Twelve Black Code Monkeys

In my relentless attempt to take over the world (as Dawn and Drew would say), I’ve started looking at this interesting Blogging tool called Blog Explosion. After signing up, you surf other people’s blogs and for each blog you can rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, add comments, bookmark it, or blacklist it. As you build up credits, they can be used to direct other Blog Explosion members to your blog - an exchange of eyeballs so to speak.

While good in theory, there are definitely loopholes. For example, while you have to do some manual stuff in order to surf to the next blog in line, and you have to wait 30 seconds in between blog viewings, there is nothing that forces you to actually read a blog. You could easily go do something else in a different browser window and then switch back.

That being said, I still think it’s useful. I have found a number of interesting blogs which I doubt I’d ever have noticed in my ordinary subscription to a handful of major (and a few minor) blogs. There are few if any “A-list” blogs, and hey, that’s a good thing, right? While it’s good to have a sense for those more popular blogs, part of the essence of blogging is getting to read stuff from people who are NOT major headline makers either in the blogosphere or in the mainstream press, and let’s face it, these two worlds are bound to start merging any day, if they haven’t already!

The other nice part of this is that it’s a pyramid scheme! Ok, maybe not quite that bad, but kinda. You can refer people and those people will contribute to your credits when they visit other blogs. Apparently there are five levels, so it’s not as bad as it could be, I suppose.

I’ve only been using this for a week or so, so I’m still not 100% sold on the idea, but it’s worth trying out at least. That’s what I’m doing for now – until the referrals come in and then I can just sit back and watch the profits roll in, yeah, baby! No, no, I don’t even expect to get any folks under me. But it is kind of cool that you can manually drive people to your site, even if they take one look at go off to play solitaire until my 30 seconds are up. Some people will actually find something of interest and may just stick around for longer – as I’ve done on not a small number of occasions…