From the ever growing sea of web apps, mashups and aggregation services, yet another emerges:  TrafficJam.  TrafficJam is the newest tool from the same people that brought you Blogrush and to understand it, you need to understand BlogRush.  BlogRush harkens back to the early days of the internet with web-rings and link-exchange networks.  Ofcourse, the makers have modernized it and made it quite the social network.  Basically you install a javascript code to your website or blog that allows BlogRush to aggregate your content.  By displaying a BlogRush badge on your own page you earn points.  For each point you earn, the tile of your blog’s entries are displayed on other blogs in the BlogRush network.  The idea being that as you expose blogs via your own, other bloggers are doing the same and you’ll get exposure as well.

With TrafficJam, all that data is aggregated and ranked according to the number of clickthroughs. The most popular blogposts from each entry are then displayed on a home page. Although it looks similar to Digg or Reddit, TrafficJam appears to be unique in the sense that it isn’t a voting community. It only counts the clickthroughs from Blogrush badges, making entries with the highest number of clickthroughs the most popular. Here’s a better explanation from the team that made it:

TrafficJam.com is powered by the BlogRush Network. It uses some unique technology to analyze millions of blog post title impressions, average click-rates, session times, and more to come up with it’s live ‘ranking’ system. We’re still tweaking our algorithm but it has already proven to be a fantastic “filter” to determine the most popular and interesting blog posts (by topic) from across the entire network. (Which continues to add new blogs everyday.) This was a major piece to the BlogRush puzzle that took a lot longer to develop than originally planned. But this is yet another ‘addition’ to help BlogRush members get more free traffic to their blogs. Some people were disappointed by the traffic results they received when testing BlogRush, and it’s completely understandable…and as promised, we’re working hard to improve things.

Check out TrafficJam.

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