Dipping into the Blogpond

I read with interest that Clarke Scott has recently released another website called Blogarate.com, which allows visitors to rate your blog posts. As the blogging community is buzzing about how Yahoo! ripped off Digg, this service quietly appears as another voting alternative, albeit with a difference.

Blogarate is groovy in a couple of ways. Firstly, it lets you give the “thumbs up” (or down) to a post really quickly without needing to leave a comment, and it has that sense of community a bit like mybloglog that says “I was here”. Actually, Andy Beard much more eloquently refers to it as “Social Proof“. Proof that real people actually visit your blog, and proof that real people (not 12 year old kids) have a say in whether this is a good blog post.

Blogarate is a free service, you create an account (which takes about 15 seconds), grab some code and you’re away…. Well, it should be that simple assuming one has admin rights to one’s blog, which I don’t here The best I can do is add a banner on my sidebar which links to my Blogarate profile. But, this is a widget I would REALLY like to have, and I do imagine it could become very popular.

Maybe I was having a blonde moment, but I couldn’t for the life of me work out how to vote! I couldn’t find anything in the FAQ’s to help. In the end I thought, maybe if I click on the stars that will take me to where I vote – Oops! That was my vote (and I think I only gave it a 3 – sorry Clarke!). But NOW I know – you click the corresponding number of stars to give it that vote – doh!

From Blogarate’s “about” page:

Blogarate.com is a free service that lets readers of your blog rate your blog posts and displays the last 5 readers to rate your post (see the image below).

The widget also sends that blog post data via the magic of Ajax to blogarate.com for processing. The data collected includes blog post Url, title, author, tags and the rating. We process the data and display it for users to find related blog posts and news items.

Blogarate.com is not just a blog post rating system, it is a distributed news aggregation platform.

By collecting blog post details including rankings at the source Blogarate reflects in greater detail what is making news on the web and what blog readers see is important.

This is another great Aussie service, brought to you by the creator of Whooiz.com.