BloggersBase Review – A Different Kind of Social Media Site

Millions of new blog posts spring up each and every day around the web. There’s just so much information out there and it’d literally take someone a lifetime to consume a week’s worth of all of the new blog posts on the Internet. So how do you keep up?

Social media is effective because it acts as a filter. The community decides what’s important and what’s not and makes it easy for people to focus on relevant items. Social news sites like Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and StumbleUpon play a huge role in how people consume information in this new web 2.0 (3.0?) age and if you own your own site or online business, getting on these sites can send huge amounts of traffic.

There are a ton of social media sites out there that each have their own unique personality and target a specific niche or audience. For example, Digg is made up of young liberal techie guys, Reddit is more focused on political news, and Sphinn consists of a lot of search marketing professionals and bloggers. The list goes on and on. But is there room for another social media site? Or has it come to the point where we need a social media site to filter out the good social media sites?

Today I want to review a new social community site for bloggers called BloggersBase. We’ll see how it stacks up.

What is BloggersBase?

BloggersBase is basically a social media platform where users submit blog posts and democratically vote on which content should be promoted to the top and get the most exposure. It’s a Digg-like system (but not on the open-source Pligg platform) that takes advantage of the community to supply the content and traffic. However, one of the biggest differences between the two sites is that unlike Digg, which has a simple vote up system, BloggersBase has a more extensive rating system on a scale of 1 to 10 that includes factors like agreement, presentation, professionalism, and value. Will this voting system better control the popular stories or will it turn away users? Time will tell.

BloggersBase is made up of 4 main categories – Entertainment, Lifestyle, Technology, and World Affairs, each with at least 2 or 3 more specific subcategories. The site caters to pretty much every type of blogger no matter the niche.

How does it work?

Once users sign up for a free account with BloggersBase, they can submit posts (called Nuggets) to the system. A huge difference compared to most other social media sites is that BloggersBase takes in and posts entire articles rather than just publishing a link to the original. In other words, you have to republish the post from your own blog to BloggersBase (automatically through RSS or by copy and pasting).

Honestly I don’t like this at all because it could lead to a lot of duplicate content issues in the search engines. Once BloggersBase gains a lot more links and domain authority, it will rank ahead of many small publishers who have the original content. Furthermore, all of the links on the submitted BloggersBase content uses the “nofollow” attribute – which makes the links useless for improving rankings in Google. If there’s no link benefit and no traffic benefit (since all of the content is already there), what’s the advantage for bloggers to use the system? If BloggersBase wants to gain in popularity and have widespread use, it needs to focus on providing value for the bloggers who use the site.

Ranking system and prizes

In order to distinguish the “power users”, BloggersBase uses a ranking system for both readers and writers. Readers move up though Subscriber, Appraiser, Commentator, Reviewer, Critic, Analyst, Trend-Setter, Sage, and Oracle depending on the number and accuracy of member ratings. Writers on the other hand move up through Newbie, Scribe, Penman, Composer, Essayist, Columnist, Author, Wordsmith, and Scholar depending on factors like the number of posts contributed, score, and the amount of conversation the post generated. Higher ranks in general mean more influence in the rating algorithm.

In addition to the ranking system, BloggersBase rewards top users with cash prizes each week. The 3 highest-rated bloggers in each category earn the privilege of co-authoring the main blog for their category (there are 10 blogs in all). The top blogger of the week wins $50 while the second-best blogger wins $10.

In my opinion, the cash prizes aren’t significant enough to attract top bloggers to BloggersBase. Social news sites should exist to share news and drive traffic to other sites – not to keep everyone on the same site and pay out cash prizes. The most successful social media sites thrive because there is an active community that wants to share with one another. Adding money to the mix kind of cheapens the site and attracts the wrong crowd. What happens when the money incentive is taken away. Will users still remain? The prizes might be a good way to gain market share and to spark initial interest in the site but I wouldn’t keep it on there long term unless it’s changed to a revenue sharing model.

Final Verdict

Overall, BloggersBase takes a fresh approach at social media that I think has potential to grow with a few tweaks. The site is essentially a big mash up between a forum, a Digg-like voting system, and an article marketing directory. The technical components are there, it just needs an active community to support it.

Again, BloggerBase needs to provide more incentives for bloggers in order to see success. Make links dofollow on articles (if they attain a certain rating) and drive traffic back to the original sites by possibly using snippets instead of full text.

As more and more information is released onto the web, a lot of different social media sites will be born to try and filter the noise. Check out BloggersBase and see what you think.

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