Goodbye, BlogRush. Hello, Scoutle.
It was a rush. Really. And one that this blogger appreciates.
When John Reese launched BlogRush in late 2007, you couldn’t avoid seeing email after email arriving in your inbox, telling you about the awesome new service. Thousands of people joined immediately. In many ways, BlogRush was awesome, offering a simple widget that you could install in your blogs that delivered syndicated headlines from other blogs of related interest. Conversely, your blog titles were being delivered across the network of blogs, giving you a chance to get extra visitors.
I used BlogRush on several of my blogs and got a few clicks, quite a few referrals, and collected “credits” of over 10,000 that sort of hovered at the same level for several months but were never served due the volume of blogs in the network that had similar credit levels.
Over the last year, BlogRush allegedly delivered over 3 billion blog titles to blogs throughout the world. It was truly a philanthropic service from Internet extraordinaire John Reese, who felt that it would help bloggers increase their traffic.
Unfortunately, the service had to be shut down. Reese writes that due to a number of issues, “from security issues to abusive users trying to ‘game’ the system to much lower click-rates than expected,” BlogRush was not living up to its potential.
I can only imagine the expenses Reese has put into his free service, from programmers’ fees to bandwidth charges. Like many in the Internet community, I am grateful for his contribution.
Click the image to visit the Scoutle blog . . .
Check Out Scoutle
There is another free service that can be used on any blogging platform called Scoutle, which has been well-received in the technical community and may be more effective than BlogRush was.
Among recent developments, Scoutle is now supported at Profilactic, a social media aggregator/lifestreaming service that pulls together just about everything you and your friends create online. Scoutle is a Dutch startup company that opened its services to the public in May 2008. After running a beta version for awhile, Scoutle performed a major update to its services in September. I reviewed Scoutle here — and some of the folks from Scoutle commented on the review, too.
My traffic has been increasing slowly but surely with Scoutle and quite frankly, I think I’ve seen more traffic from Scoutle than I had from BlogRush. It’s totally automated and the service links into a handful of other social networking services that you select within the member area. Not only have I received blog traffic, but have corresponded with some other bloggers within the Scoutle community who have some interesting insights and blogs.
If you’re lamenting the demise of BlogRush, be sure and check out Scoutle. You’ll be pleasantly surprised!
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