In the past year or two there’s been plenty of talk about the value of blogging for business, with plenty of positive and negative sentiment. My own opinion, not biased at all by the fact that I write a couple of blogs, is that they’re fantastic for businesses.

Why do I think this, well a couple of reasons off the top of my head:

• blogs open up a manageable two way dialogue with customers, creating an open relationship and possibly even community,

• blogs are quick and easy to setup and present a cheap way for small businesses to develop a web presence,

• blogs are great for search engine optimisation i.e. improving your search rankings and attracting traffic,

• blogs provide a creative outlet for your employees to show the human side of your business,

• blogs are great public relations tools where you get to control the message.

But it seems I’m not the only one who thinks this. A recent article on Startups.co.uk also supports the value of blogs, referencing case studies like Stormhoek Wines - check out their guide to blogging - and a handful of others.

I had intended to post the link up here but for the life of me I can’t find it, but why not check out www.startups.co.uk anyway, it’s full of very useful advice for entrepreneurs.

If you’re new to blogging or want to find out more, why not come along to the London Bloggers Meetup for some inspiration! Or instead just get started with a blog at www.wordpress.org.

The next edition of the London Bloggers Meetup is nearly upon is and I’m delighted to announce the launch of a new blog to support the events. From now on this is where I’ll post reviews, photos, links, write-ups and anything else in relation to the meetup.

So if you are thinking of coming along, or just want to find out a little more about what it’s all about, then head over to the new blog. If you want to register for the next event - the New Year Bloggers Extravaganza - then head to the Meetup page and sign-up. At the moment we have 37 people confirmed for the next one!

A quick note of thanks to Qype who is supporting the event by putting some money behind the bar and running a competition on the night. That’s right, Qype will buy you a beer for attending, so what more incentive do you need?

Yep, after much deliberation, BlogRush has been removed from my sidebar.

This is the last view you’ll see of the widget on my blog, unless some fairly drastic improvements are made:

There was a huge buzz in the blogosphere when Blogrush hit the market back in September, including a post from my own hand about this brand new “laser targeted” approach to bringing in traffic.

But it seems of late BlogRush has been getting some bad press - not least from the likes of Gobala Krishnan at Easywordpress and the ProBlogger.

So I started to wonder how much value Blogrush has been for me. Of course the only way to find out is to head for your stats, or with the much talked about Blogrush, the stats analysis in the admin system. As I hadn’t logged into my account since installing the widget I’d clean forgotten my username and password. No problem I hear you say, just request a new one. So I did, over three days ago….. still nothing.

Rather than try again, I figured I could just as easily head to my own stats package instead. I logged in and by looking at the last three months I was pleased to see an upward curve, in fact I’ve had a bit of a step change just this last month which is nice - see the chart.

But how much of this could be attributed to Blogrush? The next step then was to drill down a little further into the referring sites analysis. Unfortunately I was disappointed to see the following figures from the BlogRush widget:

Nov - 9 page views
Oct - 2 page views
Sept - 0 page views

What does this mean then?

Well, generally it means that BlogRush is doing diddlysquat for my blog. Eleven referrals in over two months means it’s essentially useless. But what’s worse is that in all likelihood it’s also been leaking readers away from my blog. Unfortunately I can only tell this for sure by logging into my BlogRush account - which I can’t do without my username and password.

So we go full circle. Or do we? I think the best bet is to just delete the widget from my sidebar and right off the wasted time. After all 11 visits is more valueless than value.