I joined BlogCatalog months ago, I don’t know exactly when, but I do know they absolutely sucked at the time. Their little banner you have to include on your pages wouldn’t load, their whole site was sluggish, but luckily all that changed.

In late March I wrote about an announcement by BlogCatalog. They were going to be adding social networking tools (and they now compete against sites like MyBlogLog). Even better, one of the employees dropped a comment and let us know they have a new owner and the entire site has been completely redone, so I decided to try it out again.

After logging in I was amazed. The interface is much better than sites like MyBlogLog, there is much less spam, the userbase is small but growing larger every day, it has a nice friendly user discussion board, and to top it all off their blog directory is much larger.

There are, however, two complains I have about it currently, the userbase is too small. and their blog stats counter is not particularly accurate. It says nusuni.com only has 25 hits total, but it gets much more than that per day plus last night it got hit by a nice 200+ hit Stumble attack.

Luckily problem number one will be solved soon. Iwebis.com started a BlogCatalog Mass Buzz Experiment to inform everyone across the net about BlogCatalog. Obviously this is one of those posts.

By the way, my BlogCatalog username is nusuni.

Update: Daniel from BlogCatalog just said the hits reported are click-throughs from BlogCatalog only (not total hits). See comment below.

Tyler Cruz from TylerCruz.com kindly informed me that he is giving out a free link for a blog review, just like John Chow. I figured, heck, free link, why not?

I have looked over his blog for an hour or so and for the most part I am pretty impressed. I especially like it since his blog isn’t really a “howto” guide and he is completely open and honest about what he does. He doesn’t try to hide behind a computer screen, like so many Internet entrepreneurs do nowadays. Heck, he even admits that running a successful blog is hard, which is a sure-fire sign that he is doing something right. Nothing in life is easy or free, you have to work hard to reach your goals, which is exactly what Tyler Cruz does.

Like most Internet entrepreneurs, he first started off with a couple of small websites, then launched a bigger site and realized “hey, I could make some money doing this.” Slowly but surely his income came in, and now he is making over $200 a day (before taxes, of course). Nowadays he runs a few sites and makes most of his money from advertising and the rare dabble in domain brokering.

Unlike many blogs these days, tylercruz.com isn’t so much about “How to make money” or “How to become rich.” Instead, it is about a journey through the clogged tubes of the Internet with the hope of becoming the next big Internet entrepreneur. He is humble and doesn’t try to hype it up, instead he tells it like it is and discusses any possible issues that come up. Instead of running around yelling “Woohoo I make money, look at me, I’m special!” (like so many people do these days), his writing says, “This is my blog, take it or leave it,” which is exactly what a blog should say.

So are there any negatives? Not really. He sticks to his niche, writes with his heart, and has fun while doing it. What can be wrong with that?

Actually… there are two slight negatives… the textarea for his comment section overlaps the sidebar in Safari and his layout is almost too narrow, but other than that it is good.

Overall I enjoyed reading tylercruz.com, so I’ll give it a 9/10 for its uniqueness, 7/10 for design, 8/10 for the variety of topics it covers, and an overall score of 8.5/10. Personal blogs tend to be more unique, and this is definitely more personal than the average “make money” blog.

So, why not take a look at it for yourself?

Want your blog reviewed? Click here for more info.

I received an e-mail earlier from the creators of a brand new social bookmarking service called Crispyblogposts.com. They wanted me to do a quick review, so of course I gladly accepted.

Crispyblogposts is basically a Digg-clone, in that you can vote a post as being Crispy (good) or Soggy (bad). However, unlike Digg there is no user registration requirement for voting or posting; and this service is only for blogs.

It separates user-submitted posts into channels, which are the same thing as categories. The home page displays the categories, and the popular ones will appear in larger font. Each category has a respective RSS feed (a big plus), a “what’s popular in this channel” page, and a “what’s in this channel’s pool” page. There is also a what’s popular page and a pool page for all of the posts. The pool is where all posts go by default, before they are pushed up to the what’s popular page.

Crispyblogposts also has a neat little widget which you can toss on your blog. The widget will display how many points your blog posts have. Below is the Crispymeter, as they call it, for Nusuni.com.

The widget is pretty nice, and it’s fast-loading too!

So what makes this service different from current social bookmarking services? Well, for starters, users are allowed to create a new channel if they need to, and you do not need to be registered to vote or publish a post. It fixes the annoying problem on Digg of not having certain categories. However, the way they have designed the site introduces a bunch of new problems, like an increased risk of voter fraud.

The service could be improved in one big way. As far as I know, they do not currently offer any voting widgets for blog owners, so they can’t throw a widget on a post if it gets on Crispyblogposts. A feature like that would be great. Also, it would be nice if users could comment on posts.

Overall I like Crispyblogposts. The idea isn’t really that original, but they have pulled it off pretty well. The site definitely has a lot of potential.

I am a bit curious about its future. If the site become a hit, what will the slang be? We have “Dugg”, “Slashdotted”, but what about this site? I suppose “fried” or “crisped” could work.

If you want more information about Crispyblogposts, you can visit their About Page, FAQ Page, or their Blog.

Have a new blog, website, or product that you want reviewed? Toss me an e-mail and I’ll take a look.

Ever wanted to read a blog that covers naked people (no pun intended), blogosphere news, and everything in between? Well, GreenLlama.net is the blog for you.

To be perfectly honest, at the first glance I thought, “what, is this a joke?”. But after digging deeper I found that my first reaction was wrong.

It took me a while to figure out what it is about. However, the answer was staring at me the whole time. It is about everything and nothing.

The author of the blog, Leroy Brown, sums it up perfectly in two words, “random crap.” Basically, it covers everything imaginable: news, celebrities, gadgets, blogging, naked people in the news, and even web 2.0 stuff. It has the “personal touch” that, in my opinion, marks a good blog, and it is the perfect example of what a blog should be. The author does not pretend to be anyone else other than himself, which is something that many bloggers mess up on.

My only complaint is that it is almost too random, but nonetheless it is still a worthy addition to my growing collection of feed subscriptions.

Overall I like what I see, so I’ll give GreenLlama a 9/10 for its uniqueness, 7/10 for design, 9/10 for the wide variety of topics it covers, and an overall score of 9/10. I think it is pretty safe to say no other blog is quite like the GreenLlama.

Want your blog reviewed? Drop me an email with your URL. All I ask for in return is a link to this site, or to the blog review permalink.

John Chow runs one of the most interesting blogs on the ‘net. He covers everything: from nerd events to his site getting banned from Digg and from fine dining to pointless rants. More recently, he has jumped on the Agloco bandwagon in an attempt to start a money-making cult make more money. As of this writing he has 4,000+ cultists referrals signed up under him.

Although I’m not exactly a supporter of Agloco, I’m not going to hold that against him.

It is still a mystery where his blog came from. Some “experts” suspect that his blog magically appeared in 2005 and automatically had #1 Google rankings. No one is quite sure how it happened, but it did. Nonetheless, it earns him $3,000 a month, which is definitely some good pocket change.

So, why would anyone complain about his blog? Well for one thing it used to make it onto the Digg.com front page every friggin day. Although I am sure he didn’t mind it one bit, many of the diehard Digg users seemed to hate it. One other thing that ticks some people off is his self-proclaimed title of “Internet Dot Com Mogul”.

Oh yes, he does run Intellitxt on his blog, which is one of the most annoying things on the Internet!

There are still so many topics that he could cover, including his views on PPC advertising (or PPC text messaging, in his case), and maybe some inside info into his average day, like what his schedule looks like and such.

Overall, I enjoy reading his blog, and apparently thousands of other people do too.

So now it is the end of my blog review of JohnChow.com. If you’d like your blog reviewed, why not toss me an email with your URL?

Now it is time for me to go shovel snow…