Publishing and Blogburst

A short note regarding Blogburst and "Chuck for..." In the past week linked headlines for this blog have appeared on Reuters and Chicago Sun Times in excess of 4,000 times for individual readers with 4 separate articles generating those headlines. Senator Clinton and the Democratic Party, Where Now? appeared over 3800 times over three days. This did not generate huge traffic to the site, but I am astonished to see Reuters pick up one article three times. One article has been showing up on Reuters since November of last year, it has been out of view only a couple times in weekly periods.

Blogburst's description of its services to publishers follows:

BlogBurst gives publishers access to the best of the blogosphere, and provides editorial management tools that help you filter and select content according to your needs.

BlogBurst's powerful Publisher Workbench helps you discover and source talented contributing bloggers and their posts. You can easily map selected content to specific areas of your site, complementing your in-house editorial content or creating entirely new sections for your readers.

I find being included in such an endeavor flattering, to say the least. You submit your blog and they review it to see if they wish to include you. From there it is up to the blogger to write things that will get picked up. I am in no way a professional writer and in fact most things I do are first drafts checked for spelling and dropped words. I just do not have time to spend large amounts of it on composition and sometimes that shows to my deficit.

If it sounds like I'm bragging, well I don't mean to. I'm rewarding my readers, by assuring them that their small numbers are demonstrating some real taste. OK, that's bragging. This site is 45 on the Technorati scale now, that means it is 177,000th in blogs, for scale Blue Oregon is rated 391 or 11,600th so I only have to pass 166,000 blogs to be competition. That will take some doing... Almost by itself a link from BO can boost this site 1 Technorati point. I think that takes care of accusations of bragging.

If you're a blogger who'd like to boost your exposure and you can write well with an interesting voice, Blogburst might be a real tool for you. I'll warn you that political blogging is nearly the least rewarded - travel, tech, and sports get the best play. It will give you some idea of objective editorial evaluation of your work. I find it pretty hard to be objective about the quality of my stuff, after all, I spent time and effort on it...

My real rewards are my loyal readership and the occasional kudos from fellow bloggers, thanks.