I’ve been blogging for maybe a year now but nothing serious. Picked it up more in the past few months with my discovery of WordPress. It’s a truly great tool. I’ve never been much of a writer nor do I think I ever will be one. But I do feel that I have a lot of opinions about different topics and find this as a good way to get those out. But I got to thinking about what people look for in a blog.

Blogs are an important part of the internet today. Quite possibly the foundation of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. But why are some blogs more popular than others? Are they better written, have better content, what? I read quite a few blogs on a regular basis and wonder what those guys have that the average Joe doesn’t. I watched a video blog on ProBlogger.net last night that mentioned one blog that happens to come at the right time. He did a blog asking people what they thought about who had a chance to win American Idol and before he knew it, he had tons of people looking to talk about American Idol and who would win at his blog.

That seems like the easiest way to “make it big” in the blogsphere. That one hit that gets you noticed. Many blogs would love to have one article featured on Digg or one of the other popular book-marking sites out there. This will usually work to get a lot of users to your blog for a short period. But if my personal experience is common, I very rarely go back to a site that I have dugg.

I’m not sure of the magic mix to get a successful blog going but hopefully I find out someday. Would be fun to look back at this entry and think to myself that this was all crap and something else pushed me over the hump. If you like what I’m doing and want to know more, subscribe to my blog via email or via my RSS feed. Always feel free to leave me a comment, I like to hear what people have to say.

Popularity: 26% [?]

So I hunted down and finally received and invite to Streamy last weekend and got to get my grubby hands on it. So far I like what I see. I tried so hard to get it because of what I had heard; that is was the “Next Latest and Greatest” web app. While I can’t quite agree with that, I definitely can say that I would give it a “Thumbs Up”.

I have never been one to really get into the RSS readers before. I have one on the gadget bar for Vista but nothing other than that. Streamy has a really good way of handling RSS feeds. Very easy to add and go through. After you see one, it marks it read and takes it away. Not sure if it is lost forever from your subscriptions but it does what I would want so I’ve never looked.

I do like the start page but have run into a few situations where I have seen some old stories that should have only been up there for 24 hours. Not a big deal at all.

I really like the instant messaging offered. I haven’t used it yet but it seems really easy to IM your friends and share articles that you are reading. I can see this as very productive.

This brings me to my negative comment about the site. I really wish that they would open it up to more people. I would love to get some more friends of mine in here but I am only given a limited amount of invites (2 per email address). If they were to make that something in the 5-10 range, I can see this thing really taking off. If I was able to easily invite more of my friends and co-workers, I think my experience would be a whole lot better.

Overall I would give Streamy a 7 out of 10 rating (9 out of 10 if they let more users in). It’s a great app and I highly recommend begging anyone for an invite. I still have one left

Popularity: 18% [?]

As an update to my post a couple of days ago; I have 2 Streamy invites to give away. Here are the rules:

Tell me in 50 words or less why I should give “You” an invite and not anyone else who is requesting. So to enter, enter a comment to this story (or the original) and tell me why you deserve the Streamy invite over the others. I look forward to getting some creative answers.

Popularity: 27% [?]