Blog Explosion

Ok, this is one of those shameless plug posts.

Blog Explosion is a site that lists a lot of blogs, and if you go and do blog surfing there, for every two blogs you visit, they show your blog to someone else who visits yours. It's a good way of finding blogs that you haven't seen before. And its a good way for people who've never seen your blog before to find it. So it's a way of getting new readers, and a way of finding new blogs.

Quality varies, of course.

Some of the blogs they show you are good, some are not so good. Some are bad.

But it's had a few problems recently, though those seem to be sorted now. But the number of people surfing has dropped, so that means the number of new blogs you see has dropped as well. Tonight I had a bit of time to spare so went to have a look, but only saw about 7 blogs, and then they said the number of blogs with enough credits to earn a display has run out.

So it needs a few more active members who will do a bit more blog surfing there, because the more you look at the more you see. So I'd like to encourage my blogging friends to join it, and list your blogs. That will mean there's more to see, and the more you see, the more you are seen.

Entropy in the blogosphere

Why is it that websites that provide auxiliary services to blogs have a passion to tinker with their sites in such a way that what used to work no longer works, and adding a whole lot of useless stuff?

I'm not the only one to have noticed this. St. Aidan to Abbey Manor: What's going on with Technorati?:

Not that I notice these things, but in the past week my Technorati 'authority' (number of other sites linking here in the last 90 days) has dropped like a stone, and my ranking seems to vary by several hundred thousand depending on which way the wind is blowing at the time. Maybe they're all getting a bit overloaded. It looks like links from the sidebars of other blogs (like the ones down the right hand side here) aren't being counted any more.

Technorati is a prime example of people messing with something that previously worked well so that when they have fixed it it doesn't work at all. When I first joined Technorati I found it quite useful, but it has become more and more erratic.

If I'm blogging on a topic, I sometimes enter key words in Technorati to see what other people are saying about it, but now I find Google blog search is much more reliable for that. Technorati keep changing their user interface and moving stuff around so it is far more difficult to find. I used to be able to go to my home page on Technorati, see all my blogs, ping them if necessary, see who had linked to my blog posts, and see the top ten search keywords and the top ten post key words. That's how I learnt about Twitter, and discovered who Paris Hilton and Steven Furtick were.

But those have all been scattered and are no longer conveniently visible in one place. I suspect that the reason for that is that Techorati hope that you will go looking for them as in a labyrinth, going down numerous dead ends and having to work your way back, and so will be exposed to more advertisements and so they will make more money. That might work for a week, but after that most people will give up and stop visiting the site.

The home page was all over Technology Business Entertainment Lifestyle Politics Sports Gaming Celebrity. One of the reasons I never visited Digg was that most of my interests didn't fit into any of those categories, and when Technorati went down that route I lost interest.

After writing this I went to have a look at their home page (for the first time in about six months) and I see they've put back a little of what used to be there, but still not enough.

And I just did a test: I searched for "hippocracy", and none of my posts on that topic show up in Technorati, even though they have explicit Technorati tags. When I click on the tag in the post itself it takes me to the relevant tag page on Technorati, which tells me that "there are no posts related to this tag". And it also goes on to say

Welcome to the hippocracy tag page at Technorati. This page features content from the farthest reaches of the Blogosphere that authors have "tagged" with hippocracy.

Yet it can't even find the post that has the tag that I clicked on to reach the page -- so much for the "farthest reaches of the Blogosphere" claim. The fact is that it doesn't work. It's broken.

Even the Wordpress page on the topic appears to be broken (or hacked).

So Technorati is pretty useless.

Another site that seems to have similar problems is Amatomu. When it started, Amatomu was a fairly good guide to the South African blogosphere, and also gave some interesting statistics about what posts on one's blog were being read most frequently.

By far the most popular post on this blog was Notes from underground: Books to read before you die. But then Amatomu revamped their software, and suddenly it appeared that no one was reading it at all. So either the Amatomu statistics were wildly wrong before, or they are wildly wrong now. I suspect that it is the "improvements" that broke it. One of my widgets tells me that Saint John, New Brunswick arrived on "Notes from underground: Books to read before you die" today, so people are still reading that post, and it is the Amatomu statistics that are as inaccurate as Technorati's.

After the bad news, some good news: Blog Explosion seems to be improving.

Like Technorati and Amatomu, Blog Explosion was started by enthusiastic people who lost interest in it and handed over the running of it to someone else who didn't really grasp the original vision. Because of entropy, without enthusiastic input, it gradually ran down. But in the case of Blog Explosion the users organised themselves, and complained, pressed and prodded until the people running Blog Explosion finally acted to arrest the decline, and began to get things working properly again.

They were able to do this because of the way Blog Explosion works.

At one level it is a kind of Blog Directory, with blogs divided into various categories. You surf through blogs, which it is supposed to show you in random order, giving preference to a category that you choose. As you surf, you get points for each blog you see, and your blog is then shown to other surfers in proportion to the number of points you earn. So it is a good way of seeing new blogs, and getting new readers for your blog at the same time.

The problem was that because lack of maintenance and general neglect, it was shaowing the same blogs over and over, even if they hadn't been updated for months, also also was not showing blogs in the chosen categories, but in categories that were of no interest.

Blog Explosion users got fed up with this, so they blogged about it, and because of the way Blog Explosion works, other users saw these posts, commented on them, and blogged about it in turn. And eventually Blog Explosion users got sufficiently fired up to nag the owners of Blog Explosion to do something about it. So they removed some of the dead wood -- neglected blogs that weren't updated -- and did some general cleanups, which led to a great improvement.

One of the things about Blog Explosion is the more the merrier -- the more bloggers who participate, the greater the number of new blog posts there are to see, ones you might never have otherwise seen. So I encourage bloggers to participate in this.



There are still some improvements that could be made, but it's definitely better than it was a few months ago, unlike Technorati, where they keep changing the user interface and making the site more difficult to navigate while the underlying purpose and the functions it was supposed to provide are no longer there -- like finding blog posts tagged "hippocracy" (or anything else).

TrafficG -- blog surfing and traffic generation

For some time I've been a member of Blog Explosion, which is intended to bring traffic to your blog when you surf other blogs.

I've now found a similar site, TrafficG, which may be better and more versatile.

Both work on a similar principle -- you surf blogs from their site, and as you do so you earn "credits", which are applied to directing other people to your blog(s).

Both of them have selections of interests -- you can say what interests your blog caters for, and what kind of blogs you are interested in, and that should mean that when you surf you can discover new blogs on topics you are interested in.

Unfortunately that feature of Blog Explosion stopped working some time ago. My main interest was "Books, literature and writing", but it hardly ever shows me blogs in that category any more, and when I visit it shows me blogs in categories I'm not interested in , the same ones over and over, even if they haven't been updated for months.

TrafficG seems to be based on the same idea, so I'll be interested in seeing if it works any better, and shows me some more interesting blogs.

To me the "interests" thing is crucial.

I'm not interested simply in "hits" -- what I want is readers who are interested in at least some of the same things I'm interested in, who will leave intelligent comments on the content of the posts, and possibly lead to interesting conversations. Blog Explosion did that in the beginning, but no longer does so. I think the owners have got bored with it and are neglecting it.

So here's hoping that TrafficG works better.

And the verdict is...

Blog Explosion beats TrafficG hands down.

For all its faults, Blog Explosion does occasionally show me a web site that I find interesting. Only about one in 20 match my preferred interest (Books, literature and writing), but TrafficG did not manage to show me a single site that was of any interest at all. About 99,9% of them looked like paid ads for other web sites that promise to bring traffic to your side -- and none of them looked like they would have any interest in visiting my blog, much less be capable of making intelligent comments. That kind of "traffic" I could do without. It looks like TrafficG is the tip of an iceberg: a huge incestuous network of "traffic-generation" sites wasting bandwidth by generatng traffic for each other in an endless circle.

Finding good blogs to read

I saw this appeal on another blog.

Suggestions, please! The Ultra, the Fabulous, the only, Miss P!:

I’m running out of good blogs to read.
Any suggestions?

I can understand and sympathise.

I used to use Blog Explosion when I was bored and looking for blogs to read. You could give it your favourite topic (mine was "Books/Literature/Witing") and it would show you random blogs dealing with that topic, and when it ran out of ones on that topic it would start showing you ones on other topics. By looking at other blogs you earned "points" which meant that your blog(s) were shown to other similarly bored people.

It was quite a good idea when it started, but apparently like so many things in the blogosphere (remember Amatomu and Geocities), it was abandoned by the originators of the idea, taken over by someone else who was simply interested in making money out of it, and then neglected, and allowed to run down.

Now Blog Explosion no longer shows blogs that are related to your preferred topic, but shows the same old off-topic ones over and over again -- I suspect because they have paid for preferred positions. The trouble is that some of those that keep getting shown first haven't been updated, so it becomes even more boring. I occasionally look at it in the hope that things will improve, but they don't. Perhaps the problem is that there are not enough new people registerin g blogs there, so they are showing the same old repertoire over and over again. So if you are reading this, perhaps you should try it. Register your blog at Blog Explosion, and have a look at what it shows you. Much of it will probably be new and fresh the first time round. If you find too much repetition, there's no need to go back, but at least your blog will provide a new option for some of the users who have seen it all.

Another way is to look at the blogs in the blogroll of blogs you find interesting. Use a social blogrolling tool like BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog to mark ones that look interesting and possibly worth a return visit.

For South African blogs Amatomu still works, though suffering somewhat from neglect by its sponsors. It also went downhill when, in addition to listing blogs, it listed blog hosts, so that half the blogs one sees there are called "Blat: to utter without thinking" or "Thought Leader", when in fact those are hosts to many different blogs. It needs someone enthusiastic to take over and do a radical clean-up and reorganisation to get back to the original idea that worked well.

Afrigator used to work OK, but has now become JASNS (Just Another Social Networking Site).

When I first started blogging I used to use Technorati a lot, but that too has gone downhill. It used to be possible to use tag searches to find stuff you were interested in, and each registered user had a page that showed their blogs, and what tags were popular at the moment, but that has now gone, and like Blog Explosion they've rearranged their user interface to make it more difficult to use. I suspect that this is in order to make you hunt in many more pages to find what you are looking for, so that you will be exposed to more advertising and make more money for them as you go down each dead end. Surely they must realise that this is counter-productive -- it might bring a short-term rise in advertising revenue, but eventually people users will be annoyed and go elsewhere. At the moment they seem to have a lot of technical problems, so even their new and disimproved and dehanced and clunkier user interface doesn't work properly.

So to the one and only Miss P. my best suggestion, at the moment, is Google Blog Search.

Any other suggestions?