Blogging Sueblimely

Advantages of Using Online Bookmarking

Bookmarking services such as delicious came along very early before the surge of services of the social media revolution. They could now even be considered the start of it, although at the beginning bookmarking was probably considered more of an online service than a sharing activity. The popularity of social bookmarking rating sites such as Digg and Stumbleupon and Reddit left ordinary bookmarking in the shadow.

However interesting, popular and up to date the content on the rating sites may be, they are not as useful for reference or research purposes as the bookmarking sites. I see two three main reasons for this.

Because our digging and stumbling is "social" we add sites that our friends favor or those that we want to get noticed, for ourselves or for others. What reaches the top is often more about how many contacts the originator of the bookmark has rather than the quality of the content. I will digg and stumble all sorts of topics which, although they may interest me, I will never look for again. I regularly refer to my diigo bookmarks.

Secondly, despite the availability of tagging, tags are either not totally relevant to the content, or they are tagged inappropriately, on rating sites. Digg’s range of categories reflect its News and Video purpose but not the broad range of topics it is actually used for. Stumbleupon allows more flexibility, but it is unusual to see full advantage being taken of this, meaning a search for a topic of a given tag brings unsatisfactory results. Lately I have noticed an increase in mis-tagged articles either: through mistake or mischief. I have never done a search on these sites, whereas I regularly do so on diigo and delicious. The social features of the latter also allow me to add contacts who bookmark topics I am interested in and whose tags I can refer to.

Finally, although the delicious type bookmarking sites may not be not used to their best advantage, as far as tag applying is concerned, it is still far easier to find relevant information on a given topic and information does not get so easily lost over time. The rating sites are all about what is new. This is fine if you are looking for breaking news or for such things as the latest happenings in the entertainment industry or the latest scientific findings. They are not the place to go for research on factual and non changing information. On the plain old bookmarking sites people add articles that may be years old but still of value. The best of these are bookmarked the most bringing the most valuable information to the fore.

My personal favorite bookmarking site is diigo because it has more advanced features than others and it also automatically posts all my bookmarks to Delicious which, after using for years, I was loath to let go of completely. Today I discovered an excellent reason for using the diigo/delicious combination for duplication. Ma.gnolia, one of the main bookmarking sites, lost all their bookmarks! Their database is unretrievable.

The tagging, relevance and searchability of the bookmarking sites make them a valuable tool for research and for bloggers they can be a useful resource for your readers too. I add bookmarks to sites I believe you will find of use on diigo and therefore also on delicious.

With the holiday season upon us and many travelling for holidays or to see family, (longer holidays in the Southern Hemisphere of course), internet access is not always available. I enjoy such a forced break from the net to catch up on some reading, including some of the downloaded ebooks I have not had chance to look at. Here are a few of the more worthwhile free ebooks and reports I have come across relating to blogging.

The Roadmap To Become A Blogger from the team at Become a Blogger – superstar blogger, Yaro Starak, and internationally reknowned author, Gideon Shalwick, was released for download on 1st December.

Yaro Starak’s Blog Profits Blueprint is a 50+ page report particularly useful for beginner to intermediate level bloggers wanting to monetize their blogs

Caroline Middlebrook is offering the 49 lessons of her “The Bloggers Bible” for free by email instalment – if you do not want to wait for the emails you can purchase the book for download. Her How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress ebook is available for free download as is her Traffic Rush Home Study Course, teaching how to start driving a rush of StumbleUpon traffic to your website.

From Alex Sysoef comes Profitable Blogging For Newbies.

Jake Humphrey’s Authority Black Book 2.0, 2009 version to teach you “Social Marketing Tactics That Generate Traffic Instantly”

Marketing guru Seth Godin has a treasure chest of ebooks on offer, available via his Squidoo ebook page. These include, until Dec 30th, The Bootstrappers Bible.

Mashable comes up trumps once again with the following resources (:including some that I have already mentioned)

• 20 Free Ebooks and Whitepapers for Better Web Design
• Top 10 Free E-books For Bloggers

The March 2008 edition of Bloghology provides some insights into how other bloggers have succeeded, although the site was temporarily down when I visited..

Rapidshare – downloads of all sorts of resources including blogging. Rapidshare itself is not searchable but you can use the RapidShare search engine to find what you want. I will not mention ebooks I found that were on torrent sites. Whatever your views are on downloading TV shows and movies, you will likely agree with me that if a blogger is trying to make a few bucks by writing and selling an ebook then we should buy it and not illegally download it. I am not certain if Rapidshare contains such ebooks but it might.

If you are interested in purchasing books:

• ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett, which is always sold out in bookshops I have visited, but it is available on Amazon UK as a hardcopy (not in stock at Amazon US at present) and, for Aussies, Dymocks online in hardcopy and via download. Review by Freelance Switch. Darren says, in a comment to one of his posts, that the book is now available in some libraries too.
• The newly released The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging Amazon
• Do a search for blogging on Amazon and you will find many more including the Dummies range on Blogging and Wordress.

PS Have you noticed a recent increase of popup forms on blogs offering free resources – ebook downloads, newsletters or I have maybe been visiting sites that I would not normally go to? These are appearing as you first enter the site and require your email address and sometimes to sign up for newsletters or email feeds. I find the popups intrusive although I do not object to having to sign up for a newsletter to download something that is being given away free, this seems a fair deal. You will find a few of these popups on some of the sites referred to above!

Please let me know if you have read other good ebooks on blogging related matters.

If you need a break from blogging totally try the following sources for free fiction or hobby ebooks – Project Gutenberg and Scribd Literature for downloads, the getfreebooks blog for information on where to find books or do a search via the pdf geni search engine.

Happy reading!

The internet has come alive with free Christmas gifts for download. It was hard to choose from all that was available but I have tried to bring you a selection of the best. I have spent hours searching, likely a subconscious excuse to put off wrapping Christmas gifts.

Graphics and Icons

Smashing Christmas Icon Sets Smashing Magazine always has great resources.

Nicu’s holiday gallery contains these:

There are 16 icon sets to be found at FreshFreeStuff.net including social networking and RSS buttons – Free Christmas Holidays Icon Roundup . This is a selection from the sets available:

Gifts From Designers To You: Best Of 2008 – goodies include icons, fonts, wordpress themes and headers.

50 Most Beautiful Icon Sets Created in 2008 including this Christmas set:

A set of Christmas smilies is offered by Christmas Corner, many of which are animated:

DigiScrapDepot.com has 3516 Christmas Freebies if you want to
decorate the pages of your Christmas photo scrapbook pages.

1stWebdesigner brings us a range of Photoshop brushes- 48 Snow, Ice, Snowflake and Christmas Brushes

Mel’s Photoshop Brushes gives us a set of Christmas Illustrator Brushes

A search for Christmas on Adobe Exchange shows a plethora of Illustrator and Photoshop images, gradients, patterns, shapes, styles and brushes.

Desktop Wallpapers and Screensavers

25 Outstanding Christmas Wallpapers to Decorate your Desktop! from sagacious of Weird Resources

Vlad Studio has a whole range of Christmas Images/Desktop Wallpapers (higher resolution by subscription) and E Cards.

Wallco.net has a huge selection of free Christmas wallpapers in various resolutions – 42 galleries to date. I really went to town with these and created a whole folder of them to use as a My Pictures Slideshow Screensaver.

To create your own Christmas screensaver slideshow (or any other sort) in Windows XP – go to Desktop/Properties/Screensaver and choose “My Pictures Slideshow” in the drop down box. The default folder is My Documents/My Pictures but in settings you can choose any folder of pictures you want.

Not free but a good bargain – Woo Themes have a 4 for 1 special going until 24th December – $70 USD for a single licence and $150 for a developer licence.

Christmas Image Tutorials

Strobist lets us into some secrets of How to Photograph Christmas Lights using even a basic digital camera. I love Christmas lights although the ones I have appreciated the most this year were the new green and red lights in the car park of a newly renovated shopping centre which showed me the way which spots were free.

Smashing Magazine gives us 60 Beautiful Christmas Photoshop Tutorials

PS Lover has a whole range of Photoshop Christmas Image tutorials but turn your speakers down as they advertise those very annoying smilies who keep saying “Hellooo”

What not to do when blogging

Finally but not least, Michaela Lica of eWritings has provided us with some good Christmas blogging reading by publishing her ebook Blogging Tips: How to be Cocky and Vexatious – a collection of blog entries that followed her 10 Ways to Make Your Fellow Bloggers Hate You meme.

Thanks to Design Bliss for putting me on to many of these freebies in their – Over 100 Free Christmas Design Resources – A Design Bliss Mega-List post

I am now off to join the teaming throngs at the shopping centre which is enough to provoke this Christmas emotion in anyone:

"If you drink then email , you’re a bloody idiot" (to misquote a popular Aussie ad slogan for drink driving). Google seems to agree and has kindly provided us with Mail Goggles, for Gmail, a way of attempting to help stop us sending emails which we may later regret.

Its method: prompting us to answer some maths problems at designated times – by default Mail Goggles is only active late night on the weekend as "this is the time that most people are likely to need it",. You can change the timings; which is handy if you are prone to long drunken lunches or are an alcoholic.

If your math skills are lacking you can use your windows calculator, if you can find it in your state. If you are really determined to send the email you can, and live to regret it – unless you forget you have sent it. In this case you may live forever in ignorance or wonder why someone is no longer talking to you, has deleted you from SU/Digg friend, is leaving you nasty blog comments …. or the opposite: arrives at your place with all their worldly possessions, asks when you are going shopping for rings…

If you get the maths questions wrong then a new box appears with new questions with the comments “Water and bed for you. Or try again.” If you are too slow in answering the message is “Oops, looks like your reflexes are a little slow. Try again.” I bet they had some fun trying to think of the messages to use here and some of them would not have been quite so politely phrased.

Can you tell that I find this feature amusing? When I read about it I had to remind myself that it was not April 1st and even then go into Gmail to make sure Mail Goggles really existed.

You can turn on Mail Goggles via the Labs tab in your Gmail Settings and then customize it via the General tab.

If, like me, you receive your Gmail via POP mail and have not visited the Labs Tab (how long has it been there I wonder?) there are a few other interesting and useful features that you can enable for Gmail. For example,

• Email Addict which lets you take a break from email and chat by blocking the screen for fifteen minutes and making you invisible in chat. I wish they could come up with a way of blocking my desk inbox (or the pile of things in front of me that need doing) and let me email and chat for fifteen minutes.
• Old Snakey game – for when you want a break from everything.
• Forgotten Attachment Detector which prevents you from accidentally forgetting intended attachments by prompting you if you mention attaching a file, but have not done so.
• Quick Links which adds a box to the left column that gives you 1-click access to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. It can be used for saving frequent searches, important individual messages, etc.
• Quite a few other ways to customize and improve your Gmailing experience.

.Lijit is a search tool that offers a lot more features than the run of the mill default blog searches. I have just installed the Lijit Widget (Wijit) in my sidebar. Automatic installation is available for Blogger and Typepad via the widget setup and there is a brand new Lijit WordPress plugin that gives you the option of using Lijit as a stand alone search or incorporating it into the default WordPress search widget.

Features

• Optional addition of some or all of your bookmarking, social networking and photo sites to Lijit will allow search of not only your blog posts but of sites you have bookmarked, your blogroll sites and your social networking contact’s posts and their contacts and bookmarks. Most of the popular sites are included although my favorite bookmarking site, diigo, is as usual not included. There is also a feature to add feeds and site url’s so adding my diigo bookmarks feed solved this problem for me.
  The search result window shows tabs for results from your blog, your network, your content (on any site), and the web. You set your widget’s default search to show one of these tabs as the front page of the results. I have set mine up to show search results from my blog first. I recommend this as you will keep searchers on your own site longer if the search term brings up satisfactory results in your blog (in terms of what the user wishes).

• Choose to have your search results show up only on the Lijit site or in your blog window via a pop up screen.
• Statistics available on your Lijit page will give you information about:
  • the number of times you have been searched,
  • the results that have been clicked,
  • information sources that have provided the most clicked results,
  • blogs that have linked to you,
  • searches that have brought people to your blog .

You can choose to make your statistics publicly viewable.
Widgets can be created to display some recent reader stats on your blog via a list or map:

• An optional “Surprise me!” button produces a list of random content from your blogs and added services – and the results did surprise me as MyBlogLog blogs, that I was not even aware of, showed up there. (MBL automatically adds blogs that you have visited a certain number of times) I may remove MyBlogLog from my options so that results are more relevant to my blog topics.

• A feature named ‘Re-search’ displays extra information for those reaching your blog via a Google search. Here are the results which showed up after I had done a Google Search for “blogging sueblimely images”.For this example, I had to use my blog name in the search terms so that I guaranteed that one of my posts came up in a google search! Options allow you to either display these results below your widget or across the top of your blog.

Below Lijit Wijit

Top Placement – this image was created by a Lijit preview feature

• The widget can be configured to show ‘Popular Searches’ and ‘content’ icons’ I chose not to include these features on mine, being mindful of above the fold sidebar space and page load time, but this is what they would have looked like had I installed them:

• Along with search results comes an option to add a search of the blog you are searching to your browser search engines.
• Lijit uses Google search but also has its own search infrastructure. Om Malik reports that there are plans to add an opt-in ad network to search results and to allow publishers to sell their own keyword inventory in as well as giving them the opportunity to “use Lijit to back-fill the advertising spots”

Advantages of using Lijit Search on your blog:

• Lijit search stats are very useful and are displayed in a simple to understand way.
• The browser search engines feature is useful for yourself to add for a quick search of your own blog as well for others to add to encourage others to revisit your content..
• Searching of your blogroll and social networking contact sites. This could be seen as a resource for your readers as well as a way of recognizing your blogging contacts – another form of link love.
• When results
• Search of your bookmarking sites is another resource for your readers to tap into. I consider my online bookmarking sites a research tool for you, adding links that I think you would find useful relating to topics I cover here, rather than using them for personal purposes. I already display my diigo bookmarks so for me the Lijit search is an extension of this principle. As you will know, if you read this blog often, I tend to ignore SEO recommendations for more incoming links than outgoing as I wish to provide useful information, whether written by myself or others, and to give recognition to the good blog content of my contacts. .
• Keeping the search result window on your blog, rather than purely on the Lijit site, will retain your readers on your site for longer.

Setup was simple and, if you change your preferences, you do not have to alter the widget code as new or changed features are automatically added. The widget itself did not seem to impact my page load time although the search results are a little slow to show up. Disadvantages – yet another widget added to your sidebar and for me another tool to divert me away from my tasks at hand today – my (semi) regular news post and a tutorial on Yahoo Buzz – which now allows anyone to add content a la Digg but with some different and useful features.