BlogBurst, a service which syndicates your blog across newspapers who have on-line components is a topic that I’ve wanted to blog for a long, long, time. But its one of those things you keep on shelving because something else pops up — well, its time to take it off the shelf.

At first glance, BlogBurst seems like a winning proposition — blogs to get potentially huge exposure on sites with real visitors; newspapers that are enrolled include the Washington Post and the Houstin Chronicle, get a chance to get plugged into the blogosphere on topics they chose.

Unfortunately, its a bit of a bum sell when it comes to blogs – until now.

Blogs make their content available. Then, the newspapers pick and choose which posts they’d like to put up. And while its true that blogs get “exposure” this way, for the most part blogs’ content is only represented by their headline. Furthermore, translating the actual “exposure” into real traffic has been for the most part, abysmal.

Its almost like the newspapers are getting content for “Free”.

For example, from my own personal experience, while my headlines get “clicked” on, I have gotten in the past 3 months only a single click to this own blog from the Statesman (a newspaper in Austin Texas) — and I’m pretty sure I did it myself just to see that it would register on Oct 18 (my birthday).

That’s a single click on hundreds of “headlines” view, and dozens of “post clicks”.

Ok — so if exposure isn’t rewarding, how about cold hard cash?

That’s where their new program comes in.

Well, BlogBurst Rewards program, it looks like they’re trying to that very thing with a profit sharing scheme, in that the top 100 blogbursters get rewarded — with as much as $1500/ mo for the top ranked blogger, all the way to $50 for the #100 one.

It sounds like they’re ranking according to headline impressions. Although they’re not paying Non-US bloggers, it looks like they’re keeping track of top100 bloggers so they might retroactively pay them after Q4 2006.

Now personally, I think in principle this sounds like a great idea — sharing some of the profit for all the free content seems like the equitable thing to do.

In practice, for the rest of the bloggers who are not in the top100 (such as yours truly), it does shut them out of the pie; and no matter how you justify the 80:20 split (because 80% of the headline impressions are made by these top100), and the importance of “exposure” in the form of “headline views” and “post views” (which I view as a sack of horse patootie — what’s important is actual traffic), without sharing with that 20%, you’re effectively syndicating their content for free.

Now, there is some stuff about as publishers sign on, they’ll expand the leaderboard — but the most equitable thing would be to compensate all bloggers even down to the cent; sure, they don’t have to pay by the cent (they pay as soon as the cash rewards accumulate to a reasonable dollar figure), but I think this would be the right thing to do.