BUMPzee social blogrolling

A few weeks ago I read a review of some social blogrolling sites -- MyBlogLog, BUMPzee and Blog Catalog. All three have a widget that displays recent readers on your blog, so you can see who has been reading your blog and pay them a return visit.

But apart from that, they work slightly differently. MyBlogLog is a true social blogroll site, where each blog has a "community" that regular readers can join, and if you want to pay a return visit to a blog without the hassle of adding it to your regular blogroll, you can join its community so you can find it again quite easily.

BUMPzee also has communities, but instead of being linked to particular blogs, they are linked to particular interests. This is a bit more focused. I joined and created a Missiology community, since there wasn't one. But as other blogs with missiological interests join, it should become a useful blogroll of missiology-related blogs, and aggregates their posts.

Now you might blog about lots of things, and not every post will be about missiology, so when you add your blog to the community, you can specify keywords, so that only, for example, posts tagged "missiology" or "missional" will be shown in the aggregator.

That seems to have the potential of being a very useful feature.

BUMPzee started as a site for affiliate marketing, and so at present most of the communities are on related topics, but it is now open to everyone (rather as Facebook started as a "students only" social networking site). So don't be put off by the fact that the top communities listed deal with affiliate marketing. Communities can now be on any subject you like, and I think I'll be creating a few more.

Apart from the missiology one, I've started one for the Inklings -- C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams & Co. I know there are several other blogs that have posts on those authors and related topics, such as theology and literature, and it will be useful to be able to look for updates in one place (if they join, and put the widget on their blogs, of course).