A couple friends of mine have created a site called instantspot.com, it's still in it's first year but you can see the traffic is going up quickly (check alexa.com)... The rankings are awesome and you can put your own google ads on the site. I was ranked number 1 for some really good saddam keywords up until today. 25,000 uniques yesterday.. So if your looking for a blogging platform that is easy, light weight, and free, try it out. instantspot.com Example Ranking: click here (first result until this morning, dropped to second) Another example: click here (just got been today also :-( but goo none the less) Great site for getting things in he search engines quick
It's based upon BlogCF, but the code has been pretty much re-written at this point. Also based on Mach-II and utilizes Reactor, AjaxCFC... Dave and Aaron are both Coldfusion programmers hints the fact that it's not the php based stuff everywhere else. After the latest traffic spike delivery has changed and it is now much, much faster. Has some pretty cool features like simply adding your adsense code, any number of 6-7 analytics UIDS, on site CSS editor, etc etc. They really listen to their users (they are a fresh site) they are going to be doing a lot of things that no other sites are doing. The main advantage, though, is getting in the search engines quickly
Saw the traffic from here and thought I should pop in... He forgot to mention the developers are nosey. Thanks for the props Chris. Glad to see you are digging your Spot. ~d
'Yes' on the domain name: example: www.daveshuck.com 'No' on the toolbar. Especially at the point where we begin offering unique domain names, we begin to lose network identity. That is the glue for keeping it together. It does have some functionality though, such as indexed searching of your content with the search box and the ability for other InstantSpot users to add you as a friend when they are on your site. We are adding messaging tools into it as well. As you can see from both my site and Chris' links above, the designs are pretty flexible with good CSS layouts. We completely expose the CSS, so you can mod them up to your heart's content. On that topic, another developer released a design exchange for our network this week. It is in its early stages, but has some real potential coolness for sure. At this point you can preview how the layouts look on your site, and we are working with him to do a direct import. That is www.isdx.net. Thanks for checking it out Penguin.
Oh one other thing that I am sure is important to this crew. We allow you to adsense your Spots in the top spot above the content. We have some bloggers that are making more than we are at this point! ~d
Not at this time... We have sold a clone of the network, but it is a leasing model and we hold onto the code and host for them charging them x/user. I can't imagine any scenario at this point that would change that plan and release it.