I decided to give John Reese's new Blogrush widget a try here at NPT and on my Roamsters.com travel blog this morning.

The picture to the left shows how the widget is supposed to display on your site. However, just a few minutes after I installed it, the display was replaced with text that read, “We are currently experiencing some technical issues and the site will be back online shortly. Please come back in a few minutes“.

HUH?

That strikes me as really odd text to use in a placeholder on someone else's site. MY site IS online, my visitors are already here, so why would I want to show text that reads ‘come back in a few minutes'?

Wouldn't it make more sense to display nothing at all than an error message?

Anyway, I trust that John will get the technical difficulties sorted out quickly and Blogrush widgets will soon be displayed all over the net… or at least on Internet marketer's blogs.

So, what's Blogrush?

BlogRush is a free blog syndication service intended to help bloggers increase traffic to their blogs. When you sign up for the service, place the widget on your site, you earn credits based on the number of impressions of the widget as well as the number of referrals you send. In return, your latest blog post titles are distributed on related blogs also using the Blogrush widget.

All well and good in theory – but as of now, you can't see your stats. When I clicked ‘Reports' within the Blogrush interface, I saw “Under Construction – We're hard at work creating some cool custom reporting features for you! Please check back soon.”

I was surprised to say the least. Coming from an uber Internet Marketer / uber affiliate, I would have expected John to have everything solidly in place prior to launch.

Anyway, let's just say that the jury is out on Blogrush for now. I may leave the widget up on Roamsters for a day – but I really really hate to waste good traffic.