After a roasting from the money-grabbing money-making blog community, Blogrush went ballistic behind the scenes and addressed many issues.

According to an email, they manually removed 10,000 dodgy blog / splogs that were sallying their reputation. After re-aligning their crossed eyes, they also re-jigged a dash board that outlines all their stats in crystal clear fashion. ie After being accused of blowing chunks, they moved mountains in order to blow hot.

But looking at my dashboard results, are the BlogRush team actually still blowing chunks?

The BlogRush stats

From left to right, you have:

"Blog title" (obvious)

"Syndicated" (ie number of appearances on other blogs' BlogRush widgets)

"Readers" (how many times a post has been clicked on and read)

"Buzz" (no idea about that metric.)

"Readers" is the vital column for me! Ouch!

Is Blogrush widgetry worth the real estate for 2 leads?

If I were paying a fortune per pixel squared, no, BlogRush would have been an expensive waste of space, but thanks to A Small Orange, The Pisstakers is a cheap operation to run, so, hosting the widget isn't a financial issue for me.

Is Blogrush a good idea badly executed?

In theory, content is king, so, BlogRush is a good idea, displaying 5 random humor posts from around the internet. (The content should be pretty hot and relevant, especially after the weeding out they just did to eliminate the crud content.) Positive execution of a good idea.

The dashboard is fairly clear, the widget script is simple and seems to load fast. Technically, BlogRush can boast positive execution.

Their marketable name and service seem to generate media interest on a big scale (for right and wrong reasons!)

So all round, the widget and the viral potential are on the ball.

Why is it only generating a handful of traffic?

I think the poor execution in the equation is on the side of the bloggers like me! I certainly haven't placed the widget in a prime position. In fact, it has been located so far down my right sidebar it may as well have been in the dark.

In terms of visitor numbers, it is a wash between Blog catalog near the top and BlogRush at the bottom. Both are crap for business (the way I have used them!)

So what is the Pisstakers' strategy? I am going to give the BlogRush widget a month in pride of place and see what happens. If it doesn't buck up, then it will get demoted till a better content-rich widget comes along.

What about you guys? Is it handy to quickly reference other humor posts from the side bar widget, or is your RSS reader already full enough with blogs you like and there isn't enough time in the day to read any more?