BlogRush was a blog widget that you could install onto your blog that would display feeds from other blogs within your chosen blog category. In return your blogs feeds were aggregated and displayed across the BlogRush network, potentially expanding your blog traffic and introducing your blog to a whole new group of readers.

It’s ashame to see this potentially useful service go down, this is probably just the beginning of a number of casualties we will witness in the current economy.

After careful consideration, we have decided to shutdown the BlogRush service. If you have the widget code on your blog you will need to remove it.

When BlogRush launched in late-2007 it spread like wildfire all over the Web. Thousands of bloggers were talking about it and the service exploded to become one of the fastest growing free services in the history of the Web. During the first year of the service it successfully served 3.4 Billion blog post headlines and the BlogRush widget could be found on blogs all over the world; even up until the moment we closed down the service.

BlogRush didn’t grow without its fair share of problems — from security issues to abusive users trying to ‘game’ the system to much lower click-rates than expected. We also had some problems with trying to fairly control the quality of the network, and in the process made many mistakes in deciding what blogs should stay or go. All of these issues, ultimately, limited the service’s full potential.

Our team worked very hard to try and build a service that would truly help bloggers of all sizes get free traffic to their blogs. This was our primary focus. Not once did we ever try to monetize the service with ads or anything else. BlogRush never made a single penny in revenue. We wanted to be able to help our users FIRST and then worry about monetizing the service later. Unfortunately, the service didn’t work out like we had hoped. (It happens.)

I want to say “Thank You” to all of the great bloggers that at least gave BlogRush a test to see if it would work for them. We sincerely appreciate you giving the service a try.

We have received several offers & inquiries about acquiring BlogRush, but we are choosing not to go that route. While many might think this is crazy, we truly feel it’s the ‘right’ thing to do for our users. Believe it or not, it’s not always about the money. In fact, BlogRush will have lost a small fortune when it’s all said and done, and it was by choice. There were many things we could have done to monetize the service but we wanted to make sure it was going to benefit our users first.

Last but not least I want to say that I hope the failure of this service doesn’t in any way discourage other entrepreneurs from coming up with crazy ideas at 4AM (like I did with this one) and from “going for it” to just try and see if something will work. Without trying there can be no success. And as we all know, ideas are worthless without action. The Web wouldn’t be what it is today without entrepreneurs trying all sorts of crazy ideas.

On behalf of the entire BlogRush team, we wish the best of luck to everyone with their own blogs, ideas, and crazy ventures.

Sincerely,

John Reese

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As far as our business, we have a number of strategies that I believe will not only help us survive but prosper. These strategies I believe will not only make our company stronger in the short term but the will help position us for future growth.

Create Alliances

Currently, we are pursuing strategic partnerships with other business’. Strategic partnerships are a win, win situation. bhg wins because partnerships help us broaden our client pool, our partner wins because our services allow them to broaden their services (and revenues) without additional costs associated with those services.

Focus on Value

With the same service providers chasing fewer dollars, we believe value is going to be a critical determination in the current market, especially for small to medium sized business’. In the next few months, we are going to be launching services that will allow our clients to launch to the web faster, and for less dollars then before. Our focus is to help clients leverage existing Web 2.0 technologies which help us reduce development time and costs.

Focus on Costs

It’s inevitable in any business. Costs for doing business slowly creep. What seemed essential when cash was flowing through the door may not seem so essential now. We are taking the time to look at all our expenses and evaluating what is truly necessary and what can be replaced cheaper even sometimes free alternatives.

Re-invigorating Sales

We are a small design house and when big projects come in the door it’s all hands on deck. Essentially, we are all technicians (not necessarily sales technicians), the downside is sometimes sales get pushed to the side, when the focus is on a big project. It’s important to remember that sales always needs to be a primary focus of your organization. Set goals and develop strategies to meet these goals and finally, make sure you have accountability.

Re-emphasize Core Values

It’s never a bad time to take a look at your business model and return to basics. Re-focusing your business on the things that truly matter to you and understanding why clients should choose your products and services is a critical exercise in good or bad times. Revitalizing your mission will also help you evaluate and cut costs and help you determine an effective marketing approach that will help yield you the greatest benefit.

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I gave up on Internet Explorer a long, long time ago. But I was pushed off that ship. I think it was 2003 when Microsoft stopped providing updates for Internet Explorer (IE) for Mac.

I recommend any and everyone kick the Microsoft habit. I use Mac, but even if you use PC you should still make the switch. Why? First and foremost, is Microsoft’s total insistence of a slavish devotion to their software across the board. Microsoft is like a date gone from bad to “Fatal Attraction” bad. Dialogue boxes with cryptic warnings that try to discourage you from changing default applications (Microsoft One’s), they so conveniently link together. Don’t be afraid! Not to mention all the alternatives I provide below are FREE! Not only can you keep your hard earned cash, but these applications represent the BEST software available PERIOD!

Here are some suggestions for alternatives to the Microsoft applications you currently use.

Firefox

Firefox will change the way you browse the web. Throw away Internet Explorer and start using this open source browser developed by Mozilla. With regular updates and an entire community providing support and developing add-ons to extend Firefox functionality there is no better browser around. You can download Firefox for free and browse the add-ons available to extend Firefox here.

Thunderbird

Thunderbird is a free email client also developed by Mozilla. Thunderbird replaces Entourage, Outlook, or Outlook Express. Just like Firefox, Thunderbird offers a wide range of add-ons to extend it’s functionality.

Open Office

Open Office is an open source project that has been sponsored by Sun Microsystems (Find out more about Open Office). Open Office is a free application that offers word processing, spreadsheet creation, multi-media presentation creation, and data base management software. Open Office competes directly with Microsoft Applications, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You can use Open Office to open any of your current Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files. Open Office is used by millions of users around the world and best of all it is absolutely, completely FREE! You can download it from their Web site.

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*Cover Design by Maria Lilja.

English Language Learners- Interior Samples

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY HOLLY! October 23rd is Holly’s Birthday, I won’t mention how old she is, that wouldn’t be nice. Have a birthday haiku? Use the comments below!

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Get ready for on-slaught of low cost, small, green computers.

I remember in the mid 90’s, talk about how the future of computing was moving away from massive hard drive, application intensive computers to smaller, less application intensive computers that relied on the net for applications and storage space. The idea never took off, but things seem to be about to change.

There seems to be two approaches that computer manufactures are taking. The big guns like HP, Dell, Acer are all producing or are planning to produce a scaled back version of their higher end offerings, with there slave-ish devotion to Microsoft*. But there are a number of new manufactures looking to turn the market upside down re-write the rules with cheap computing loaded with open source Linux based software and access to a variety of web aps and online storage.

What’s Different?

A number of factors are driving and will drive this move in computing.

1. Economics- Bottom line these computers cost only a fraction of tradition desktop and laptop computers. In an economy that is forcing many consumers to be more and more price sensitive, cheaper computing will definitely have its advantages.
2. Reality- The laptop and desktop computers that you buy today are way to much machine for the average user. Most people barely use a fraction of the computing power their computers provide. Applications for word processing, email, and browsing the web typically are not hard drive intensive. With continued increases in processor speeds and storage most users with far more computer then they will ever need.
3. An Explosion of Browser Based Apps- In recent years there has been an explosion of browser based apps, one of the most famous and most used, Gmail. Google also offers Google Docs, a series of browser based apps that are meant to compete with Microsoft Office applications. Today, many of the applications you store on your hard drive now have a browser based competitor.
4. Cheap Space- With increases in storage capacity online servers are bigger and cheaper then ever before. Only a few years ago, hosting for a web site was limited to a relatively small amount of space. These days most hosting plans offer 1 terra byte (or een unlimited space) of hard drive space for about $10/month.
5. Hi-Speed Connections- Back in the 90’s most of us were still on dial up which made the web crawl at a snails pace for even the simplest text based web pages. Now more users are logging on with high-speed connections which is critical for serving up bandwidth intensive web apps.
6. WiFi- Places and ways to connect are everywhere. Particularily, in urban areas access is free and abundant. I have noticed in middle America places are still charging for WiFi access but expect this to change as more people will be able to connect through their cell plan and free WiFi access becomes a value ad for business’.
7. The Rise of the Green Revolution- Most of these mini computers sip power versus their predecessors conserving valuable, costly resources.

A List of the Players

Here is a list of some of manufactures offering mini computing:
Cherry Pal
Asus
Everex
Zonbu Mini Desktop
Zonbu Notebook
Hewlett-Packer
Acer
Dell

*Dell now offers the option to load your computer with Ubuntu, a Linux based operating system.

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I ran across an article on Wordtracker about some steps you can take to help weather the current economic woes. This article covers the importance of understanding the current economic climate, providing value, building stronger client relationships, and the importance of building cash reserves.

Wordtracker Academy asked me, as an experienced internet marketer, if I could offer some perspective on today’s business and financial climate. They specifically wanted to know how it impacts internet marketers and others who use the internet to market online.

Read the full article.

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How? ISPs are floating the idea that they will have to start billing USERS for bandwidth usage. How will that work? Why should I be billed for visiting a web site that I have no idea how much bandwidth it uses? Will sites then have a page “Warning, the site you are about to enter will consume vast quantities of your bandwidth! Would you like to proceed?” How will this effect users browsing habits? The same browsing habits that help small business’ and individuals find new clients and make new connections.**

*Really, you are already footing the bill through your taxes and the charges you currently pay for internet access, be it by a phone line, cable, or satellite.
**Inherently, bandwidth charges are unfair to the user. So what are they really driving at? Tiered service for site owners. In effect doing away with network neutrality!

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I like the idea of mobile blogging. It’s a great way to be able to post to your blog even if you are not in front of your computer. A tool like this would be great if you use a blog to facilitate communication with a team of people in or across companies.

This morning, I tried to use the Wordpress plug-in Postie which posts via email. To have your posts organized correctly you have to format your subject line and email body text so that they will display correctly to your blog. Jeeezzz . . . Just another thing to remember! None the less, I was never able to get the plug-in working correctly and was never able to post to the blog using Postie.

Rick (bhg’s lead developer) and I dug around a little as we were trying to resolve the issue with Postie and found another Wordpress plug-in called Wphone.

What Wphone does is create an easy to use Wordpress Admin panel you can access via your mobile phone. Whether, your phone supports CSS like the iPhone or doesn’t like my Blackberry, you will be able to access a lightweight version of Wordpress Admin dashboard and post without any special formatting like the Postie plug-in requires. The major drawbacks seem to be that you can’t post pictures and video from your phone or format web links within the post body but I will have to explore those possibilities a little further and see what I can come up with.

So here is attempt number two.
*Links for Postie and Wphone and image were added in a subsequent edit after I returned to my normal laptop computer.

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After you have your domain name you will want to set up hosting. Hosting is where your site will reside on the world wide web. Most hosting packages are shared hosting packages. This means that your site is on a server with a number of other web sites and all these sites share resources on that server. The server allocates resources according to demand. This works because most sites use only a fraction of the servers resources. It is possible (although rare), your site or another site may require such a large amount of server resources that it slows down everyone on the server or potentially crashes the server. Some hosts are now offering cloud servers which in effect do the same thing however, they spread resources across multiple servers reducing the chance any one site will over burdening any one server. Mosso is one such host. Expect to pay more for this service. In addition, there are a number of other hosting upgrades you can choose including dedicated hosting in which, you have a dedicated box that only your site resides on. For dedicated hosting Rackspace is probably the best and most flexible dedicated hosting solution.

Let me say, the likelihood that your site will need anything other than the normal shared hosting services is SLIM! So stick with shared hosting and, in most cases, you can always upgrade if necessary.

Inexpensive, Easy to Install Hosting Options for Wordpress

There are a number of affordable hosting options available ranging from $5-$8/month. Don’t make the mistake of paying more for shared hosting. Below are three hosting services that offer a slew of features at a reasonable cost.

Siteground

We use Siteground hosting for a lot of the sites we build. Siteground offers a shared hosting plan with 750gb of server storage and 7500gb of bandwidth which is more than enough for 99% of web sites. In addition, Siteground offers Fantastico which will allow you to install Wordpress to your domain in less than 5 minutes by logging into cPanel (cPanel is an application that allows you to manage your domain). For us, Siteground has always been reliable and when there have been issues customer support has been responsive and has worked to help us resolve any issues. Siteground will run about $7/month for hosting.

Go Green- Green Hosting

More and more people and business’ are looking for green alternatives to their normal products and services. Now you can even your web site hosting can be green.

A number of companies have sprung up that offer “Green Hosting”. These hosting companies accomplish their aim in one of two ways, 1.) They use alternative renewable energy directly, using solar, wind, hydro and so on to power their companies, or 2.) They purchase Renewable Energy Certificates which provide for investments in renewable energy resources for a small charge based on their energy consumption.

Here is a list of hosting services currently providing Green hosting:

ThinkHost

*Think Host uses renewable energy resources to directly power their hosting facilities. Think Host powers through solar and wind resources. They offer affordable shared hosting packages starting as low as $9.95/month and provide web site owners with umlimited bandwidth and storage space.

Think Host Mission Statement from their web site:

“We strive to be a constantly evolving and improving socially responsible company, providing the very best green web hosting services and dedicated to playing our part in making this world a better place for all.”

Dreamhost

*Dreamhost is another green hosting solution. Although, they do not power their hosting facilities directly with renewable energy they purchase renewable energy credits and purchasing carbon off set credits. In addition, Dreamhost has initiatives in place to cut down on things like paper consumption, office commutes and so on. Dreamhost 1 year hosting packages start at $9.95/month and go down as low as $5.95/month with multiple year commitment. Currently, Dreamhost is offering, for a limited time, unlimited storage and bandwidth for new hosting clients.

From the Dreamhost web site.

DreamHost is carbon neutral.

We’ve calculated the impact of everything that DreamHost uses and leaves behind in the course of our daily work. All of the resources that we use - paper in the office, electricity for our servers, even the gas in our cars that bring us to the office - leaves behind some kind of soul-sucking residue in the world.

Both, Dreamhost and Think Host offer one click installation for Wordpress.

*The links for Thinkhost and Dreamhost are affiliate links which mean if you use them to sign up for hosting we get a small discount on our hosting. I am not recommending them because of our affiliate program rather I have signed up to be an affiliate because I believe they are great hosting services. If you prefer there regular links here they are Thinkhost and Dreamhost. If you use our affiliate links thank you, in advance.

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