Lars-Christian.com|This is me at the intarwebs.

Not long ago I just announced a new feature over at Bloggst that I believe will act as a great assett for those of the members who wish to give their blogs some extra exposure. The new feature is dead simple really - I add the feed of a blog to the Bloggst feed aggregator, and everytime the member updates his or her blog, the feed aggregator automatically inserts an excerpt from that post as a thread in a certain forum, with a link back to the original post of course.

This is a feature that I’ve been planning on implementing since I started serious development of Bloggst. Right now, it’s a little “halted” by the fact that the community is still in its starting phase, but I will be expanding it as the site grows in size and activity. The most pressing things that I want to add is to categorize each blog, so that the members can easily find blog posts regarding the topics they care about. I also need to work on promote this feature a bit more. Right now the latest blog posts show up on the front page and in that specific forum, but I want to make it a bit more highlighting, and it is something I will probably be working on as early as tomorrow.

Like I said though, I am really excited about the introduction of this feature, and I hope that as many bloggers as possible will sign up and take advantage of this opportunity. If you sign up early while we’re still in the starting phase, the likelyhood of being admitted quickly is greater than it will be once a large queue of applicants starts to form! Oh and I almost forgot, if you want to participate with your blog, take a look at this post that I made outlining the all the details.

While I’m on the subject of Bloggst, I thought I’d might as well give you some updates regarding how it’s progressing and where we currently stand in relation to the goals I mentioned in a previous post. Things are still going alright. Registrations have slowed down a bit in the past week or so, but that’s mainly because instead of working on promotion I have been working on the actual site. We recently got a bit of link-love from several prominent blogs though, so the registration rates have picked up a bit again this weekend actually. I expect that once I get the new feature properly set up, and it catches some attention through the blogosphere, we’ll have no problems matching the 500 registered users goal by the start of June.

Something that concerns me a bit more though, is the fact that the amount of posts have also dropped slightly the past week. I have no doubts that we’ll meet the goal of 5000 total posts by the start of June still, but it concerns me because I don’t want to miss out on the active members we’ve managed to draw in so far. One of the reasons for this drop is the fact that I simply haven’t been able to participate as much as I should in the dicussions myself, mostly because I’ve been spending my Bloggst timeshare on developing and working on everything else. I really need to get these things sorted however, because any new community needs an active and present founder. If the founder doesn’t take the time to engage in it, why should the rest of the members? Hopefully I’ll be able to pull myself back in as soon as possible, and by then I’ll hope the ball will get rolling again.

In terms of monetization, I’ve started to play around with AdSense integration in the forums. Just as expected the return isn’t anything to speak of as of yet. Once I start to seriously monetize the project, I hope to make the bulk income from direct ad sales. I’m still some way off from reaching the required visitor numbers for this to be a possibility, but hopefully as the site continues to grow, the visitor numbers will as well.

That’s about it for now. Don’t forget that if you have a blog, you can now promote it over at Bloggst! Do it, do it, do it!