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At long last, John Reese has finally launched his long since promised TrafficJam…which goes hand in hand with last year’s BlogRush.
Interestingly enough, I finally decided to remove the BlogRush widget from my blog just yesterday because I wanted to try other things in its place. The widget had been providing me with about 100 visitors per month, but I wanted to see what else could be done with that virtual space.
Well now that TrafficJam is here, I put the widget back to see what affect the new site will have on visitorship.
What Does TrafficJam Do?
TrafficJam ranks blog posts according to popularity based on BlogRush statistics. According to the site:
TrafficJam.com uses technology to analyze the click-through rates of millions of blog
post titles across the BlogRush Network, along with other factors such as time spent on a particular blog entry’s page, and attempts to estimate the ‘popularity’ and ‘quality’ of certain posts based on similar data from other blog posts of the same topic.
The main page shows the most popular blog entries across all categories. Then to the right, you can choose a category to find the most popular entries in each major category.
What I Like About TrafficJam
- It is a potential extra avenue for traffic for BlogRush members.
- It’s a good place to look for popular posts to comment on (intelligently, of course).
- It’s a good place to find entries to trackback to and/or to write about on your own site.
What I Think Could Be Better
Prior to launch (a couple months ago), John actually asked me for my opinion and any suggestions I had for the site to make it a better research tool and potentially good exposure for BlogRush members:
-> The site only ranks the most popular. I suggested having the option to show the most recent entries across the network and in specific categories.
-> A more sophisticated search function would be good. Being able to search through specific categories and by date would be awesome.
-> The categories are very wide, but I understand it’s very much tied into the categories of BlogRush. I think sub-categories would make this a much more useful research tool.
Looks like none of those brilliant suggestions have been implemented…yet. 
Overall Thoughts
I’ll definitely be using the site myself for ideas, new blogs to read and so forth.
I do hope that John Reese’s team really works hard to make this a go-to resource not just for BlogRush users, but the reading public in general. It’s success will definitely hinge on that.
February 21st, 2008 at 9:22 am
This is something I will be keeping my eye one.
February 21st, 2008 at 9:52 am
Thanks for the info. I too just recently put the BlogRush widget back on my site. I’ll be keeping an eye on this.
February 21st, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Alice said: “I think sub-categories would make this a much more useful research tool.”
I totally concur. And this, “I suggested having the option to show the most recent entries across the network and in specific categories.”… by far would be awesome!!
February 21st, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Update…82 visitors from TrafficJam.com since yesterday.
February 23rd, 2008 at 3:25 am
Alice-I found in my niche that the blog posts were not very good so I decided to remove Blog Rush. I would often see the same posts over and over. I hardly received any traffic at all from Blog Rush. I received so much more from stumbleupon.
I am going to wait on Traffic Jam. Without the subcategories, it is hard for your posts to be on relative other blogs. I don’t think Blog Rush is great for every niche. He should have listened to you. Anna http://www.green-talk.com
February 23rd, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Great post! I am looking forward to seeing how well TrafficJame works. It seems many have been let down with blogrush, so maybe this will redeem it!
God bless!
February 23rd, 2008 at 9:35 pm
Hhmmm….perhaps I’ll have to revisit putting the BlogRush widget back on my site. I had removed it because I wrote it off as a gimmick not worth the real estate.