JoeUser.com is unique in the sense that it is, the first (and to my knowledge) only blog site that integrates all the blogs together into a single meta blog community. There are plenty of free blog sites out there. BlogSpot for example is vastly more popular than JoeUser.com is and in all likelyhood ever will be.

But JoeUser bloggers get a few key advantages:

Every site promotes every other active site/article/post.   The blogger on Blogspot or some other blog is not likely to have many people read what they write.  By contrast, a blogger on JoeUser.com is almost certain to get traffic as long as they write interesting (at least in terms of having an interesting title).

The home page of JoeUser.com represents a selection of blogs from all over the site. Right now these featured articles are chosen by me personally. Eventually, however, they will be chosen by the consensus of moderators and elite users through the "interesting/insightful" mechanism. That means that particularly well written blogs are more likely to be read.  Whereas, as many long time bloggers can tell you, many masterpieces languish. I know of many really great bloggers out there who write pages of outstanding content that are rarely read and rarely commented on. JoeUser.com takes care of that for the user. You write something really good and odds are it'll be read by thousands of people.

While JoeUser.com isn't anywhere near as popular as BlogSpot or other mega blog sites, because so many sites link to JoeUser itself that articles that show up on the side-bar for a time end up high in search engines. This isn't some fluke, this is how the search engines are supposed to operate.  Go onto say Google and type "last episode of friends" and see what happens. The articles people write her that do become popular end up popular on search engines.

But for all this coolness, it does create a bit of a moderation headache - where does the bloggers rights end and the site owners' begin? Where do the rights of the user end and the blogger's begin?

This is something we've had to struggle with. For example, if User A is abusive to User B on User C's blog, should the admins of the site intervene? This was a topic of much discussion and ultimately it was decided that yes, the admins SHOULD intervene but only because User C's article was on the forums and anything that is posted on the forum is subject to moderation. Therefore, if User C wants to have more control over what can and can't be commented in their blog, they simply need to not have their articles be posted to the forums (one of the posting options).

Bloggers get a set of important tools for control of their blogs:

1) They can control who can see their blogs through the audience feature.

2) They can control who can comment on their blog (no one, registered users, or everyone).

3) They can kill-file (black list) a given user who is making their blogging experience less pleasant.

As Admins, we are building up our tools so that we can take actions on different levels to maintain a certain level of civility on the site. Right now, our tools are still insufficient (I REALLY hate banning people for instance but I don't have many other tools at my disposal  yet).

But coming up we'll have the ability to Isolate users so that they can only post and respond on their own blogs and their articles won't be syndicated onto the right bar. That way, we don't have to "Ban" a long time blogger for being obnoxious.  We also will be implementing the Visitor feature which prevents the user from being able to comment on other people's blogs but can still write on their own and get what they write syndicated.

We are getting pretty close to "going gold" on JoeUser.com. (yes, we're still in BETA). At that point, the PR will begin and we'll hopefully see a great deal of new traffic come in. And then down the line we'll have premium features (storing images for showing pictures of family/friends, vastly greater site customization, easy archiving of your site to disk, etc. that'll have a nominal monthly fee ~$3 per month).

But that said, we expect to continue to struggle over what is and isn't aceptable behavior on the site. Once we have more admin tools, I expect things will become more flexible.

Happy blogging!