Why I decided to blog here and what has kept me here
This article is primarily for newcomers to JoeUser, who may have stumpled into this blogger world via my blogsite, Guinness Daily.
I became interested in online publishing back in Fall of 2003. I tried out a number of different sites, such as blogspot , and I eventually settled on the new, smaller, but in my opinion, more powerful JoeUser.com.
Features
JoeUser has a number of features and advantages that I found interesting and to my enjoyment. The main thing is your articles are connected to thousands of other pages by the sidebar that appears on each person's page. This assures that your articles have a decent chance of being read at least a few times if you have an enticing title. There are also some features to help the better articles get more attention, though these could be vastly improved.
Points Systems
There is a points system that also attempts to make the better blogs and bloggers more noticable, but I've found that the way the system is set up, it is merely those who post the most (either articles or comments on other articles) that do the best in points. And those that post the most are certainly not necessarily the best bloggers. For me, the best thing about the points system is it motivates me to make frequent posts.
Search Engine Placement
For me the best thing about JoeUser is how surprsingly well it does in search engines. You are able to somewhat track your progress by viewing the referrals that brought traffic to your site. You can see all the different search strings used to find your particular article, the search engine used, and how many times that search string was used to find your site (though I think there is a bug with this final part). I am constantly surprised by the variety of search strings that brought people to my site. I have also on a number of occasions been doing my own googling, and been surprised to see a JoeUser site be near the top of my search results.
JoeUser Community
One aspect that is important to any blogging site is the community it attracts, and the how connected that community is to itself.
There is definitely a community atmosphere here, but I've yet to really find my place within it. The core community is primarily conservative and rather political in nature, but there is plenty of diversity as well. I've found that some other sites have, such as xanga.com, have better features to create groups based interests or, say for instance, a particular university or city, and to search for such groups. JoeUser does have a group feature, but I have thus far found it clumpsy to use. I'm always hoping to bring more users into the community that share my interests (especially with regards to sports), and at least a few that will help me back up my "liberal" views. Hopefully eventually I can build up a meaningful group and use this group feature more readily. If anyone wants to form a group with me, please let me know.
Great Admin
Lastly, I have also found the administrators of the site to be surprisingly responsive, helpful, and open, though this is unfortunately and inevitably changing as the site grows. Many thanks go out though to Brad and gang who created this site, and probably foot a sizable bill for the operating costs.