BackType.com is a prime example of a great idea put into action. BackType.com allows you to setup a profile, yes it’s social networking too, and as you comment on different blogs in the blogosphere BackType will archive those comments for you.

This is very useful when you sit back and try to remember where you made that clever comment two days ago. Instead of searching your browser history looking for a needle in a haystack you just go to your BackType profile and find it there. I have done exactly that several times already.

Another cool thing about having your comments in one central location like that is sharing your thoughts with others. Other bloggers can even tweet or reply to the comment right from your profile. Bloggers can follow each other and even subscribe to each other’s comment feed. Just like other social networking sites this interaction makes it easy to make friends with your friends – only now you can get a better idea about someone when you see how they react to various blog posts.

Did I mention BackType is free? Check out my BackType profile here: http://www.backtype.com/ExtremeEzine

I was inspired to try BackType from Shanker Bakshi dot Com’s post Find, Follow and Share Your Comments With BackType

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I should re-phrase that, “I Talk Too Much“. Have you ever proof read your blog posts or articles just to find that they are so long you could hardly stay awake? Ok, perhaps I’m not that bad but I do have a tenancy to get very long winded. To the point, at times, when I’m sure most will lose interest before getting the message. That’s the risk we take when we turn a simple blog post into a short story. Everyone is in a hurry and we don’t want our readers to start clicking away due to information overload.

I’m as guilty as this as anyone. In fact, just between you and me, I started writing a post yesterday for the Extreme Ezine and it went so long I decided to break it up into an ecourse. It should be ready by next weekend.

I’m taking my friend Sire’s post Blogging! It’s All About Presentation to heart. Number eight’s ‘Keep It Short‘ is something I’m striving for. I think I did ok with this post. Short and Sweet is my new motto.

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John Reese announced today that he has officially shut down BlogRush. BlogRush certainly doesn’t need an introduction. Anyone that’s been involved with internet marketing or blogging within the last year is familiar with the BlogRush widget. I had it on one of my blogs for a long time. I removed the BlogRush widget from my blog once I decided I would never receive the credits I had built up and what little traffic I did get wasn’t worth writing home about.

I’m not here to gloat about the failure of BlogRush. I wouldn’t even call it a failure. BlogRush was serving a few million impressions a day and that’s nothing to sneeze at. I think it was a great idea that may have come on the scene a little late. Look at the competition with ultra successful sites like BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog. Perhaps if BlogRush could have been converted into a more community friendly (yes, Web2.0) site it may have lasted longer.

Blogrush was a great concept and I truly think John Reese was unfairly criticized in a lot of cases. It was clear that John was doing his best to correct the early problems and keep up with the incredible growth the site experienced. The launch was promoted by some of the biggest most successful marketers there are and that raised everyone’s expectations way beyond reason.

In John’s latest blog post, The Death Of BlogRush, he said, “I’ve become a successful entrepreneur (online since 1990) because I am not afraid to fail.” I agree with that and give him credit for trying. He accomplished more than ninety percent of the marketers out here ever will. I’m not a friend of John Reese trying to stand up for him. I’ve never met or even spoken with him. In fact one of my blogs was rejected for BlogRush inclusion and I think it was better that most of the blogs he had running the widget. Even with that I think John Reese should be congratulated for at least giving it his all and going after the dream rather than just wishing a dream would come true.

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This post is going to be helpful mainly to those fairly new to blogging. Can you remember the first time you heard the word ‘Blog’? I bet it wasn’t that long ago. I can remember posting on my forum about this new thing called a Blog asking if anyone know what it was. Shortly after that I was running my own Blog on Blogger.

Later I moved my two Blogs from Blogger, Google’s free Blog hosting network to my own domains using WordPress. That gave me three WordPress Blogs. Just six weeks later I had ten! When I had thirteen blogs I went to the opposite extreme and pulled all but three (This post was rescued from one of them). Blogging is here to stay. It’s just too contagious, too addicting. I converted ExtremeEzine.com to Blog format even though I knew we would be starting over in a sense as far as the search engines were concerned. We built ExtremeEzine.com to a page rank of 05/10 on our main page. Now that the URL of the main page has changed we’re down to a 02/10.

So why the change? It sounds crazy I know but there really is a method to my madness. There are many reasons to change over to Blog format and I want to share my thoughts on the subject.

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