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Words of Wisdom

In life, we have to choose between the jeans and the cookie jar. Liz Hurley chose the jeans and I chose the cookie jar

~ Nigella Lawson....(on women's body image and her own voluptuous body)

Saturday, November 1, 2008

The sad demise of BlogRush


As evident from my lack of posting in October, it's obvious that I hadn't been very active online in recent weeks. With my current workload taking up much of my time, all I want to do after reaching home is to clean up and get some sleep.

Therefore, I was shocked when I opened my Gmail account and saw an email titled "BlogRush Is Shutting Down" with an explanation from founder John Reese saying how the service failed to be what the team had hoped it to be.

I do not know about other people but I have always LOVED BlogRush. Sure, it never really brought traffic to my blog but I myself had found some great blogs from BlogRush. Yes, I learned a lot too from other people's creativity and wittiness in writing eye-catching blog post Titles which is something I'm quite weak at, I must admit.

After some months on Blogosphere, I have noticed that a lot of people out there are only interested in monetization only as opposed to people like me who blog and visit blogs simply because we love to read. I'm sure I'm in the silent minority. Users of the service were more interested in getting traffic to their sites/blogs in the hope of making more money. If that's what you're looking for, then I think BlogRush was rather useless.

Also, I remember how users were asked to label their blogs into a category and I think that's one of the roots of the problems. For example, I categorized mine under Personal Diary. Therefore, the Blogs appearing on my widget were all Personal Diaries. It meant I couldn't get posts by Blogs categorized under Entertainment, Food, IT-related, Politics, Crafts etc displayed on my widget.

Displaying posts only from Blogs within our category seriously limited BlogRush. What if I needed some IT advice to fix a problem with my Blog HTML coding? I still had to directly go to relevant sites on my own. What if someone posted an interesting info on a Blog categorized under "Politics"? Well, I wouldn't know it because it would not be displayed on my "Personal Diary" widget in the first place.

Other Socio-Blog sites such as StumbleUpon and Technorati offer cross-categories exposure as people would visit Blogs specialising in a certain area of expertise for some guidance or valuable info.

As for me, my purpose of entering Blogosphere was more about connecting with personal-diarists alike and therefore found BlogRush very enjoyable as I got to reach their personal thoughts through their blog posting Titles. In fact, I think personal-diarists could be the ones enjoying it more than others.

Farewell BlogRush. It had been great having you around as part of my online adventure.

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