Mojotek is thinking of signing up w/ a few traffic exchanges. I'm not sure that any of these result in repeat visitors / regular readers / subscribers. In my limited experience, people just jump from blog to blog to earn the service credits, & wait for the time to tick down so that they can click the number and move on....
So here's a thought for traffic exchanges. You choose a topic / directory area for your own blog when you register your site. What about reader preferences too? As a reader you could choose a handful of topics that you wanted to read about, and the blogs that you were served up would at least be of passing interest to you, increasing the likelihood that you'd spend quality time there & comment, interact or subscribe. Decreasing the likelihood that you'd have to spend two precious minutes waiting for some random blog to go away...
I stopped surfing blogexplosion long ago, because I never saw anything that interested me & I'm sure that the people who were presented with my site at random didn't like it either. If I had been in a blog-explosion micro-sphere for blogging, or technology, or folksonomy, or something, I might have felt more like participating.
Filed in: blogtech, webtech, traffic, micro-spheres
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Sure!! At least that way, even though the page is random, I know that it will have something to do with whatever tag / keyword I selected, and so will be of interest to me. If you could "opt in" to a bunch of keywords when you registered your blog, (think technorati blog tags), & be served up sites from those same categories as you surfed the exchanges, that would save having to do a search each time.... although a search each time would be much more dymanic & flexible.
I am completely in agreement on traffic exchanges not really generating genuine traffic... and I'm about to give up on using them to even find blogs I'm interested in myself. So, hopefully they'll pick up on your suggestion, as that would make them quite a bit more useful.