invite a “team member” to be part of posting on your group blog that they don’t automatically become a ‘Friend’ so you’ll have to do that separately.
15. ‘Photos & Files’ is where you can create folders for images/pictures you want to use on the blog. A rather anemic 5MB limit is set so a third party image hosting service will be necessary. BE actually has a service for hosting images called blogphotohut.com which is linked in a small strip above and provides 25 MB more of free hosting space and 250 MB monthly bandwidth with a maximum file size of 512k. Flickr is a better option for image hosting with many more features, especially for Flickr pro members.
16. ‘Messages” system for sending private messages to other BC members or friends. Currently limited to one person at a time. I sent out a very short (two sentences) and it said the folders were 2% full. This looks like a very small amount of private message space.
17. ‘Search’ provides a more advanced search for other BC members by any of the following criteria: username, name, email address, gender, location, age ranges, website, IM screenname, interest and the About Me field.
18. ‘Help?’ leads to the BE contact page, same as #10.
19. ‘Logout’
20. ‘My Blogs’ section lists each blog you’ve created, alphabetically sorted with no other sorting options currently.
21. # of entries for selected blog
22. # of comments for selected blog
23. create a ‘new entry’ for the selected blog. On the blog entry screen additional submenus exist for ‘Entry Categories’ where you can manage different categories. No tag capability or multiple categories selectable yet. You can also send pings to the four services by default checked: weblogs.com, blo.gs, Technorati and Ping-O-Matic (which sends ping to many more services).
24. Review/modify the ’settings’ for selected blog
25. ‘Delete’ the selected blog
26. ‘Create’ a new blog
27. ‘Who’s Online (X)’ with X being the number of BC members. Their names and links to profiles are listed below, but as mentioned in #12, this function is only useful when there is a very small number of users. Otherwise it becomes this gigantic list of names linking to profiles.

Miscellaneous feedback
- no third party API or plugin support
- no way to add additonal/custom ping services
- no post by email/phone capability
- multiple categories not an option
- Couldn’t figure out how to change the link shown on the BlogCharm homepage or even if this was an option, so had to post a help inquiry about it. When you first setup a blog the default is blogcharm.com/NAME so since my name was TD Goodliffe, it wanted to assign me blogcharm.com/tdgoodliffe only that wasn’t the name of the blog I created. The blog I created was called VTOR so it should have been blogcharm.com/vtor that was linked up on the homepage, but instead it linked up to the name which wasn’t a blog that existed. My temporary solution? I created the /NAME blog and used the template that looked sort of like a DOS error screen.
- fairly liberal editing of the single page template — similar to how blogger works — so I could modify the CSS and make the text larger and add a favicon. This flexibility is unlike some major free blog hosts like MSN Spaces, AOL Journals and Yahoo 360.
- too bad you can’t map to your own domain. Maybe that will be a future feature?

Overall opinion
BlogCharm has many of the basic blog hosting features available and the UI is fairly easy to follow and intuitive. Some of the limits (pictures, messages) are suspect and there really isn’t enough tie-in to the mother ship for how to increase blog traffic, but I would be surprised if more of this isn’t available by launch in March.

Noticeably absent and sorely missed are any sort of developer features like even a rudimentary API, XML RPC, etc, so that posting could be made with existing blog posting tools. These are key features necessary for extending to the many blog tools that exist out there and BC won’t be complete without them.

The traffic tie-in is an important feature because after creating the blog and adding content that is one of the blogger’s next concerns. It was a natural for BE to add this BC blog hosting service and depending on how much advertising revenue and how many ways the pie will be split plus if they add the missing important features connecting the third party tools it could make them a free blog host player to watch in the coming days. Grade: C+

Did this post make you go hmm?

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