Reading

• 20 Myths About Blogging That Many New Bloggers Actually Believe
• Windows Live Search Tricks You May Not Know Aboutby digital inspiration. What interested me most in this was the ability to subscribe to searches via RSS. I use Google alerts which sends me results by email but wanted to display a feed of specific search results for a website that I am building. I am going to compare the results for a particular search term from Windows Live Search RSS feed with Google Alerts.
• Learn Illustrator CS3 in 30 Days
  - Vectordiary has just finished posting 30 days of tutorials teaching beginners the basics of Illustrator. If you would like to learn how to create your own illustrations, design your own logos and create special effects these will be very useful to you.

News

• Google’s own browser. Chrome, not an unexpected addition to their suite of services has just been released. I will likely write about this further once I have had chance to look more closely at its features and had longer to try it out. The fact that each tab is isolated to prevent one tab from crashing another appeals to this multi tab browsing person. Multi tab bars in Firefox 3 do tend to keep me in check though - when I get to the third I realize it is time to start closing some tabs. Google’s cartoon announcement is a good place to start to find out about Chrome. My son read this yesterday and reckons it was really effective as he was able to remember and reel off its contents to me hours later. Even if you do not want to use the browser it is wise to view your blog in it as the Tech Herald reports that there is at present an issue with some fonts not displaying correctly.
• Yahoo Buzz - has just been opened to all publishers, six months after initially launching. Buzz, with its wider subject areas, will produce serious competition for Digg which still appeals more to those interested in technology. I am working on a tutorial, which I will publish soon, giving you more information and details on the various methods of adding Buzz buttons to your blog.
• Something For Your Time - Monetizing Video Phil Butler reviews Zadby on Online Public Relations . Zadby is an "online marketplace where advertisers, marketers, and brand managers can connect with freelance video producers to create innovative product placement videos tailored for sites like YouTube, AOL, and MySpace". If you already create videos for your blog perhaps you may consider taking more advantage of your talent.
• HowToBlog has come up with an innovative idea for members of its site to promote their own sites - a Review Exchange System. Add your website to the review directory and review other blogs. Those that review the most appear higher in the directory, giving more prominence to their own website.
• The HowToBlog also alerted me to news for those using Google Adwords that Landing page load time now affects keywords’ Quality Scores- This may be old news for some but, not using Adwords myself I was not aware of this.
• What’s new in Picasa & Picasa Web Albums For those who use Picasa for your photo albums or because you use blogspot you may wish to check out the new Picasa interface and features, which include adding name tags to photos and adding photos via email. Picasa Web Albums (the desktop image managing tool) has a new etouching tool and new Sync functionality.

Blogging Tools

• Mozilla’s Snowl — A Unified Messaging Interface - rj3sp from ClipsToNote reviews an experimental firefox extension that gathers all your inbound communications from email, RSS, Twitter, social network updates ….
• If you use IE, Opera or Safari and would like some of the editing features allowed by the Firefox Firebug exension then the new Firebug Lite is for you.
• Text Link Checker Tool by Bad Neighbourhood scans the links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, alerting you to possible problem areas which may affect your standing with search engines. The scan will bring up some sites that you do not need to worry about because of keywords it discovers and the number of links to blogs etc so please read the Bad Neighborhood Clarification post in conjunction with the first search you do to set your mind at rest.

Blogger

• Followers is a new graphical Blogger Widget that is being rolled out to all users as from the end of August. It allows people to follow your blog and for you to see who is following you. A new "Blogs I’m following" tab on your Dashboard allows you to read the posts of those you follow. I will be looking out for it on the blogspot blogs I visit and will add them to my follow list. I will start off with blogspot users who comment here - hopefully a bit of encouragement for you to talk to me:-) Thanks to Tech Flaps, who wrote a post which alerted me to this new feature.

Wordpress

• Yoast Breadcrumbs pluginConstructs customisable breadcrumb navigation for single posts and pages. This allows “ease of navigation for your readers as well as providing an additional way for search engines to determine the structure of your site”. Yoast also has an extensive guide on Wordpress SEO Tested up to Wordpress 2.6. Review on Blogging Tips

A couple of question for you - do you think I should date these news posts or give them a number? Do you think having multiple posts with the same words in the title could be bad for search engine purposes? Would Google bot get all confused and think it was spammy?

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Blogosphere News Sept 3

• JimmyR.com - a mashup that puts all the best rated sites of today on one page. Includes BBC Today in History, del.icious, Digg, Fark, Google MP3 Search, Google News, Lifehacker, Reddit, Stumbleupon, YouTube, WikiHow. An archive page links to previous days listings all the way back to the beginning of 2007. I discovered it because my Best Stock Image Sites post appeared on the site - Yeah. Similar sites - POPURLS and THEWEBLIST
• NxE’s Fifty Most Influential ‘Female’ Bloggers
• Firefox Privacy Protection
• Jason Calacanis Retires From Blogging, Listen Up Bloggers – This Means Something I did not put this in news as for me this post relates more to the author’s impressions of how blogging has changed. There is a lot to be said for the pre stumble, digg, fav, friend me, add me days.
• Will blogging have an impact on our children? Some food for thought here. Will our words come back to bite us? Could mommy bloggers cause their children embarassment or is this a just recompense for the challenges they cause us
• 5 Security Tips to Protect Wordpress Blog
• If you have ever considered applying for a job as a blog writer have a look at the extensive list of skills that may be expected of you! Blogger Jobs: What Are They Looking For?
• Blog Bloke has had an unusual problem with Feedburner pinging his Wordpress blog so much it caused his host to take his site down until the problem is fixed. He can be found using his old blogger blog for now. I am interested in reading what caused the problem.

News

• Features Planned for WordPress 2.7 2.7 looks promising with inbuilt functionality to replace some plugins and more.
• Delicious has finally been redesigned and some new features added. Now that I have moved over to diigo with its even more advanced features, including automatic posting to Delicious, the new features aren not enough to compel me to move back again.
• Opera - Pownce and Digg have been added to the Services available to the People Sidebar. Even if you do not want to use Opera as your main browser it is worth using it as a way of monitoring/ interacting with your social networks, feeds, chat programs and email and for uploading images and videos to online services.
• Gmail to No Longer Auto Add Contactsinstead adding addresses to a suggested list for you to choose whether to add them to your contacts. I did not realize I had so many gmail ‘contacts’ until recently when my list was somehow compromised and spam email was sent out to the whole lot of them. Apologies to those who received this and did not get an apology email. I think more of the apologies were rejected than the spam email itself - maybe because it was the second email in as many days ‘I’ had sent out to a big list?
• BNet Australia reports on the draft rules for blogs compiled by the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission: New Rules for Blogs . Unfortunately, with the increasing number of bloggers being sued, Associated Press trying to stop bloggers quoting from their articles and bloggers not being given attribution by the main stream media, maybe this is inevitable and necessary. More information on the DBKP blog: MSM Stealing Blog Content: Times Online Joining Growing MSM Trend?

Blogging Tools

• Tools to help you mark up your posts semantically to be read by the few but increasing search engines that cater for semantic markup.
  These are produced by Clearforest
  who have recently been acquired by Reuters.
  • Calais Marmoset - enables your site to automatically provide microformat metadata to Yahoo and other automated metadata crawlers.
  • Tagaroo Wordpress plugin - Tagaroo analyzes the text in your post and suggests intelligent tags for the things and events you’re writing about.
  • Power Blogging Tips: Comment on Blogs From Within Google Feed Reader - Lorelle tells us about a Greasemonkey script that enables commenting via Google Feed Reader and another that adds feed icons to a page identifying and allowing you to subscribe to the choice of feeds available.

Blogger

• There are good Blogger templates to be found on Blogger Tricks. Thanks to snos of Life in the Country for letting us know about these via the Aussie Bloggers Forums

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Blogosphere News 1st August

They are jointly or singly responsible for:

• trafficKahuna - A set of Online Marketing and Promotion Tools - a snip at around $150 a month although you do seem to get advice and help too.
• CommentKahuna Free website traffic promotion software
• Video Post Robot - a tool for posting videos to multiple video sites
• Orwell Pro a content finder and publishing tool - grabs content from content article directories etc.
• Content Rover - searches for content from content article directories etc
• PortalFeeder - a “suite Of Proven Web Business Building Software, Site Promotion Tools, Training, Mastermind Think-Tanks, Article Syndication & Link Exchange Networks, 71+ 648 Blog Network, And The Insider Secrets” with a brashy clashy sensationalist “Grab Your Seat And Join The Most Sought After, Elusive, Under The Radar, Group Of Web Marketing Superstars…” website.
• DealDotCom - internet marketing products and affiliate program - a recent offering being Wordpress on Crack
• Article Announcer, Ezine Announcer, Web Copy Makeove, PickTheirBrain - Jason Potash
• AdTactics Marc Quarles and Jon Atwood
• Numerous blogs, ezine articles, ebooks

I would say they are very qualified in teaching us how to make mooney online - as the ‘cow jumps over the mooney the little dog laughs all the way to the bank”

They are again sharing their wealth by holding a competition with prizes ranging from a 26” LCD TV/Monitor to a 1970s Disco Party Mac Daddy Pimp Costume - yes you read right. The only requirement to enter for the draw is to register to download a free ebook. JohnCow.com and Garry Conn had a contest of their own recently where they each launched a brand new domain and competed to see who could build a blog and sell it on sitepoint.com for the most money, all within 30 days. The “Cows” shared their strategy and gave us tips as they went along. The ebook is a compilation of this - a full start to finish case study.

You can read their identity announcement and competition details on JohnCow.com WIN Big Time with the Unveiling of John Com or the same article at Blue Planet

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Who Is John Cow? Identity Revealed

Social Networking

• FriendFeed -
  • New Feature - Rooms
  • Share web pages on your FriendFeed using the Share on Friendfeed Toolbar Button

• 20 Things I Learned Using Twitter- some good tips here on making the most of Twitter and using it efficiently. I am adding this link to my Twitter Beginners post
• The Art and Science of Retweeting for Twitteraholics- a guest post by AJ Vaynerchuk on BloggingBits.
• 50 Top Niche Social Media Sites and Their Power Accounts- I should imagine this may have changed some since it was written in December. Does anyone know of other more recent posts on the topic?
• Profilactic social media aggregator - you can now post content to 14 services from within Profilactic - currently supported are: Bebo, Blogger, Facebook, hi5, Jaiku, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Mashable, MySpace, Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter and Xanga.
• Flickr integration with Facebook - share your own Flickr photos and browse those of your Facebook Friends.
• If you work from home you may be interested in the WhyDoWork network. A new feature that has been introduced by the site is the ability to add links to your blog, website or affiiate activities to their directory. Reviewing other member’s sites is a factor in determining how high your own links are in the directory.The more reviews, the higher you get. WhyDoWork includes forums, an add friends feature, your own blog page and a work at home job search engine. I have joined up but have not signed up for the blog review feature as yet. I want to check out the others who were doing reviews before I decide on whether it is a suitable feature for this blog.

Blogger

• Blogger in Draft has introduced new features including the long awaited comments embedded in post pages rather than those annoying popusp.
• I am using my blogspot blog to answer the specific questions relating to Blogger so if you have a problem or wish to learn something please drop me a line via comments or my contact form at Sueblimely Blogspot I also keep its blogroll up to date with any good blogger template sites or blogger help sites I come across.

Wordpress

• How to Format Images for Feed Readers A simple solution to ensure your images and text are well laid out in feed readers.
• Wordpress.com enables the use of Google Gears, a powerful browser add in to speed up access times when your PC is communicating with your Wordpres dashboard. If you do not already have Gears installed and enabled on your PC click on the “Turbo” link at the top right of your dashboard . This will take you to the Gears download site. After you install and enable Gears most of WordPress’ images, scripts, and CSS files will be stored locally on your computer. This is not so useful if you use more than one PC or use a public computer while blogging. More info:
  • Browsers supported by Gears
  • Gears Help Center
• Wordpress 6 is around the corner, hot on the heels of the much maligned version 5. Technosailer gives us a sneek preview of 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.6 which includes Google Gears and what looks like a nifty post/snip from any website directly to your blog feature.

Search Engine News

• 4050 Search Engines - Phil Bradley maintains a list of Country Based Search Engines - 4000 to date. Don’t panic at the amount, they are categorized by country :-). If you are interested in more specific topics then Laura Milligan at College@Home provides 100 Useful Niche Search Engines You’ve Never Heard Of As I tend to concentrate on blogging and general search myself I had not heard of many of them, but bloggers on other topics may find this list very useful.

I am setting myself a target of one news post per week, otherwise I will no longer be able to call it news!

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Blogosphere News 2

To save you from eye strain and the possibility of losing concentration from a long long post, I am splitting my news into two this week. In any case you may find something of interest in the links, follow them, and not come back here to read the rest.

News

• Influential Blogger is running a writing project which aims to identify The Top 10 Emerging Influential Blogs in 2008, blogs that started after 1st July 2007. Entering the project requires that you write a post with your choice 10 (or less) of emerging influential blogs. The Cut-off date and time for submission of entries is July 30, Wednesday, 5:00 pm. More details and lists of previous weeks submissions can be seen on the Influencial Blogger site. Even if you do not enter it is always interesting to find new quality blogs.
• Blog Catalog is conducting broadcasts at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/blogcatalog every other Monday night. The first two broadcasts were “Twitter for Beginners” and how to increase your blog’s traffic using social media tools. The next broadcast, 30th June explores the World of Online Streaming Video. I am rather late publishing this aren’t I!
• Have you heard about blogger Vlad being sued by eperks for comments that were made on a paid review he did? (the comments would you believe!) Andy Beard and others have been supporting Vlad through his ordeal.

• Andy’s post also gives us a good way to search for up to date posts and the latest news about a particular subject - simply by doing a search on Friendfeed. Here is an example using the query “eperks”
• 100 Awesome Webmaster Blogs by and for Women I came across this one via a twitter message. I will leave it to you to decide if the blogs are awesome - I cannot be objective as I am included in the list
• Awesome Gmail Trick To View Contact Conversations
• How to Create a Rock-Solid Tagline That Truly Works - Copyblogger gives us some useful tips on creating taglines or slogans that capture the essence of your site. This is something I have always struggled to do.
• Do You Suffer from Blogger Imposter Syndrome? by ProBlogger

Blogging Tools

• How To Embed an RSS Feed On Your Website or Blog? In case you want to add a separate webpage to your blog that you are going to update and want people to be informed about it when you do.
• Twingly Blog Search - promises to be a spam free blog search engine. Twingly search excludes spam by working “outwards from selected high quality blogs, discovering and including only those that are linked directly or indirectly to the quality “seeded blogs.”

Tomorrow I will post the other regular Blogosphere News sections:

• Social Networking News
• Search Engine News
• Blogger and Wordpress News

It is part of my dastardly plot to get you to come back and visit me, as I miss your comments when I do not post as frequently as I should. (my Technorati ratings have been slipping too - you really have to keep grinding away to retain those ratings don’t you? There is often no rhyme or reason to them at times? I have however gone up in Alexa’s eyes and am now no 6 in the Top 100 Australian Women’s Bloggers list (the list is now being hosted by crazy meezer) but have slipped down 3 to no 25 in the Top 100 Australian Blog index. Google Analytics reckons I was getting between 3-4000 unique hits a day in early June and now it is less than 200. (A Google Gaff I think as I do not believe the 1000’s and do not want to believe the low 100’s).

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Blogosphere News 1 July 5th

Top level domain (TLD) names (the 2 or 3 letters after the dot) will not have to conform to the existing name conventions. So instead of .com we may be seeing .blog, .xxx or .sex to identify a site. Second level domain names (the bit before the dot) could use a TLD as a keyword giving more options for creativity in naming - .travel, .hotel, .photo. craft, .shop, .safeway. Towns and cities would not have to just rely on a country TLD name - .melbourne .waggawagga. The possibilities are endless, although a name will have to be either memorable, descriptive, distinctive or follow conventions taken up by similar niches to be of much use.

This opens the floodgates to domain name registration. Popular .com keynames words suddenly become free again to be recreated with a different TLD extension. Interesting thought - I wonder if ing or ed will become popular - twitter.ing, digg.ing, learn.ed stumble.ed, flickr.ed. We will not see these particular examples of course because of copyright on the second level domain name (the bit before the dot). So we will not witness google.oogle, msn.acronym, abc.def, windows.liveordead, microsoft.hard nor ICANN.ucannot ask.andlearn. I could go on forever making up names like that but will restrain myself and leave you to come up with some for yourself

There are advantages for users as well as domain name owners. Users will be able to distinguish what a site is about more easily if it has a distinctive TLD. I hope search engines and browsers will come up with a way for us to easily filter out certain TLD names. For example, it would be good to filter out shopping sites if we were just looking for information rather than to buy or vice-versa. I can see it now - a Firefox extension called shopaholic. Search engines relying on advertising revenue may not be so keen on this idea, however. Another advantage of this could be easier filtering out of adult sites to safeguard children although I imagine some of these sites would want to draw unsuspecting visitors in by having a special extension as well as one that does not distinguish it.

Here is an quick explanation by the BBC on the changes:

You can read more about the ICANN recommendation on their site

For Australian readers: The rules on transfer of an Australian domain name were relaxed as of 1st June this year. Now domain names are not strictly attached to businesses. Previously a name could not be transferred unless the business changed hands too. There will be a 6 month cooling off period before a sale can be finalized. It sounds as if you do have to have a good reason to sell however as the rules state that “It will not be allowable to register a domain name for the sole purpose of resale or transfer to a third party”. I would imagine an allowable change would include a situation where a domain name defines a product or service that a business no longer sells. More information is available on the The Australian Domain Name Administrator (auDA) site.

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

New Rules for Domain Names

I need to create a site which will allow multiple users to easily add news and additional pages, upload photos to a gallery. I have created a number of sites using the Joomla CMS system so that their users could update the sites themselves once I had set them up. Each time the sites have either remained unchanged or I have had to to the updates myself ; the admin interface was too hard for them to learn.

This time, Wordpress was my main preference; with plugins and tweaks I could get it to do what was needed. It was not ideal but it was the best option that I was aware of - until I found Majestic. Majestic’s inbuilt features immediately attracted me, providing all the functionality I needed, and a simple admin interface means my clients will be able to start blogging without a steep learning curve. I was sueblimely happy with my discovery Not only does Majestic provide a simple blogging solution but has extras that even Wordpress cannot provide, such as more flexible user permissions. Plugins being developed by Injader will also provide more advanced uses if you need them. Apologies if this sounds like an advertisement, I do tend to be enthusiastic about such finds.

Another discovery I made was that Majestic has been developed by Ben Barden, whose blog I have been reading for quite some time and who I know from the Aussie Blogger’s Forums as a knowledgeable and helpful contributor. I have asked Ben to write a guest post to give you more info on Majestic and an opportunity for you to have your questions answered - so if there is any more you would like to know about Majestic please ask in the comments here.

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Majestic Wordpress Alternative and CMS

• Daniel of Blogging Tips has initiated RSS Awareness Day to take place 1st May. The objective - to get as many people as possible talking about RSS and its benefits. Read his blog for More details on how to get involved.
• If there is a web article that you do not have time to read there and then consider using Instapaper which, via a browser bookmarklet, saves the details for reading later. You could, instead, just leave a multitude of tabs open with the intent of coming back to them, slowing your browser down until it eventually crashes (I don’t recommend this although I often use this method!) or you could bookmark or favorite to a folder called “read later”.

 

• Liz Strauss - SOBCon08 and Utterz announce the
  GET MY MESSAGE Contest!! Do a Commercial for Your Blog.

Reading

• Blog Profiling Sites Declare War! Who Wins…? It seems BlogCatalog is gaining favor and MyBlogLog is declining. I personally favor BlogCatalog since the new features were introduced.
• The 100 top Web apps for 2008
  These are the 100 best Web 2.0 applications, chosen by Webware readers and Internet users across the globe. Over 1.9 million votes were cast to select these Webware 100 winners:

Blogging Tools

• 55 Active RSS Directories to Help Promote Your Feeds! - the title says it all.
• Fontcubes is a free font site in beta.

Social Networking

• Oziwi is a Ning based social networking site for “Connecting people Down Under all over the world”.
• SocialVibe is an online popularity contest that turns corporate advertising into money for charity. Add ads to your profile and gain points for the number of views. Review on ReadWriteWeb
• Shiftr - a new RSS aggregator service which is bad news for bloggers as it allows comments via their service rather than on our blogs. Read more at the Blog Herald: The Shyftr Saga

Wordpress

• Wordbook - a plugin that lets you to cross-post your blog posts to your Facebook Mini-Feed. Your Facebook profile will also show your most recent blog posts.
• Free, Premium and custom Wordpress themes are available at Blog Oh!Blog I thought the free Tutorial theme interesting.

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Blogosphere News 28th April 08

Image via Wikipedia

News

Darren Rowse is holding a Speed Posting weekend on Problogger - It is a long weekend here in Australia because of Friday’s Anzac Day public holiday so I am not certain if the “weekend” is starting Friday or Saturday - it could even be Friday in Australia but Saturday in USA

Darren has gathered 20 questions from his Twitter followers and will be providing a short answer to these and then throwing them open to readers to add their own responses. Sounds like there may be some real communication going on in the comments. As an added incentive Darren is giving away prizes to 3 readers who comment.

It is Darren’s birthday on Sunday so let us give him a gift by making this a bumper commenting weekend for him. Happy Birthday, Darren.

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Problogger Speed Posting Weekend

• Adobe PhotoShop has released a free online version Adobe PhotoShop Express. It is only available to the US as yet, which peeves me, so all I can tell you is that it is a cut down and simpler to use version of Photoshop. As you are given your own URL I presume you can share your creations with others. Perhaps one of the privileged could let us know if it is any good although Profy thinks so Photoshop Express - An Excellent Web-based Photo Editor
• Andy Beard has been noticing a trend in his blog and other which leads him to ask Alexa Rating Changes? Have you noticed any changes in your rating?

Reading

• 7 must-read Webmaster Central blog posts - Google Webmaster Central
• 25 Paths to an Insanely Popular Blog - Skelliwag
• The Fragmentation of Identity and Discussion - Internet Duct Tape
• 20 Types of Pages that Every Blogger Should Consider - Darren Rowse
• Blog Marketing Tips Even the Professional Bloggers Won’t Share - Tip #1 - Andy Beal.
• 50 Thoughtful, Funny and Polemic Blogging Quotes - Daily Blog Tips
• How to Help Immunize Your Site Against Scraping - Blog Herald

Blogging Tools

• Social Scan is an online tool for checking a website link popularity among well known social sites.
• Test different font types, styles and spacing at Font Tester or Typesetter
• LinkBunch lets you put multiple links into one small link which you can share over IM, Twitter, email - or even via blogs as you can see by the blogging blogs I have bunched together here: http://linkbun.ch/76r

Social Networking

• Alltop, a news aggregator, now has a section for dads - Dads.Alltop.com
• Profile aggregator Tabber has been completely redesigned. You can read a review by Profy at Tabber’s Complete Makeover: Looks Like FriendFeed
• Colin of Life warns us about Social Networks Targeted With Trojan At present this uses the Orkut social network to spread. I hope this is not just the tip of the iceberg! Thanks for keeping track of such nasties Colin.
• Facebook has introduced a new feature that suggests “people you may know.”
• Social Media and Simplicity, Part 1: Reduce by Muhammad Saleem writing on Freelance Switch. Wise strategies to reduce our blogging workload.
• The Common is a new site aimed at bringing people who wish to know how do do something together with those who do know. Profy has a post that explains more - The Common: Helping Each Other 2.0 Style

Blogger

• How to Install a Blogger XML Template - includes an excellent idea for saving all your current widgets if you do not want to lose them in a template change over.
• Blogger has recently created a Blogger Help YoutTube channel for those who prefer their tutorials in video form.
• 8 steps to a more professional Blogspot blog - from the Download Squad
• A directory of Blogger Templates - BTemplates

Wordpress

• An easily browsed visual index of free Wordpress themes - Fresheezy!
• Wordpress 2.5 has some significant changes that will need learning. Here are a few posts introducing you to WP 2.5:
  • WordPress 2.5: A Thorough Analysis
  • WordPress Upgrade Preparation Checklist

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Blogosphere News 1st April