Unless you’ve been under a rock in a cave on an uninhabited island lately, you’ve surely heard all of the press that Blogrush has been getting. If you’ve installed the Blogrush widget on your blog, you’ve probably seen stats where you have tons of impressions but only a handful of clicks. So by this point, you may have written Blogrush off as hype.

People have offered some basic tips on how to convert more eyeballs: keep your titles short enough to fit in on one line, keep your posts in English, etc - but it has become clear that there are folks that are gaming the system.

Well, let’s just say that the Blogrush folks aren’t too happy about this. The latest message from John Reese, their CEO, states:

“…And a quick word to any ‘cheats’ that might be reading this letter… it’s very possible that you may come up with something extremely creative that temporarily gets by us, but you should know something… IT’S NOT GOING TO BE WORTH YOUR TIME. And I’m not just talking about the tiny amount of traffic that you’ll receive before we shut you off.

You see, we have other plans in the works…

If you attempt to cheat or abuse our network in anyway, shape, or form, we will not hesitate to come after you. Our company is well funded and has plenty of resources. And we WILL use them to punish you to the fullest extent of the law (and civil court process). Oh, you think you can just hide behind some anonymous proxy IPs? Sorry, it’s not that easy. ANY reason you’d have to try and cheat the BlogRush network for traffic and any attempt you make to monetize that traffic will lead directly to your front door — whether it’s AdSense, any affiliate program in the world, any online pharmacy, porn site, casino… ANYTHING. We will follow the trail and it WILL eventually lead to you.

Our hard-working company provides the income for MANY families. As
the CEO of our company, I take this very seriously. I HAVE TO.
People that attempt to abuse or cheat BlogRush are affecting the livelihood of all my employees and their families. And I will do everything in my power to protect them — it’s MY DUTY.

So for all you cheaters that joined BlogRush and had your fun trying to siphon off some traffic, hopefully it was fun. And I’ll go ahead and make this statement right now… IF you were one of the people that has been cheating our network I’m going to give you ONE opportunity… quit now and we’ll pretend it never happened. I think that’s more than fair.

BUT… if you continue after this point, all bets are off. We WILL eventually discover what you’re doing, where you’re trying to send
traffic, and we will prosecute you. I GUARANTEE IT. Sorry, but WE
HAVE NO CHOICE NOW.”

Those are some pretty strong statements. After seeing the poor conversion rate and equally poor blog titles appearing my widget, I had initially taken down the Blogrush widget. After seeing this bold statement from them, I’ve decided to put it back in again. We’ll see how things turn out.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed, or follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

Wordpress version 2.3 has officially been released. Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress, is even going so far as to throw an upgrade party at his apartment.

This is a pretty major update for the Wordpress blogging platform. It has added some great new features in group publishing - users can now not only save drafts, but can also save posts for pending review.

Full tagging support is now provided as well.

Read more about the latest changes in my previous post.

Keep in mind that this upgrade is for bloggers that have a self-hosted, or Wordpress.org blog. Be sure to download the new version, but remember to back up all posts and database first (useful tips on how to do so here):

(photo by xyzzy)

O, StumbleUpon, you’re our only hope left. Digg started shouting at us, and we’re tempted to listen - but to no avail.

Reddit changed its looks, and is quite nice, but is a whole new alien.

Netscape went up, up, and away to Propeller.

Yahoo, you confuse us. You are already are Delicious, but Mash is just a wee child. Are you bookmarking, networking, news or what?

But you, StumbleUpon. You have stayed true to us. We want to know you very well, but don’t change a thing. We like you just the way you are.

Digg Just Became the Best Social News Site.

If you’ve read my blog for a while, you know that I’m a big Netscape (well ok, Propeller) fan, and I’m usually quick to point out the flaws in Digg. With one major update last night, Digg just became second to none in social news. Seriously, even if you hated Digg before, these new updates will change your perspective. What are these great options I speak of? Let’s take a look.

1. True sociability. Imagine the ease of use of Facebook to find friends in Digg, notorious for having an awful profile / friend options. You can also easily add your im accounts, multiple websites, blogs, Facebook links, and the like.

2. Friends. You can now search for your friends that you might just recognize by name, avatar, or on someone else’s friend list - you’d be surprised on how many people you already know that have Digg accounts that are not yet your Digg friends. Adding friends in Digg used to be the slowest, most painful part of the whole site. No more stupid “hey, you’re adding too many friends” annoyance messages. You’re free to keep adding friends, so have at it.

Once in your profile, click the Add Friends link. You’ll be taken to a much improved page that gives you options to see what Digg friends you already have in your Gmai, AOL, and other popular email account. It also shows you who has befriended you, something that was a lengthy process to get to in the past.

3. Shouts.
There are some things in the new Digg that could easily become abused, though. One such feature is shouting. Still, there are many positive qualities about Shouting. Let’s say you find a friend and you want to let them know about a story you think is great. Before, you would have to hope that they were watching their friend activity and Digg you, but now you are top billing in their profile when they login, depending on their settings. Shouting is also a great thing when you’re just adding someone that you know from somewhere else that’s now on Digg:

You can also shout to your friends by sharing a story (something Digg actually got from Netscape/Propeller!). Just click share on a story and select the friends you want to shout it to (you can also select all of them).

By the default settings, whenever people shout at you, you’ll be emailed. This is similar to Facebook, and will fill up your inbox quickly. If you don’t mind it and want emails all day long, have at it. Otherwise, you can control your email settings pretty easily on the email settings page:

Don’t take my word for it, check it all out for yourself! (Hey, it worked for Reading Rainbow).

Breaking news - Propeller.com has officially been ported over from Netscape. Users going to Netscape.com will now be directed to the AOL / Netscape portal that has a similar look and feel as Yahoo:

For those wondering how the new Propeller will work differently from the old Netscape social news site, so far it appears to have kept user profiles, friends, stories, and the like intact. The only apparent changes are that the site is now branded with Propeller logos instead of Netscape:

Also, it appears that the Netscape team will be making the site more stable, spam free, and robust. As Tom Drapeau, Director of Netscape / Propeller writes on the Netscape blog:

“We do realize that there have been undue performance problems and a few technical glitches over the past few weeks. Let me apologize for this poor user experience, and assure you that we are hard at work in fixing these. We have also had more spam escape our filters lately, and I want to apologize for that as well, and give thanks to all of our great members who reported these stories as such.

Also, we are not happy to simply stand pat with our existing features. In the near future, we will be able to share information about our new social news platform, which we are extremely excited about. It will bring together the best of all worlds: a world class design team, an advanced website platform, and a host of new and interesting ways to enjoy social news.