Its official, the USA is a White Trash Nation! Thats right, that staple of early nineties TV is back on the air, proving that once again, we have a facination for watching our neighbors get the crap beat out of them. American Gladiators is back on the air, and unfortunately, it was in the works even before the writers strike began. Instead of watching new episodes of this season’s greatest new shows, I’m stuck watching this ken doll on steroids pummel firemen, professional skateboarders and day care workers in to the ground. Granted, there is a part of me (a little white and trashy part of me) that likes it for the shear humor.

Like one of last nights male contestants, Chad, a professional skateboarder. He went the entire round only scoring 4 points (to the NYFD’s 32 or something like that) and all he could say was “I still got time”. Well, his time ran out and he lost. It was much more entertaining watching the women battle their way through the challenges than it was the guys.

That may be because I would not want to meet any of the women gladiators in real life, or because the women seemed to be doing a better job (and were more evenly matched against the gladiators) than the guys did. There’s just something about watching someone, anyone, get the crap beat out of them by someone twice their size though.

Amy asked while we were watching it, if we watched it when it was on before and I had a hard time recalling. I don’t think we ever made a conscientious effort to watch it, but if it was on, it was on. Maybe Eric can shed some light on that for me. Did you watch Gladiators?

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It appears that several of the bigger players are abandoning ship in hopes that they aren’t dragged down with it. The promises made by BlogRush head John Reese have failed to materialize as more and more bloggers pull the widget from their sites in an effort to rid the web of such bloaty scripts.

I had posted back in November about my experiences with BlogRush and whether or not it was worth it and at the time, I decided to make some changes to the way I handled their system. Instead of giving them my main feed with every article in it, I switched to a specific blogrush feed that only showed the articles I wanted to show. It helped a little, but as the next screenshot shows, it still wasn’t the boon to traffic that programs like EntreCard, and even just making comments on other blogs has been.

My next step was to change the category my blog lived in as well on the BlogRush system. That did little more than drive my credits up as I received less and less exposure. So now, I have around 20k credits that aren’t being used (which is a far cry from the Cow’s 10,000,000 credits). I’ve noticed that as I browse the blogosphere, I’m seeing the BR widget less and less and with bigger sites pulling their widgets, I have to wonder if it was a good idea poorly implemented. One of the things that makes EntreCard worth while is that you have to get out and drop your card on other blogs and YOU get to choose who you advertise on and who advertises on you.

This form of self quality control enables you to make better choices that benefit you and your readers more than blogrush. Most of the crap on the blogrush widget is just that, crap. I really don’t need to know that you failed to make 28,000 a month last year. What I need is good incoming traffic.

Popularity: 65% [?]