I've been having fun checking out the many blogger groups and sites aimed at increasing traffic and building the blog community. You can find those I added to this blog as icons on the bottom right hand column of my E-Journal. There are really some cool ideas being tried out there in the blogoshpere - not the least of which, of course, is Blogcritics.
Blogshares is a sort of link-sharing community that makes an "investment" every time a blog is linked or shared. I'm not sure yet exacty how it works, but I'm in. It's creating a lot of excitement out there and looks like it will be fun.
Blogwise is a blog catalog, a search engine that categorizes almost 5,000 blogs by subject and geography.
There are now all sorts of Web Blog Rings. i joined the Michigan version.
Then there's Blogchalking. It specializes in what it calls "collaboratively mapping weblogs for smarter blogsearching" so the big search engines will pick them up. It keeps track of blogs by author, georaphic region, areas of interest and lets blogers "tattoo" their blogs with little symbols that "discloses something personal without revealing too much."
The final addition is a cool traffic-generating idea called Blogsnob, which can be clicked to from a very, very tiny "BS" logo you'll find down n the right section of this page beneath my blogrolling list. It generates a random link to a member Blogsnob blog.
I'm not sure how much extra traffic all of these services will really add to this blog. I'll post the results next week after a few days of monitoring my page views. But they're all a lot of fun and certainly show how active and big the blog community has become.
What other traffic-building ideas am I missing?