Guess I should have waited a day before posting the Blogrush update. In the mail this morning, I received a missive from the Blogrush team. I’ll post excerpts below with some commentary.

The BlogRush team has been hard at work making major improvements
for you and we won’t rest until BlogRush is running 100% smoothly and
sending you tons of targeted traffic! This is OUR MISSION. Please
know that our entire team is working around-the-clock to make
improvements and fix any problems AS FAST AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE.

Given that this has been released a little over a week, I’d say they’re pretty darned responsive thus far.

We’ve encountered some problems since our historic launch just over a
week ago, and we fully recognize that we’ve made some real ‘goofs’
with the system for our Public Beta release…

For example, our data center provider (one of the largest in the
world) had a short, temporary outage (they had to replace a network
switch) two days after our launch. We had no control over this
outage but want to SINCERELY APOLOGIZE to those that saw this
message on their blogs (where the widget should have been):

“We are currently experiencing some technical issues and the site
will be back online shortly. Please come back in a few minutes.”

This is a problem. I saw the message and was irritated by it. Glad to know it’s now fixed.

We also realize that we completely underestimated the number of
unethical people that would sign up and proceed to CHEAT and try to
‘game’ the BlogRush system. These cheaters ruined the click-rates of
many of our members (and burned through a lot of their credits using
automated ‘exploit’ methods) and hurt BlogRush’s ability to send
maximum traffic to our honest members’ blogs.

It was very clear to me from the outset that the very first thing people would do is try to game the system. It’s human nature on the interenet (unfortunately.) Since there was no money changing hands, I was comfortable with the risk of early adoption. The worst outcome that could happen is that traffic wouldn’t be referred and crappy links would show up in the widget. Unfortunately, thus far that’s what we’ve seen. But, it’s early days yet.

100% MANUAL BLOG REVIEW.

Our team is going to be manually reviewing every single new blog that
registers to participate in the BlogRush Network.

…

Our members, like YOU, made it LOUD AND CLEAR to us… BlogRush
needs to only have members that have quality blog content — not blogs
filled primarily with ads and other spammy looking JUNK.

Glad you realize this Blogrush, the service will fail if it’s content light. Real bloggers who write real content that people read can actually use your service. When the signal to noise ratio is low, no one will ever click a link from the widget. 100% manual review sounds very expensive though, I hope you can maintain throughput whilst making the human touch.

**** A LOT MORE CATEGORIES! ****

…

**** IMPROVED REPORTING! ****

The current Dashboard stats are being under-reported for all users
right now. This is the reason that users show discrepancies when
looking at Google Analytics data (or other stats packages). We’re
currently sending more traffic to our users than we’re reporting in
the Dashboard because we are giving all users bonus credits
everyday. We’ll soon be reporting all bonus credit activity so all
the numbers will be accurate.

…

**** IMPROVED NETWORK DISTRIBUTION ****

A few of our users have noticed that they’re building up credits
faster than the system is using them.

…

**** BLOGRUSH “FLAVORS” ARE NOW ACTIVE!

You can go login to your account, click the “Settings” tab and then
select “Flavors.”

You can choose from (13) different widget colors. You no longer have
to only use our original “black” widget design that many users
thought was ugly! (Hey, just don’t let our lead designer hear
that… he thought his black design was “really cool.”)

…

***** BLOG POST CONTROLS *****

Under the “Settings” tab you’ll also find a new option called, “My
Post Control.” Here’s what this awesome new feature does…

You can create POST FILTERS for your blog posts…

For example, you can add a keyword or phrase and create a new post
filter. If you ever create a post on your blog (while you have that
filter active — and you can add/delete them at anytime) that
contains one of those keywords in the TITLE of your blog post, that
post…

These are all needed improvements to help the experience along. Thus far, while disappointed with the performance of the Blogrush service, I am impressed with the commitment and speed of the improvements. There’s a long way to go, but this tool just might prove to be as useful as I thought when deciding to give it a whirl…We’ll see how all this shakes out and I’ll write another update in a couple of weeks with my experience to date. Blogrush, I salute your vigor and enthusiasm!