Blogrush launches TrafficJam

Back in October when Blogrush relaunched, they mentioned a new service called TrafficJam that would use live data from the widget to work out what’s hot in the blogosphere right now.

Well today, they finally launched TrafficJam.com, and so far I’m pretty impressed. The general idea seems to be to become a kind of next gen Technorati - and I think they may actually have a chance, too.

I do have a couple of concerns though.

Because all the data is coming from the Blogrush widget (as seen in the right hand column of this page), it’s potentially open to click fraud.

Although you don’t actually see your own posts appear in your own widgets, it still may be possible to click your posts in other people’s widgets, thus increasing the rank. I would hope TrafficJam have some basic click fraud detection in place and will refine that with time.

The other potential issue is that Blogrush is primarily a test of your headline writing skills. The widget only shows headlines, and that’s all a user has to go on when he or she decides to click on a story. This is a flaw in the Blogrush widget itself, but not an unsolvable one. Perhaps if the widget presented an article summary when the user hovers over the headline, we’d get some better results.

The actual amount of data being presented is quite limited at the moment too. I’d really like to see feeds of the top posts and a Technorati style API so bloggers can write their own tools to query the TrafficJam database.

It’s early days, but I think TrafficJam has potential.

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