Some of the most popular websites online today have to do with meeting friends and renewing old relationships – but what are social networking websites really about? Especially blog communities. I have started blogging 4 months ago and I find myself joining these blog communities. These networks primary focus is a means of gathering like-minded individuals in one central location and providing opportunities for them to interact.
Is it to increase traffic? Meet new people? Network with ease? These are the typical marketing questions. I join them because of that and I join to meet new people and easily find the information that I need.
Recently I joined a new social blog community called Bumpzee. They say they are very different from other blog communities and social networks in general. Since I joined I can say it is a bit different but all similar all the same. Now I am part of 3 blog communities.
Bumpzee describe their community as differently from others:
When you join a community, you are fed with an ever-updating list of blogs and blog posts submitted and chosen by like-minded individuals. Blogs are approved into a community by a community manager and their posts are pulled in automatically. Community members 'bump' the great posts so you can read everything as well as see what others think are the best ones.
If you have a blog, you can tap into a group of people who will visit your blog every day, or at least every time you post. You get great visibility on BUMPzee because the communities are small and focused.
But to me all the blog communities are the same in general, with a twist. Each blog community has their own specialty and reason why they are better and different from others, in turn Bumpzee does have a twist from other blog communities.
Since I have reviewed MyBlogLog vs BlogCatalog. I have decided to write a review as well for Bumpzee and give my perspective on it as well.
The first thing I notice is color and layout. I personally do not like the color they chose for the community, its too bright and too vivid. The first time I saw Bumpzee it did catch my attention but after logging into Bumpzee everyday the color is just too much.
I usually talk about color with layouts because color plays an important role with websites or blogs. They determine if the end user will come back or navigate properly with your layout. Overall the redwood red is a good color but really does not intertwine with the bright lime green. To me its just too vivid for everyday seeing.
The layout is ok, the structure is just simple and its not properly adjusted. By this I mean there really isn't a flow for navigation, its there because its there.
When you log in you are brought to your dashboard. With user entered comments to your right hand side. The main navigation is above the dashboard which will have other sub categories and will lead you to your destination.
What I like most about Bumpzee upon joining is all I had to do was provide my feed address and my site was setup. With the feed it grabs your latest post and makes them public within the communities that you joined internally. This is great exposure for us bloggers!
As per OnlinePresence, communities are started by:
A community in BUMPzee is formed only when there are a minimum of 3 blogs on a similar topic coming together. Anyone has the freedom to start a new community, but the onus would be on them to go get atleast another 2 blogs to join them before the community is deemed active. Shown below is the community called “Make Money Onlineâ€. The Online Presence Blog is a part of this community. When i joined that community it had over 40+ blogs as a part of it. You can subscribe to a feed for that community. Imagine the wealth of information you can get from a single feed in this manner.
With communities you can add friends and join as much communities as you want. Upon joining you do not get approved right away, the moderator of the community must approve you. You will have to have good content and a good reason why you would like to join their community.
Within the community you are able to start discussions from any topics that your feeds provides to each community. This is like an internal "comment" section for each post by each member. Open discussion per post is great as it leads to similarities and discussion, which is again proof we are entering web 2.0!
They even provide widgets to bloggers, allowing a vote system per article they post. The widgets provide stats to the Bumpzee communities and puts them in ranks. But all the other post will be shown, base on newly added, yesterdays post, etc. Your post will be shown no matter what.
One of the widgets provides stats as well. Not as simple and sophisticated as MyBlogLog, but it does show how many visits 'this' page received and total of blog visitors. Again this is in a form of a widget which I find bulky and unattractive for my blog specifically.
Overall, I find Bumpzee a good blog community to join, as it does provide exposure, discussions, feed submission, and networking. I am slowly running away from MyBlogLog, as BlogCatalog and Bumpzee are 2 of the better ones that I enjoy personally.
