While looking into places to promote my work on writing sites I ran across a number of sites dedicated to promoting Squidoo lenses via Digg/Reddit style mechanisms (Squidom, Squidoos, Squidup, and others… can’t the poor cephalapod get a break once in a while?). I do a little writing on Squidoo, but right now I’m mostly focused on Infobarrel, so I decided that IB writers needed a rating, sharing, linking platform like that.
While building it I decided to also support Seekyt and Wizzley articles – they’re newer, up-and-coming sites that have found success and earned their writers real cash and could benefit from the site as well. Many writers diversify across multiple platforms, and this way my new site could serve a larger audience and pull in a more wide-ranging set of posts.
Thus was born BarlRol, a free sharing, voting, and linking platform for users of the writing platforms mentioned above. It works like Digg, Reddit and similar sites – you can anonymously browse through others’ work or create a free account that will allow you to enter your own links and comments, vote on stories, and befriend and communicate with other members.
Posts linking to your articles are all dofollow. Your user profile page features several configurable dofollow permanent links , and in the near future there will also be profile links to your IB, Wizzley, and Seekyt article feeds. Use it to drive traffic to your articles, add backlinks to your work to improve its search engine ranking, to see what kind of stories are popular across multiple writing sites, or just to find interesting things to read!
User avatars are supported via Gravatar.com. Currently all links in the voting/sharing system are limited to the three sites mentioned, but you can link to other sites from your profile (just nothing forbidden-word-ographic or illegal, please!)