I can’t decide what I think of alphainventions.com. A few days ago I started receiving dozens of visits to my blog from this source. Since I’d been blogging about scams, this was the first thing to come to mind – that I was the victim of some sort of nefarious activity.
I plugged alphainventions into WordPress’ site search to see what I could find. The search immediately brought me to the WordPress support forum and a thread entitled “alphainventions – scam?” The forum has 69 posts with comments filling three pages. Aha! Just as I had thought! I read on, though. The first post was from a blogger who was suddenly getting significant traffic from alphainventions just like me. He questioned the legitimacy of the hits. Was it a something malicious or a scam? The next post was from another blogger wanting to know the same thing. A few days later WordPress staff responded saying, “not sure what to make of that site yet, but if we find evidence it’s spam or a scam then we’ll do something about it.”
The following day the owner of alphainventions.com popped up with his explanation of what he is doing. It turns out he is “a regular working guy” named Cheru Jackson. (I guess you could call him Cheru the Coder.) Anyway, his intention is to show blogs in real time as they are updated. The idea is that, if people read a blog promptly, the blogger is likely to receive comments sooner. You can visit Cheru’s blog here. He’s receiving lots of positive comments.
It seems like a cool idea. I’m not sure how my blog got noticed, nor am I sure how the stats are determined. I used to have a handful of readers and now WordPress is showing dozens (up to 115 yesterday). I suspect they didn’t all really read my blog, but at least I’ve had some exposure that I didn’t have before.
One thing that I do know for certain – Cheru has managed to create a big buzz about alphainventions. Alphainventions is being talked about in blogs right and left. It remains to be seen if alphainventions creates any substantial impact for bloggers which will translate to real readers. I for one hope that it does.
Please add a comment about your experience with alphainventions. Has anyone been able to evaluate the quality of the hits?
http://danicozma.wordpress.com/2008/12/18/alphainventions-a-brilliant-idea-for-bloggers/
I alson wrote about it there.
I’m commenting from alphainventions.com
Cheru has a lot of work to do. To get money from something like that you have to make it specific. Maybe some blog categories will do for the start
Same story here….although I only got 20 hits : ( lol
In any case, I think it’s a great idea for people like me, who rip their hair trying to come up with interesting tags so their blog will show up in every search engine imaginable…with only 3 views a month t show for it.
Maybe great was an understatement?