Warning the Blogrush is on and isn’t degrading gracefully |
Loading ...The last few days we’ve been experimenting with the newest overhyped blog service called Blogrush on our group blog and this morning we’re disappointed to see this message:
If your RSS reader was anywhere near a lot of marketing blogs these last couple days, you’ve probably read something about Blogrush. Although I didn’t count, but I’d say the number of posts seen yesterday alone was near 100.
Blogrush is a new sidebar widget that you put in the blog sidebar and displays contextually relevant posts to other blogs. It is a 1:1 link swap. For every impression where the Blogrush widget shows on your blog, a contextually relevant post from your blog is shown one time in the sidebar widget on another blog. There is also a ten level referral network that is being over-promoted as the promise land of traffic, but is way too early to be able to verify factually. I’m not going to use our referral link or any other link to Blogrush in this post because I think that would devalue the credibility of this post and because at this point I can’t recommend this service to any blogger with a serious face.
Blogrush originally launched on Friday afternoon promising to show stats within 24-48 hours. Here we are on Tuesday and those stats still haven’t materialized. Scaling problems? Of course. Beta? Of course. A long excuse from the guy behind the service, John Reese, saying they were blown away with the response, but the stats are still coming. Promise! Of course.
Take another look at the first screenshot above and Blogrush widget message:
We are currently experiencing some technical issues and the site will be back online shortly. Please come back in a few minutes.
How many readers will understand who that message belongs to? A reference to “the site” is not obviously the Blogrush sidebar widget, but more likely the site that is hosting the widget. This is not a good example of how to degrade gracefully. A better option would be to show nothing, yes? No?
Goodbye Blogrush until you get it together
We removed the Blogrush widget from our group blog temporarily and may experiment with it again when/if things stabilize. It’s nothing personal but why should readers see ungraceful degrading messages? I’m not a big fan of third party Javascript in the sidebar anyway.
Update 3:38pm PST: Blogrush stats finally appeared an hour or so. See the comments for additional details.
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Aww come on TD it’s not that bad
Sure it’s been overhyped and maybe won’t deliver much in the way of quality traffic for lower traffic sites (which is the hope of those sites of course) but I think people are keen to try anything new, particularly if it’s free. I’m looking at it as just another social widget for now. If the space can be better put to use once it’s had a fair run, it’s easy enough to delete.
The stats issue is a bit irritating I agree, but I think the hiccup yesterday was handled sensibly, even if the wording was a bit lame - better the error message than hanging hundreds of blogs with Javascript that wouldn’t load.
I don’t actually disagree with your view on the idea itself - only time will tell if it is a worthy addition to your blog.
Comment by Maurice (TheCaymanHost) — September 18, 2007 @ 12:36 pm PST
Good going for blogrush, I don’t see the entire hype about it anyways, it’s just another link exchange service if you ask me. There’s been many around like it for ages and probably many more to come, why even bother with it? It’s not like it ever really helps a lot.
Comment by Slevi — September 18, 2007 @ 12:44 pm PST
Maurice - from a technical standpoint a more elegant design to degrade would be to show absolutely nothing — not an ugly error message — just nothing at all. Showing a message like the one above or an error message is asking to have the code ripped down. Also, they have our email address, why no email about the issues? It’s not really the sign of a very professional organization. Your site, your readers, deserve something more stable
Slevi - well, like anything else, it pays to get in early because one idea in a thousand does turn into something. Just because I sign up for something and try it out — and I imagine there are many others like me — doesn’t mean it will be something that stays very long.
Truth be told, I’m guessing leaving comments on dofollow blogs will get as much or more traffic than Blogrush. Certainly it’s more effective when it is throwing off public service announcements instead of serving the contextual links.
Comment by TDavid — September 18, 2007 @ 1:36 pm PST
I should add to my last comment, Slevi, that I’m disturbed seeing some other bloggers hyping Blogrush up like it’s the next great thing when they haven’t had enough time to honestly evaluate its performance. This kind of thing absolutely screams dishonesty to readers. Slippery promotion like this lowers the credibility of blogs and bloggers.
I saw some blogs that didn’t even disclose the BR links were referral links. Bad, bad disclosure practices
Comment by TDavid — September 18, 2007 @ 1:41 pm PST
Nothing new there either I’d say, hehe. For everything these days there are referrals in place and people just slam out the referral links as soon as possible and as many as possible, myself I have spent quite a lot of years on forums and I still see it as a huge form of spam especially if you don’t bother to tell it’s a referral link. But when it comes to the blogosphere things appear to be the entire way around, spamming your own blog full with referral links is common practice and hardly anyone turns away from it.
From a user’s standpoint though I can’t see at all why people bother to mention it so much without even knowing anything. Has anything been said yet about how much traffic one gets back? So far I’ve been trying to get an answer to that on a couple of blogs but apparently no-one checks their own stats when it comes to a service like this. With the stuff being redirected through blogrush you should be seeing blogrush popping up as a great new referral source if this service was actually useful but I truly doubt that.
Comment by Slevi — September 18, 2007 @ 1:51 pm PST
OK, you’ve got me there on the error message, I agree that your suggested solution would have been preferable, and that yes, an email was surely advisable.
As for the hype, what can you do? I just visited a Blogger blog where about 60 comments were made with a high number just stuffing up a referral link and shamelessly crying out “sign up under me”. It was a dofollow blog and the sheeple doing the commenting were pretty juvenile judging by the standard of “writing”. As soon as one said Shoemoney, they were almost foaming at the mouth (no offence to SM).
I didn’t make any specific posts about BR at its launch because it’s not as exciting as people are making out. I’ve finally got some limited stats up, and unsurprisingly no referrals, but I’ve earned around 400 impressions since yesterday afternoon and I have seen a few visitors coming via the widget. The hype will soon wear off I’m sure but I’m still going to let it ride for a while and see how it goes.
Comment by Maurice (TheCaymanHost) — September 18, 2007 @ 1:58 pm PST
“but apparently no-one checks their own stats when it comes to a service like this”
Slevi - that’s one of my main gripes with this system and it’s not being highlighted enough by bloggers writing about it. They didn’t have any stats showing until just a little bit ago so one can compare against server stats to compare if BlogRush is honest.
As for blogs thinking it’s ok not to disclose affiliate and referral links, well, it all depends on what type of blogs, I think. Most the blogs I subscribe to are good about it (see homepage for my current reading list in OPML format).
Certain niches of blogs you see more affiliate stuff jammed in without any sort of disclosure (I notice a lot of the ‘make money blogs’ for example are not very good about disclosure). Text links and referrals inside the editorial here are denoted by “(affiliate)” or “(referral)” or something obvious like this. I went out of my way NOT to link to BR in this post because I didn’t want it to be just another blind BR endorsement post, of which I saw way too many of them the last few days.
Maurice - what can you do? All you can ever do is write from your heart and be honest, mon
When you see something overhyped and are curious and want to check it out (which I think curiosity is a great thing on the web), just tell your readers that’s what you’re up to so your motives aren’t called into question after the fact. The primary reason I posted about it over on our group blog wasn’t to milk other blogger readers for referrals but to announce something with the site structure had changed and that we were experimenting with something new.
BTW, our group blog shows 1 referral, over 2,400 impressions/credits and not a single clickthru. Not a stellar start no matter how we slice it.
Comment by TDavid — September 18, 2007 @ 2:32 pm PST
Personally I thought it would at least be one click out of a thousand views, but I suppose clicking widgets has becoming even less popular during the past couple of years. Thanks for giving the figure :), now at least I know for sure there’s no reason to place a widget for this stuff in my sidebar.
Comment by Slevi — September 18, 2007 @ 2:42 pm PST
Maurice - thanks for stumbling this post. I just added you as an SU friend as well as subscribed to your blog. Always appreciate acts like that.
Also added your blog to my RSS reading list, Slevi. You’ve left a few good comments. I appreciate that too.
Comment by TDavid — September 18, 2007 @ 3:40 pm PST
I’ve just rejoined SU under my own name as previously we used my wife’s details - her art makes us more than blogging! This was worthy of a Stumble to put out some alternative views on the whole BR story. I have seen others who are less than impressed so you are not a voice crying out in the wilderness
Thanks for the subscription that is certainly appreciated at my end - as you know you are already in my Bloglines.
Comment by Maurice (TheCaymanHost) — September 18, 2007 @ 3:54 pm PST