So, I’ve been a member of Entrecard since they opened their doors. And to be fair, its been a good, if sometimes onesided, relationship so far. The traffic has been decent, the friends and new blogs I’ve visited have sometimes proved valuable and other times not so much. I was intrigued, to say the least, when I heard about the newest endeavor by EC to help boost readers and participation on blogs. I mean, afterall, we’ve all seen how well blogrush helped right?

July 15th saw Entrecard announce a partnership with sezwho. Its simple. You join sezwho and add their dealie to your site and you have the ability to earn more EC credits via posting comments on other blogs. Now, I know you’re thinking “AWESOME!! Finally some payback for being first on problogger all the time” but thats where you’re wrong.

Your comments have to have substance and are subject to the ratings of the masses. If people like your comments, good for you, if not…..

Its an interesting idea, and one that is kind of patterned after digg, blogging zoom and other sites like that, however, this is strictly for comments. The more you leave. The better they are, the more likely you are to benefit from this conglomeration of stuff.

Yes, I’ve added it here, so comment away, you willing commentors, maybe you’ll get a good ranking! Oh and let me know if you’ve added it as well….

Popularity: 3% [?]

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% [?]