Well I have seen a ton of crap written about Blogrush since it launched just over a week ago.

Put Blogrush On! It’s the greatest thing since sliced internet, and will bring you a flood of highly targeted traffic, all of whom are desperate to click on your ads and make you a millionaire! (I’m paraphrasing here).

Take Blogrush Off! It’s evil and intrusive, and Google will come round to your house and pour petrol through your letter box, your family will leave you, it’s full of spammers and you should never even think about installing it again!

OK, lets all take a deep breath and start again, shall we?

I signed up to Blogrush the night Andy Beard first posted about it, as it was the first post I read on the subject It sounded like a cool idea, and I know Andy’s not the type to write about anything without knowing a fair bit about it. He made no grand promises, but it sounded interesting, so I signed up, wrote about it myself in order to start spreading the affiliate sign-ups, went to bed and forgot about it.

The next day, it seemed like every blog in the world was writing about it in a tide of euphoria, rapidly followed by the sensationalist link-baiting negative posts, which were in turn followed by a group of more sober, but still negative comments. Blogrush, from nothing to everything and back again in less than two weeks.

More Facts, Less Hysteria 

Being the contrary sort that I am, I ignored the good and the bad, and just watched my widget and traffic, and so far have determined the following:

• The widget is fast loading, and has never caused my blog any problems.
• The affiliate system works well, and I have earned over 15000 credits for doing very little.
• I have followed and read some interesting stuff from the headlines displayed on the widget.
• I have received just under 20 visitors via the widget. A small amount, but they cost me nothing.
• Possibly unrelated, but i have gained 15 more RSS subscribers in the time the widget has been live.

Unspectacular yes, but hardly worth screaming about one way or another.

This morning, a long email was sent out to all Blogrush subscribers, which you can read here, from John Reese the man behind the whole thing. I normally scan the first paragraph of these things, then delete them, but this one was written so personally and passionately I read the whole thing. In it John makes clear that while Blogrush has made mistakes (don’t forget, this is still ‘beta’), he and his team are absolutely determined to make sure this thing works. They will be taking legal action against anyone attempting to cheat the system, they will be manually reviewing all blogs submitted, more categories will become available, as well as a few other things addressing concerns already raised.

Giving It A Chance

I said at the beginning that I would run the widget for a month or so, and evaluate it from there. I haven’t changed my mind.

So far it has cost me nothing, has not negatively affected my blog in any way, and has brought me some free traffic. How can I complain about that? It’s always your choice what you run on your own blog, but if you have recently removed the widget because of some of the hysterical posts floating around, it may pay to give it another chance - what’s it going to cost you?