Blog Implosion

First, an update on Kelso: He's still in the hospital. Not sure if he'll need surgery, but he can't come home until he's well enough to navigate the stairs and he can't do that yet.

Now, to the topic at hand. Non-bloggers will be incredibly bored by the following, but it's an important public service announcement to my blogfriends:

Shortly after I began blogging, I learned about a cool site to drive traffic called Blog Explosion. I will not link to it here, because every time you go there they make money from the ads they run and right now, I don't want them to make any more money they didn't earn.

Initially, this was a great site. You surfed blogs for credits that translated into other people seeing your blog x number of times. You could even buy credits to get in a higher rotation, or to run banner ads. Other traffic sites came and went, but BE seemed very solid and I made some wonderful connections as a result.

A few months ago, BE changed hands. Since then, everything has gone to hell. There were issues beforehand, but now they have started taking money for credits and not applying the credits to your account. I also had my banners running (assigned credits to them) but the only banner that ran was for BE itself, for weeks on end. Yet my credits were being used up. Hm.

Bottom line: Do not use BE anymore. They are crooks. I've posted to the member forums there and other people are having the same experience. There IS a new service called Blog Soldierswhich seems to be good. At least you can get a response to questions from a real person.

Funny update: Since posting this, BE has credited my account with SIX THOUSAND credits. Too funny. And too little, too late.

There's also a great forum called Mystery Topic Challenge. You don't have to "play" the Mystery Topic game. You can just introduce yourself and your blog there and read other new ones. The community is growing daily.