Inspired by the Prinzzess (German), I “halloweenized” my blog a little – enjoy…
Update: That’s how it looked:
Environment
Umpteen billions for war
Man, plant, beast? “Well, ignore!”
What is nature’s worth?
Ev’rywhere only slough?
Let’s all, then, act now
To save our earth
(“Umwelt” is German for “environment”.)
Now my Blog has fever…
This is about Blogfever.de, a new (and hopefully better) German competitor to a German would-be version of BlogRush for German blogs only.
Daniel from the ChaosZone informed me (and others) via comment on my post about BLOGspeed and BlogRush about a new German service for link exchange with topically related blogs (German only): Blogfever.de – if you switch to German in my blog, you can see it in the middle of the sidebar. Daniel has beta-tested this service extensively and reports about it (German), incl. comparison with BLOGspeed.
The major advantages – might be a hint for American services, too – are that you get credits for clicks and views to have your links displayed on other blogs, that you’ll get (soon extensive) statistics and that you can set individual colors and width from the very beginning. Since the service is so new, there are hardly any blogs registered yet, especially outside the “Computer & Internet” category.
Update: I forgot to mention that you can also specify tags to facilitate better correlation of the link displaying than is possible with categories alone. And it seems to work fairly well (as far as you can tell that already). 
Let’s see how this will develop – hopefully there will soon be other links than from ChaosZone in my widget… In a few weeks, I guess, I’ll kick the then inferior of the two (BLOGspeed and Blogfever). (Of course, with the English setting, my blog will display only BlogRush.)
Plugins & Functions
For those that are curious: I put together a list of all plugins I’m using here (the link is also available in the blue bar at the top); a few functions that are directly integrated into the theme are also mentioned. If you want to know more details, just ask…
(PS. about the topic of the week: 
I currently don’t plan to upgrade to WordPress 2.3.)
Rush with speed, blogs!
Does automatic link exchange with other, allegedly topically related blogs really generate a noteworthy amount of traffic, i.e. new readers? Even though – or because? – these link fields don’t really match your own blog’s design?
Update: At BLOGspeed, you can now pick the colors freely, and BlogRush now offers 13 “flavors”.
Well, it’s worth a try, especially when it’s new services (which hopefully will become more configurable). So I registered with the German BLOGspeed (found at Datenschmutz) and the English BlogRush (found, among others, at Daily Blog Tips), with only the one corresponding to the currently selected language being displayed, of course – near the end of the sidebar on the right.
I picked the category “Entertainment” which seems least inappropriate for my blog “about anything”. We’ll see what kind of links will show up there… hope it’s not too much celebrity gossip.
If you want to register, too, why not do that via my referral links, so that I get a few “credits” (for more displays of own links on other blogs): 
– for BLOGspeed (for German blogs)
– für BlogRush (currently for English blogs only)
(or click the link at the bottom of the link field).