BlogMad has undergone a number of long awaited changes. I am a big supporter of BlogMad, being a moderator there and blogging about it very early on its existence. The site has gone a long way in the 11 months of my membership, being mentioned in over 4000 blog posts! I believe it is BE’s largest competitor.

BlogMad, until recently was owned by a group called RKKi and was administrated by a volunteer group called badc0de. However, it has now (alongside with RKKi’s other large site, Vault9) been acquired by a new Web 2.0 company called Kinetiq, which seems to be full of many badc0de team members like Paul Kain.

Unlike most other blog traffic exchanges, BlogMad has not sold credits. However, they have now started selling credits at the very reasonable cost of $0.01 per credit (meaning 1 cent = 1 visitor), and 50k will be initially up for sale. This is as a result of requests of many members. A logical question to ask is: with a 1:1 ratio, how can this work? The answer is the fact the site takes small fees in credits when using banners, text links, playing games and VARB and BlogMad Blocks (mentioned below) also helps.

BlogMad has also launched block.blogmad.net where members sumbit a 200×200 square representing their blog, it may be a sketch, piece of artwork or screenshot. The price per click on a block is 1 credit, and blocks are rated with the best one being given a credit bonus

Also they have a redesigned shoutbox, which has a lot more eyecandy and supports private messaging. This is powered by PHPFreeChat. This shoutbox appears to lack the lag the old one had.

Both the shoutbox and BlogMad Blocks use some nice Ajax.

The improvements made to BlogMad are quite good, as they appear to be not only trying to raise the identity of BlogMad, but to improve the community.

Tags: web 2.0, web2, web 2, web2.0, blogging, blog traffic exchanges, traffic exchanges, blogs, blog, blogmad, blogexplosion