In our first installment of the powder keg series, where we take a look at a new upcoming site that can help ease our blogging woes, we take a look at a unique rss related site. The powder keg review site should have a lot of potential for blowing up across the blogosphere. We better take this seriously. We don’t want to get burned.

rssHugger.com
The deep RSS orange of the site coupled with a dark grey makes this site visually appealing. The cutsie factor aside, the logo does the site justice. The only thing that struck me as odd — no RSS icon anywhere on their main page. Not sure why the rssHugger site wouldn’t have an RSS icon, but I’ll leave that to the graphical gods to determine a punishment.

 Above the fold, we can clearly read the intent of the blog. The site informs us we can either do a review of rssHugger or pay a $20 fee to have a page on their site for ten years. I would much rather do a review than pay $20. Times are tight. I need all the money I can get to stock up on gunpowder.

rssHugger intends to bring bloggers and readers closer together. Oh, I’ll just lay it out there from their site. Here’s their blurb:

rssHugger is a unique website that aims to bring bloggers and readers together. rssHugger aims to provide blog owners with a unique easy-to-use way to promote their blogs by sending them traffic, building backlinks for search engine optimization, as well as attracting new rss subscribers if the content is interesting to the reader. rssHugger aims to help visitors be able to easily find blogs that write about subjects they are interested in. These subjects include: internet marketing, making money online, charity, sports, gambling, and many more. If the visitors find a blog that they had not previously heard about, they can easily add it to their RSS readers or bookmark it.

So it apparently works like this: you submit your RSS feed to their site, they enter you into a category, and finally they list your most current blog titles under your feed name on their site. Sure this build backlinks for your site, but will this really benefit your site that much? They could at least use the MSN Safari thumbnail creator to pull in an image of your site.

The rssHugger site comes to you from the creators of wordHugger, a seemingly pointless buy a word for $60 page. The wordHugger site seems to offer you one word that you monopolize on their site (or phrase) like “make money online” or “memory foam“. The two sites seem to mirror each other, except rssHugger costs less and offers a free way to enter. Overall, I think both sites have more flash than bang.

Conclusion
I’ve asked non-bloggers what RSS feeds they read. The most common answer? What’s an RSS feed? The biggest hurdle for rssHugger seems to be attracting readers aside from bloggers. As soon as RSS feeds become like radio stations, then the internet will be jumping with sites like this. For now, it seems the site will be pandering to the same crowd, with a few perks. Not too much to get excited over just yet. In their defense, they may be adding more functionality in the coming months. We’ll have to stay tuned to find out.

Do you know of a site, service, blogging tool, widget, plugin, or advertising opportunity that has gunpowder spilling from its barrel? Write us a quick message to let us light the fuse.