For Bloggers, BloggingZoom is a Good Place to be Right Now
Written by Andy Komack on January 9th, 2008
I started using BloggingZoom.com (BZ) about a month ago after reading a post on Sphinn about how Courtney Tuttle had started a great new social community for bloggers, and how BZ encourages users to submit their own articles in addition to other people’s articles (very contrary to how users behave on other social media sites like Digg). I can’t find that thread I followed on Sphinn, but here is a blog post on Jennylens.com that makes the same assertion.
Then, yesterday I read this article, “Forget Digg and SU: 10 Reasons Why You Should Focus on BloggingZoom“, from “Patrick” at Piggie Bank Pie.com (I spent a few minutes looking for Patrick’s full name, but I admit that after reading his About page and saw that he did not offer it up, I gave up quickly).
Patrick makes some excellent points about BZ - it’s new, it’s not crowded yet, making influential BZ friends can drive traffic, the site is squarely focused on bloggers, & Patrick has seen his own nice traffic results from BZ.
While I’m not yet 100% convinced yet that BZ is a community that encourages self-promotion (my initial reason stated above for investigating the site), I’d be interested to know if Patrick would include that as an 11th reason that BloggingZoom is a reason to “forget Digg”. (yes, I will contact him and ask him because that is what good social media networkers do 
)
Also, while I know that using Alexa.com Traffic Rankings data is something that should be viewed with caution (in terms of accuracy and demographic biases), I think it is very worthwhile to note that in less than 2 1/2 months BloggingZoom has already gained a Traffic Rank of 20,146 - which means that Alexa views this at the 20,146th most popular site on the Web.
In any case, I personally am enjoying getting involved in this community (something that Derek here at KoMarketing points out as a factor in choosing how you participate in social media in his recent post “5 Ways To Make Social Media A Part of Everyday Business Strategy“).
I have more work to do to figure out the community, make friends, and discover how to successfully submit articles. But, here are some links pointing to things I have done recently on BZ:
- My BloggingZoom Profile - akomack
- Posts I submitted on BloggingZoom:
- Blog post from John Cass on “Facebook Disables Then Reinstates Robert Scoble“
- Blog post from our own Joe Vivolo on “How Paid Search Can Help Elect the Next President“
- Self-promoting blog post from me (Andy Komack) on “How to Convert a CEO into a Blogging Evangelist“
I hope you join BloggingZoom too, and we can share blog posts we like with each other!
Hey Andy, this Patrick, the guy you are referring in this article
Here’s a few points regarding your post:
1) The only reason why I’m blogging under “Patrick” only, and not Patrick Bisaillon, is because my last name is so unfriendly in English that I prefer to leave my French Canadian roots out of my Internet life. Trust me, you have no idea how badly people can write my last name
2) Thank you for referring to my article on BZ
3) The reason I haven’t added this to my 10 reasons is because I have published a post a few weeks earlier titled: Submit Your Posts to BloggingZoom, where I cover this fact precisely. But looking at it now, I should have added this as reason #11.
I’ll add you as a friend on BZ.
Cheers,
January 9th, 2008 at 5:19 pmPatrick…. Bisaillon
bz account: piggybankpie
Andy, thanks for the mention, and interesting article.
January 9th, 2008 at 11:21 pmThank you for the review I wish I had read it earlier lately with so many things to deal with it is hard to do review searches. We look forward to having you become a huge participant of the community. Currently we are growing at a ten fold pace of what Digg grew. So if we keep this pace we should one day be a bigger community then Digg with out the 16 year old kids controlling the content. We encourage bloggers to submit all the work they feel they would like to share.
Again Thanks And Welcome
Vic
January 21st, 2008 at 3:59 pmAs an update - I’ve been seeing less and less traction on BloggingZoom in terms of the (apparent) number of users of the site (seen by the low number of zooms for top posts - today’s top post has 19 zooms), and in terms of the quality of the submissions.
I like the concept very much - a community of bloggers sharing content and ideas, and having those submissions voted on to bring the best to the top - but I’m just not seeing it.
Hopefully the community will get some traction soon. I’ll give it a bit more time, but there are so many social communities to participate in that I have to choose how to spend my time wisely…
February 4th, 2008 at 9:28 pm