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.

I recently took up the mantle of organising the London Bloggers Meetup Group and we had the first session last night. I have to admit I was a little apprehensive before hand, but it seems I shouldn’t have been as it went really well!

I was a little surprised by the interest on Meetup and even more surprised by how many people actually turned up. It seems blogging is no longer a past time for geeks, more a mainstream medium for fantastic people to wax lyrical, or for talented illustrators (see Blog Mouse below) to pick up book deals, or photographers to write about their passions, or for expats to stay in touch with the folks back home, or probably for most of you reading this, a source of making money. In fact you could say it was quite a colourful bunch who turned up - a representation of the rich tapestry of the blogosphere.

Blog Mouse by Alex Milway

If you want to check out some of the bloggers who came along you can find most of their URLs below. Sorry for those who are missing or if I’ve mispelled your details - drop me an email and I’ll happily correct them.

I learnt some really interesting stuff last night. For example social review sites like Qype and We Love Local are the next big thing coming to a town near you soon. Most encouragingly I found that the blogosphere still has an awful lot of potential for whatever you want to make out of it - money, friends, a career, whatever. It seems there’s also still money to be found for online and Web 2.0 ventures for anyone that’s looking for funding.

A special thanks needs to go out to We Love Local’s Dan Bower who helped a great deal in getting the word out about the meetup. So, Dan, thanks! Hope you like the photo..

Well anyway, here are the bloggers that turned up:

Peter Marshall
Mark McLellan and Gullible’s Travels
Katie Lee and Gemma Cartwright of Shiny Media
Rob Hinchcliffe (founder of Londonist)
Dan Bower, Helen Evans and Max Jenninsg of We Love Local
Cate Sevilla and Dolly Mix TV
Stuart Waterman and My Chemical Toilet
Mirona Iliescu’s Gorgeoux
Tim Dickinson’s Plummet Onions
Keith Brand’s Housing Panic
Bronwen Dekke’s Work Blog
Alex Milway
Jonathon Melhuish
Oliver George
Improbulus
Chris Jackson
Iain Buchanan
Andrew Bulhak

Thanks to everyone who came along last night, I hope you enjoyed yourselves.

For anyone that’s interested, there will be a Christmas Meetup on December 18th. More details are on the Meetup page where you can also find a few more photos from last night. The groups open to everyone and anyone who blogs.

Recently I posted a YouTube video of Derren Brown’s phenomenal subliminal advertising exercise. The reaction I got in the comments got me to thinking that it truly is an interesting concept to play around with.

Any ideas would be much appreciated. What audio visual clues could I leave to highlight the importance of customer satisfaction, without pushing it down their throats.

For anyone interested in attending the London Bloggers Meetup, it is now confirmed for Tuesday 27th November. The venue will be the Camel and Artichoke pub in Waterloo - where I enjoyed a few beers and some cracking food last night.

For more details head over to the Meetup homepage at http://blog.meetup.com/395/?gj=sj2.