It’s always cool to discover more ways to network online, meet new people from across the globe and discover blogs I wouldn’t have known existed.
SmallRivers is a tool for bloggers to network content and audiences. You can connect with other bloggers who have the same interests and to share your own blog content, tweets and FB updates. It’s also called a “portable content network” since you only need to paste a compact “river sticker” on your site and you automatically do two things:
1. Get access to content and updates from other sites connected to your network
2. You share your own content and updates to other sites connected to your network.
I was curious about how all this stuff works so I gave it a spin.
SmallRivers makes it easy for you to register. You can go the traditional route and register your email address or you can sign in using any of your Twitter, FB, Blogger, Yahoo or Google accounts.
After registering, you can do two things: either find a network you want to connect to or clip your own network.
Let’s try connecting to an existing network or “river.”
One network that interested me was the Earth Hour network. I did a couple of stories about climate change before as part of my work and I knew Earth Hour could be a big help in battling that. So I wrote a quick tips post about Earth Hour on my blog and pasted the sticker on my post.
To do this, you just need to click “Embed” button on your selected river, copy the script that appears on the pop-up box and paste it at the end of your post. (Remember to do this on the HTML pane of your post editor.)
This is how it looks like on my blog post.
Now when you click the “See all” button, a sidebar will expand on your blog page showing the posts in your river. My update is at the top of the sidebar followed by recent updates made by other bloggers connected to the Earth Hour river.
The cool thing about this is I get to discover other blogs and my content gets shared to other sites automatically. Just like this:
My update appeared on the WWF blog river sticker and on the sidebar. A closer look:
That’s pretty cool. 
So if I have other posts related to Earth hour, I could just clip the river sticker and my updates will show up in the network.
Another way to do it is to clip the network on your blog’s sidebar so that your updates get automatically shared even if you don’t paste the river sticker on the individual blog posts. This would be good if the network you’re joining in is directly related to your blog.
In my case, I wanted to find a network for mommy bloggers. I couldn’t find one since SmallRivers is still quite new. So I just clipped my own “Mommy blogs” network.
SmallRivers is still a work in progress but the concept is good and holds a lot of promise. It’s just like a compact blog roll and sort of a more targeted RSS feed reader in one since you can see the updates of other bloggers in your network about topics that may be of interest to you. Another advantage of this portable network is you can access the updates right on your blog or home page.
If you want to connect with other people and get more traffic for your blog, SmallRivers is worth a try. Clip a network (like my Mommy blogs river) or start your own.
Hi, I'm Jayme. Thanks for visiting my 
