Although I do plan to prioritize writing to a level that allows me to do it daily, my day job and late-night baseball have kept me extremely busy recently.  (Pretty exciting about them Red Sox, eh?)

However, I would like to mention one thing I found humorous. A while back I wrote a middling review of a blog traffic-building product called Blogrush, commenting that the president of that company had written some pretty odd, very lengthy, rambling emails to his product users. My conclusion was that the jury was still out on the product.

Well, guess what. They kicked me out of their network. They did not cite my review as a reason, of course, but I suppose they didn’t have to–we’re grown-ups here; we both knew why they were doing it.

Road construction is on-going, by the way. The road in front of our house has been flattened dirt for a couple of weeks now, as the major work has moved to the other end of the street. Our driveway has been inaccessible since they started. Also, although the plan is for the road to get no wider and, if anything, narrower in places, they’ve removed quite a bit of yard from the front of our house. The plan is for about two more weeks of this, and then we’ll be done.

Shortly after I started this blog, I discovered BlogRush, a new product that purportedly helps send traffic to your blog. I must say, I have been very unimpressed so far. I am not issuing a verdict at this time, as they still may be able to pull it together, but so far … not so great.

The concept of BlogRush is that you create an account, select a category, and then put this Blogosphere widget on your site (look over on the right, below the Google ads). I selected Writing and Literature as my category, even though I easily could have selected any of several others. Your Blogosphere widget then will show links to five other blog entries from your category. The number of times you get to appear on other people’s Blogosphere widgets is based on a complex Syndication Credit formula, which itself appears to be based largely on your own site traffic. (How they make any money off all this is beyond me. I assume they’re hoping to corner a specific market so that Google will buy them.)

BlogRush, in theory, has this cool dashboard that shows you your information. So far, it’s never worked. Based on the emails I’ve received from founder John Reese, they encountered several problems after the launch, many caused by people trying to cheat the system. Imagine that–people trying to cheat the system. Who woulda thunk.

Mr. Reese has sent out a number of lengthy rambling emails discussing the issues they’ve had. Some of these emails have been rather … well, odd. The most recent one was a 2,484 word, 95 paragraph email that featured lots of emphatic asterisks, words and phrases in all-caps, and a nice peppering of exclamation points (or, as they say in England, exclamation marks). The email included passages like this:

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.

* If you’re one of our valued, HONEST users, I’m very sorry you even have to read stuff like that. I know it’s a waste of your time. Unfortunately, there are unethical people in this world that attempt to abuse and take advantage of others.

Kind of weird, huh? This appeared near the bottom of Page 3 of 6 if you pasted the email into MS Word. The email ends with this:

I’ll be in touch when I have more “news” to share. Thanks for reading this long letter. I had a lot to tell you about. :-)

(There’s that sideways smiley face again.)

To be honest, the whole letter was a waste of my time, although it did introduce me to BlogRush “flavors,” which means I can have that widget on the right over there show up in a variety of bright, cheery colors. (There are thirteen “flavors,” including Licorice–which is what I’m using–grape, chocolate, watermelon, and the always tasty aqua.)

There are other oddities as well. Along the bottom of the BlogRush Web site are some handy links to FAQs, terms, privacy, contact, help, etc. Once you log in, however, you automatically are redirected to your under-construction dashboard. Even if you try to get back to the home page, you can’t while you’re logged in. And the dashboard does not include these links. There is a help tab that has some of the information (on a page that currently has several broken images), but not all. So, the only way to get to the privacy statement or terms or the video on the home page is to sign out. Also, the Blogosphere widget on my site occasionally links me to sites that don’t include the Blogosphere widget on theirs. Maybe those are some of those cheaters we were warned about.

Like I said, I’m not giving up on this product yet, but I’m very close.

Let me say out the outset that this is not a paid ad. I tried a product, I liked it, and I’m sharing with you what I found out. I don’t do blog ads.

Okay, that said, let’s move on.

Like a lot of people, I spend a significant amount of time in front of my computer. So, like a lot of people, I spend a little time making my desktop–my computer desktop, not my actual desktop, which is a mess–look nice. For a couple of years, I have used desktop artwork from a talented artist named Vladislav Gerasimov. You can find his Web site here: http://www.vladstudio.com/home. I learned of him through a graphic artist I work with, and I really like Vlad’s work.

Vlad recently teamed up with Jury Gerasimov (I assume they’re related) of softshape on the Chameleon Clock–a piece of software developed by Jury that turns the standard Windows tray clock into an artistic and useful tool. However, with Chameleon Clock, you also can have Wallpaper Clocks: desktop artwork that actually keeps the date and time.

Some of the wallpaper clocks are bright and colorful, others dark and brooding. Some are more functional, others just fun to look at. But all of them keep time on your desk top, and they’re all beautifully done.  Together, the Gerasimovs have created  a great add-on to the Windows environment.

Give them a try by going here: http://www.softshape.com.

Back in the early days of the Web, organizations constantly were attempting to find ways to make people want to come back to their Web sites.  One original concept was that a site should have a really good Links page–a page people would bookmark and then come back to frequently to get to your links.  (Law firms, for example, liked to have links to all the local courts, libraries, and law resources, with the idea being that people view their site as some kind of portal into the legal world.)  This didn’t really work.  First, everyone was doing it.  Second, it turns out that Links pages simply give site visitors a vast array of juicy-looking exit points.  Finally, the advent of search engines like Google (or “the Google,” as our president says), made these Links pages fairly irrelevant.

More recently, some companies have put games on their site, thinking that games will drive people back to the site and, of course, cause them to buy more of their products or services.  The success of this approach will depend on your audience.  The Keebler Elf games on Kellogs’ Web site appeals to kids, applying the same marketing logic as was done with Joe Camel:  if you can get them to like the character, you can get them to like the product.  Although this may work well when your goal is Brand awareness, I have yet to see games on a corporate Web site–a site targeting an adult audience–that I thought were effective.

What I do find effective, however, are clever and imaginative contests that anyone can enter and the results of which the target audience will want to come back to see.  An excellent example of this is The New Yorker’s Cartoon Caption Contest, which is held monthly.  They show you a cartoon, and anyone can submit a caption for it.  Then they let their on-line audience vote for what they think is the best caption (collecting your name and email address as you vote).  I try to go back every month to see what people have submitted, and usually the winning entries are extremely clever.

Another good example of using contests to attract your target audience is the Wine Limerick contest for Wine Enthusiast magazine.  What serious wine drinker does not want to demonstrate how witty he or she is?  They just recently posted the results, and I’m happy to say that my own father was one of four 1st place winners, having entered this little ditty:

I have an untamed predilection

for building a vast wine collection.

But my wife is incensed

o’er the vinous expense.

‘Tis a shame; I shall miss her affection.

Way to go, Dad.  For his efforts, he apparently gets two years of the magazine for free!  The cost to the magazine, therefore, is virtually nothing.  But they received hundreds of entries and probably thousands of additional eyeballs on their Web site.  Clever.