MyBloglog, Romlet or BlogRush? September 16, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : internet, wordpress, blogs and community, web2.0 , trackback
In this post I am going to review three similar on-blog widgetised linking services. All three are currently in my sidebar here, displaying links of one sort or another and tracking visits. I also use the excellent Facebook application “Blog Friends” but that works a bit differently, and was covered earlier.
Blogrush is the newest, being released only yesterday, and at the time of writing it’s temporarily broken.
I’m sure they’ll fix it soon.
MyBlogLog
MyBlogLog is the oldest and best established. I like it for the simple idea of displaying visitors faces, which can creep up as a loose sense of community eventually, and also for the three column layout of the stats page. It flows naturally from left to right, showing where visitors came from, what they viewed, and where they left for.
For a quick glance analysis, this is so much more intuitive than for example Google Analytics. Disadvantages are that it can often take three clicks to make a reciprocal visit, navigating the pages at MyBlogLog itself. With practice you can get this down to two clicks, by paying careful attention to the links as illustrated below:
ROMlet
I was invited to Romlet beta via MyBlogLog with whom they are really a direct competitor.
ROMlet is a brand new blog widget that incorporates the best aspects of a brag badge, stats counter, bookmarking tool and popularity booster. JOIN THE COMMUNITY now and then sign up take part in the beta release!
As a beta product, it’s not at all clear where ROMlet is headed for now. The service is so simple that it hardly seems to do anything. The so-called “brag badge” is a collection of icons which give out a certain amount of referral stats data, which is not really something that I consider adds value for my visitors, nor particularly for myself. I did have a little trickle of traffic when one of my articles was popular enough to appear on their front page for a while, but if the service becomes at all well used then I would expect this to be an increasingly rare occurrance, thus undermining its own success. So all a bit baffling really, and I’ll probably take it off in due curse.
BlogRush
Blogrush is the newest, currently getting a lot of attention from marketing bloggers, which betrays the origin of the service. There’s a multi-level referral scheme which is supposed to favour early adopters so if you are interested in these type of things then it’s best to get set up with BlogRush sooner rather than later. The only danger I perceive is that with all the multi level marketers jumping on board from the off, the service could well prove Hugh’s Law to be correct right from the start.
Conclusion
Hmm, do I need to write a conclusion? It’s fairly clear that MyBlogLog is providing a lasting service which slowly helps to build some level of blogging community and relationships, as well as the handy stats. Linda pointed out that in some ways it’s a shame that these automated and uncontrolled systems have taken over from the manual blogroll to some extent, and I can see that personal choice may be diminished. With Blog Friends, you can choose to filter your reading of friends of friends blogs ( I’d rather read my friends‘ blogs unfiltered ) and with BlogRush you can choose which category to associate with, and you can also choose to take it off altogether - something which is very easy and non-destructive with widgets for Wordpress 2.2
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
Completely agree with you Andy, MyBlogLog is awesome!
I haven’t come across ROMlet, but I’m giving BlogRush a whirl to see what sort of traffic it can deliver. As many bloggers have commented already, too many of these widgets are a flash in the pan.
I wonder, if BlogRush had come from someone other than the mighty John Reese, would the buzz have been quite so explosive? lol
Cheers,
Steph.
Did you ever seen AutoRoll from Criteo (http://widget.criteo.com/)? It was intended to bring back links related to your blog and BlogRush reminds me of it. BlogRush has the added multi-level-marketing aspect that AutoRoll didn’t have.
I tested AutoRoll for about a month and never found that it offered fully-compatible references to the topic of my blog. The idea goes back even further. Remember WayPath? They had a article-based tool that would gather similar articles from the blogosphere. (I think they had a whole-blog gizmo too.)
MyBlogLog: definitely established and good for seeing who has visited - though you’re right: it’s a pain to track back through multiple steps sometimes. Still, they have grown it well over time to have more and more creative and interactive back-end features.
Romlet: to my mind more valuable for me personally than for my visitors per say - I look at it daily to see if there are new sources of referring traffic, which in turns helps me ‘thank’ referrers and generally learn more (and more quickly) who is linking to me. Judging from all of your Google traffic, you may wish to generate a new Romlet widget without search engines (that’s an option in the generator) so it display only link-based refferals. I see Romlet as more of a companion widget to MBL than competitor - one shows visitors, the other referrers - both are valuable kinds of info.
BlogRush: check out Onemansblog.com for a scathing review - I and others have tried out the widget only to find that the sites being linked to are either (1) scammy/spammy and/or (2) most of the time they don’t even have the widget themselves, so they are somehow gaming the system and ending up on other peoples’ BlogRush widgets without sending any traffic back into the system. Basically, if you do try it: be sure that the sites on it are also displaying the widget. Also figure: if they all do what most will do and bury the widget down low on their sites, even if they are showing the widget it will likely have terribly low CTR.
I am using all 3 at the current time. MBL gives me regular referral readers who revisit. Romlet seems to give me new users but not as many as MBL for now. They do seem to be referring more lately. And Blogrush I signed up for and still waiting to see and traffic from them. Good post.
Thanks for the comments about MyBlogLog, ROMlet and BlogRush everyone. I’m still unsure about BlogRush myself. The “coming in 24-48hrs” message has gone and now I have a big red square that says I have ZERO referrals and yet I know for a fact that one person signed up through me. So put a note about that in the Facebook group
Jack, I don’t remember Autoroll or WayPath but I do remember when technorati tags and blogrolls sort of fulfilled the function of bringing related blogs together a bit. The internet doesn’t really need re-inventing.
Urbanist, thanks for the tip about excluding search engines from ROMlet. I decided to try that but it hasn’t worked through yet. Actually, I am quite interested in tracking the keyphrases but there are other ways.
Aha, threaded comments!