Burst Blog

As many of you know, bloggers who win a spot on the BlogBurst 100 Leaderboard can opt to have their payment donated to charity. This year’s charity is The Periwinkle Foundation, which provides camping and recreational programs for children with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses – free of charge to campers.

We’re thrilled to announce that BlogBurst bloggers have donated enough money to send two campers to Camp Periwinkle this year! Because of your generosity, two children battling cancer will spend the next week doing such fun activities as swimming, horseback riding, archery, arts and crafts, nature, campfires, ropes course, biking, boating, baseball, volleyball and dances.

Upon the announcement that BlogBurst bloggers could contribute to The Periwinkle Foundation, Pat Sorrells, the foundation’s executive director, offered her sincere thanks: “From all of us at The Periwinkle Foundation, thank you to everyone that participated in this wonderful donation! You have changed lives!”

And we thank you as well!

About The Periwinkle Foundation:

Founded in 1983, The Periwinkle Foundation provides camping and recreational programs for children with cancer and other life threatening illnesses. The Foundation offers four programs throughout the year, free of charge:

Camp Periwinkle is a one-week summer camp for cancer patients and their siblings from Texas Children’s Hospital. The children, ages 7 to 15 years, enjoy a full camp experience. In 2006, Camp Periwinkle topped an all-time high of 184 campers.

Camp YOLO is a weekend camp providing support for teenagers with cancer, cardiac diseases, renal diseases and HIV. The camp, named by a camper for You Only Live Once, takes place two weekends of the year and allows campers ages 13 to 18 years old share their experiences living with life-threatening illnesses.

Making a Mark provides children undergoing treatment at Texas Children’s Cancer Center with artistic and creative writing opportunities. Children get to work with professional artists and writers to express themselves through the arts. More than 250 children participate each month, and their works travel across the country for display, including the Texas State Capitol, Houston Children’s Museum and Norfolk Virginia Children’s Hospital.

Celebration of Life is an annual gathering for long-term cancer survivors and current patients to share stories of hope. More than 200 adults and children attend this event.

• Related post: Long-term camp counselor describes camp in his blog post.

In an effort to more accurately reflect the blog usage data in the BlogBurst syndication network, we’ve adjusted how we calculate the Leaderboard Top 100 beginning in Q3.

In the past, we relied purely on headline impressions - our new formula utilizes both headline impressions and click through rates, which are a measure of how many people read your article on a publisher’s site. These two components are then combined to arrive at the blog’s final Leaderboard position. We think this balance provides a more accurate reflection of a blog’s performance in our network and on publisher sites while better establishing a blog’s value. This new formula will also help us provide you with more detailed feedback on your blog’s success.

You can improve your click through rate by:

- Writing engaging headlines

- Utilizing avatars to provide a better visual for readers

- Making sure your lead sentence compels the reader to continue

- Keeping your blog on topic with consistent postings

For more detailed information on the Q3 Leaderboard formula change please visit our FAQ at Blogburst.com.

When there is a breaking news story, such as the passing of the former First Lady, BlogBurst editors typically package relevant content and recommend it to publishers for use on their sites. We found several thoughtful posts on Lady Bird Johnson, and these were published on USA Today, the home page of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Austin-American Statesman and The San Antonio Express-News.

Here are just some of the posts that were picked up by publishers.

• Lady Bird Was Ours (musings)
• One Last Flower in Texas (Dyre Portents)
• Lady Bird Johnson Dies (The Political Realm)
• My Lunch with Lady Bird Johnson (FrontBurner)
• Lady Bird Johnson, RIP (Eye on Williamson)
• A wildflower partisan (Brains and Eggs)
• Lady Bird Johnson has passed away at 94 (Common Sense)
• The Eyes of Texas are Upon You (PinkDome)

Like many other techies, our team members were quick to get on the iPhone bandwagon and check out the capabilities of this hot new device. We were thrilled to confirm that Pluck widgets work flawlessly on the iPhone’s Safari browser. BlogBurst headline and post view widgets look great. On the SiteLife side, you can read and post comments on articles, view Personas, and quickly post comments or recommend articles.

If you are part of the new iPhone revolution, enjoy it and let us know what you think!