Blogarama Review
I sat down to do a review of the Blogarama site and realized what a horrible time it was to do a review of their site.
From their news page:
Last week (2nd May) the hard disk on our server decided to give up. Our dedicated server is supplied and hosted by a rather large company and considering that we moved to the new servers just a handful of months ago, we were quite surprised that the standard of hardware they used was below par (obviously). Although in hindsight there is no discounting the fickle nature of hardware.
We didn’t have a remote backup system in place (our fault) and our only backups where on the very hard disk (again our fault) that died. This resulted in a total loss of all data, which is why Blogarama is so desolate at this point in time.
What we did have was a half finished version of a new Blogarama sitting around. So, the past week was spent feverishly putting together a working Blogarama. And here it is. This also explain why it looks so different to the previous incarnation.
The events of the past week as taught us a lesson that we hope we can share with you . . . KEEP LOCAL BACKUPS. Though if you are anything like us, you won’t heed this bit of wisdom, until it’s too late.
We hope that Blogarama will get back on it’s feet soon enough and everyone can once again enjoy the free service provided by The Blog Directory.
Let this be a lesson for all of us. Backup often and locally. I actually just completed a round of backups before I started writing this post. So take the time to do it yourself now (don’t worry I’ll wait 
)…
Back? Backups in order? Good.
Onto a brief review of blogarama:
Blogarama is a basic directory of blogs. Users have the ability to search by keyword or browse by directory. Since new blog directories keep popping up, the burden is on each to somehow distinguish themselves from the competition. Here are some key function on the blogarama site:
- To include your site in the directory, you must register with your email address, etc.
- Review Blogs. Users can enter reviews of blogs they read. Similar to an Amazon review of a book. BEcause of their crash there are few reviews out there. This is an opportunity for reviewers to start afresh and bloggers to get their sites updated.
- Rate Blogs. Easier to do then write a review. Rate a blog from 1 to 10. This is subject to abuse and could be rendered worthless. Blog owners could continually give themselves a rating of 10. BLog readers could give blogs them despise continual ratings of 1. The rating system could be made valid if only registered members could rate sites. This would then be able to keep blog owners from rating their own site and keep users from giving more than one rating on a blog.
- Most Cool List. The sites on this list are the sites that provide the most traffic to blogarama. How can you provide traffic to blogarama? Place one of their links on your site. If your users use it to visit blogarama, blogarama records that they came from your site.
- Most Popular List. The most popular blogs visited when users found the blog via the blogarama site.
- Highly Ranked List. Top ranked sites by users visiting blogarama. Again this is subject to abuse. See above.
Hopefully blogarama will get back on their feet. It will be interesting to see if the site loses out on traffic and interest because of their data loss. I’m sorta thinking they might.
If you had previously registered with blogarama, return to the site and register again. At least in these early stages of re-registration there is opportunity to get noticed with little competition.
Posted by Paul Flyer on Friday, May 13th, 2005 in RSS Solutions
