A subscribe option allows you to add the collections of others to your favorites and track when these are updated. These user created collections are ranked by the amount of subscribers they have attracted.

The Firefox Collections page allows you to view lists of Editor’s Picks (so far only Firefox Created Collections), Popular Collections, your own and your favorite Collections. The lists are searchable by most popular all time, most popular this week or month and newest. A keyword search box is also provided.

Social networking aspects are involved here.

• You are able to keep up to date with new extensions added by those whose knowledge you respect. I first heard of collections via the blog post Best Of Breed Firefox Collection For SEO, Bloggers & Internet Marketers, by Andy Beard, whose collection I subscribed to immediately.
• You can subscribe to the collections of current friends and develop more contacts.
• By publicizing and gaining subscribers for your own collections, the higher your own profile will reach in the collection rankings.
• For bloggers this could lead to more visitors and regular readers.

It has taken me a while to get back into the swing of blogging after being away on holiday but life is now back to it’s normal routine. As usual I have tried out the tools I review so here are my own Firefox Collections: These are based on those I use and those I have found useful but have had to delete from my default Firefox profile to keep the number of add-ins down. The more you have the slower the browser.

• Social Networking Firefox extensions and toolbars that help you interact with your social networks and communicate with your contacts. I keep my most used in my default profile but have a social networking profile for times when I wish to do nothing else but catch up with my network contacts.
• Blogging- blog writers, web design and image tools for blogging.
• Sueblimely Using Add-ons- the add-ins I use with my default Firefox profile.

For an explanation of why and how to use different profiles please checkout my post Speed Up Your Firefox Browsing

Firefox Collections and Social Networking | Blogging Sueblimely

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.

Social Bookmarking v Social Bookmarking Rating | Blogging Sueblimely

Google Friend Connect is my latest social networking trial – partly because other blog community sites have not been too successful in bringing readers here lately and because, as usual, I cannot resist checking out something new. Although released for trial in May last year, the beta version is now available to all.

When I first started writing this article I was the lone friend of my site. As you can see by the member icons in the Friend Connect member gadget, at the top of my sidebar, this has now changed. Initial enthusiasm for new social networking activities means members spend more time participating and adding contacts. This initial enthusiasm tends to fizzle out either because the network is not successful or it is successful and you get lost in the crowd.

Benefits

"You will bring viral social growth to your website. Visitors can evangelize for your site by inviting their friends and publishing their activities to their social networks. Social gadgets will keep these visitors more deeply engaged with your site, and with each other." That was taken from the Friend Connect site but, ignoring the hype, why should you join yet another social networking community when you are likely bogged down in them already? For me the answer lies in its differences rather than similarities:

Why is Friend Connect different to other methods of networking?

• Interaction with others is done via the actual sites that have Friend Connect Gadgets installed. You do not have to go off to another site, as with MyBlogLog, to join a site or add friends.
• In addition to the Members widget (gadget) you see in my sidebar, Social gadgets allow for such things as commenting, reviewing and sharing media..
• Unless you want to add your own site to Friend Connect and include gadgets on your page, you do not have to be a member of Friend Connect yourself. You can sign in with Google, Yahoo, AIM, Twitter or OpenID’s to interact with other members.
• Integration with other social networks is achieved using a member’s Google profile. Clicking on a member’s icon will show not only their blog URL’s but, if they have joined using their Google account rather than an OpenID, other sites they belong to. (Google Reader, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr ……) Twitter users can sign in with their ID and check to see if any of their followers are also using your site.
• Integration of OpenSocial means that independent developers can can create social gadgets and, although the choice is limited as yet, the possibilities are promising.

One disadvantage with adding multiple widgets is that they increase your page loading time at times quite considerably. Adding the widget to your footer rather than your sidebar is one way round this – at least your page content and your sidebar(s) load first, leaving the footer to load out of the fold area.

Friend Connect Page

Friend Connect is not very simple to learn and you may find it hard to install, navigate around the widgets and find other members.. The help is not comprehensive. I have therefore created a Friend Connect Page, which I will update as I find new resources. On the page you will find:

A tutorial and videos covering:

• Joining up with Friend Connect
• Setting up your preferences
• Adding Member and Social Gadgets to your site.
• Managing your settings and members.
• How to add Friend Connect to WordPress self hosted, (not possible with WordPress.com) and Blogger blogspot.
• How to find other members
• How to join other sites

Examples of some of the Social Widgets

I have added social widgets to the bottom of my Friend Connect Page show you what they look like and to give you an opportunity to use them, in case you are considering adding them to your own site.. I had a bit of fun finding Google and Social Networking type songs to add to the playlist gadget.

Hope to see you around Friend Connect

Guide to Google Friend Connect | Blogging Sueblimely

I am a member of a lot of Social Networking sites, although my degree of participation varies a great deal. It tends to be based on which sites I enjoy, especially the social aspects, although these are also communities where readers are more likely to result. I know that I could be much more systematic and organized in how I expend my efforts online, rather than fluttering from place to place without prior planning or without following the planning. There are just too many sites to be successful as an online social butterfly – the wings are just not large enough, being a social Albatross would be preferable.

I know the theory behind SEO and increasing visitors but tend to lack in the implementation of it. Being a bit of a net junkie the time and effort requirements do get fulfilled but matters such as keyword analysis take a back seat I find this tedious, although I do tend to use openings that are hopefully Google Getters. This has become more automatic rather than thought out, although on writing the first sentence here I did have this in mind and reworked it.

To the stats themselves – I compared 2008 annual figures from Awe Stats and Google Analytics. Although there was a lot of variations in the two sets of figures, when I grouped the numbers and looked at them both in percentage terms there was much less variation. I split the figures into groupings based on the type of networking involved.

Entrecard (+ related sites) 15% – I expected these to represent a fairly large proportion although I don’t think they necessarily translate to readers and bring few comments. After initial enthusiasm I no longer spend much time with Entrecard.

Lists and Blogrolls – The vast majority of this 4% is made up of lists I have qualified for rather than blog submission sites – Top 100 and top 50 women Australian Bloggers, a Do Follow list. Sitehopping has brought a small but steady stream of traffic too. The the blog directory sites were not doing anything at all and by mid year I had removed all of these buttons. I had joined these sites when I first started blogging and before Social Networking sites had taken off.

The amount of visitors arriving from Social Networking sites surprised me, especially how many referrals Stumbleupon had sent, as you can see below:

Stumbleupon sent me 23,500 visitors last year even though none of the submitted posts received huge amounts of thumbs up – no “Digg” effects are apparent. Although I do send my posts to contacts via the SU toolbar occasionally, many more were reviewed and given thumbs up without this. I do not enjoy Digg and have not had any enthusiasm for doing what is needed to get a post rated highly there.

As SU took up such a large proportion I have analyzed the other Social Networking Sites on their own without SU.

Although I expected Twitter to do well, I was surprised to see Blog Catalog in second place and Technorati in third. Considering I have not participated in Blog Soldiers and the Good Blogs for months, and no longer have the widgets installed, they performed quite highly. I do not use Mixx a great deal so that figure is not a true reflection on how well it could do for others. Nuffnang Australia has so far proved excellent considering the short period of time I have been a member, although that could be initial enthusiasm that comes along with something new. It will be interesting to see what results arise being featured blogger of the month on Nuffnang. I am pleased that diigo did so well as it is my favorite bookmarking site, with good social networking features thrown in.

Zimbio, which is not included above as I did not consider it a networking site as such, brought me 9674 referrals over a short period of time for just one contribution; my Best Sites For Good Free Stock Images post.

I also had a closer look at which posts were the most popular. (Publishing links to older popular posts is always a good strategy, not only for newer readers who may have missed them the first time round but to increase the number of links within your site.

• New Rules for Domain Names
• Add Borders to Images
• Excellent Free Online Image Editing Tools
• Add Widget Ready Sidebars to WordPress Footers
• Best Sites For Good Free Stock Images
• Adding a Favicon to your Blog

These vary from the Most Popular Posts listed in the sidebar because of different time periods used but both show how popular the image posts were. I believe I managed to get in quickly with the Domain Name post and it was a subject that attracted a lot of interest… The fact that the Favicon tutorial did so well is related to the nature of blogs. There are many posts and static website articles on this topic but this was much more recent than the others. It would be an interesting exercise to write another post on the same subject perhaps later this year, I suspect this too would do well..

So what does all this mean for the year ahead? I will concentrate my social networking efforts on the sites that have been the most useful in terms of visitors and most satisfying in terms of connecting with people. I will make an effort to participate more in Mixx. The Scoutle widget will reluctantly be removed from my footer. The concept is good but it has not proved effective visitor wise and the widget often causes very slow page loading times. I am going to continue giving Google Friend Connect a try – the poor lonely contact widget, which I recently installed, will have to be moved – again because of page loading issues. Nuffnang has yet to produce any ads and the widget’s intrusive size still bugs me.

I will also find time to do the full blog redesign that I have intended to do for a year, which I subequently planned to complete by today; to be installed in replacement of my Christmas theme. Instead I just quickly changed the colors and removed the Christmas images.

I hope these figures give you some indication of the worth of sites in relation to bringing in readers as, having read what others recommend, I do not think they are particularly out of the ordinary. If your experiences differ I would be interested in hearing about them.

Which Social Networks Bring the Most Readers? | Blogging Sueblimely

It was with anticipation and a certain amount of childlike excitement that I opened my Secret Santa. I was not disappointed. As you can see my parcel contained a treasure chest of bright and useful goodies, complete with its own container.

Many thanks to my Secret Santa for a delightfully presented and thoughtful gift. Thanks too to all the members of Aussie Bloggers Forum, who have not only provided me with help and ideas throughout the year but kindness and friendship too. These forums show that blogging means far more than writing posts and promoting them so that they are read. Whatever the reason you blog and and whether you are aiming for multitudes or a small close circle of readers, building up a network, social or business, is an important and integral part of the process.

Aussie Bloggers Secret Santa | Blogging Sueblimely

Scoutle considers itself to be “Automated Social Networking” where there is no need for communication in order to connect and no real life obligations. I think they must be talking only about the initial method of connection here as, once you have connected with someone, there must be communication for a blogging relationship to develop and establish.The novelty of Scoutle is that you do not have to search for people to connect with, Scoutle’s search does that for you, filtering out sites that it considers not worthy – eg outdated sites or those just that only exist for advertising purposes. As well as finding contacts via the widget you can discover other members on the Scoutle website itself, – via contacts of contacts and through networks based on interest areas.

Scoutle is premised on the idea that it is the quality of connections that is important not the quantity. This appeals to me considering the masses of people I do not know that connect to me on sites such as MyBlogLog; many who have likely never visited this blog. Scoutle allows your Scout to walk twice for every time you have a visitor to your site – the more your Scout gets to walk the more it will appear on the sites of other Scoutle members. You make contact with other users by requesting to make a “Connection” with them via the Scoutle website. You score points based on your site visitor numbers and the number of Connections you make. The higher your point value the higher your place in the Scoutle Guide, which in turn should lead to more visitors.

This service has been available for a good few months now and, although as usual I joined as soon as I heard about it, I felt that I already took part in too many social networking activities and these were beginning to take time away from blogging: becoming counterproductive. I have since narrowed these down to networks I find the most use and enjoy using the most so I have some leeway to explore others.

I will report on Scoutle once I have had more opportunity to find out if it is working for me, although I suspect it is not attracting as many members as it deserves because of general social networking fatigue as well as the desire not to have too many widgets. I have already discovered a few very informative blogs that I had not come across before – one you may be interested in is Social Web Tools by ChaCha Fance – it sent me off in discovery of various new, interesting applications.

If you are a Scoutle member please leave a comment letting us know what you think of it.

(I placed the Scoutle widget in my footer because this reduces the impact of any increase in page load time it causes – the footer loads last so the rest of the page is visible even though the social networking widgets may not have fully loaded)

What is a Scoutle Scout? | Blogging Sueblimely

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!

Blogosphere News 2 | Blogging Sueblimely

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).

Blogosphere News 1 July 5th | Blogging Sueblimely

Where do you begin with Twitter?:

As you may know the basic Twitter interface is just that – basic. Type in a short message and press enter. There are some official twitter commands that you can use. For example the @ command before a contacts name addresses a message to that person:

• From Sueblimely ” @Shakespeare Your rhymes are more revolting than Roald Dahl’s”
• DHLawrence to Shakespeare – “@Shakespeare When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder That such trivial people should muse and thunderIn such a lovely language.”
• replies from Shakespeare:
  • @Sueblimely I thank you for your voice: thank you: Your most sweet voice. I can no other answer make, but, thanks, and thanks.
  • @ DHLawrence Thou surly ill-breeding death-token!

Adding “Retweet: @” indicates that you are rebroadcasting a message made by someone else. e.g.

• Retweet: @Hamlet I am struck with wonder That such trivial people should muse and thunder In such a lovely language.

A hashtag (#) before a word is a kind of tag, a word which identifies a topic, place, event etc.

• #shakesepeare The Taming of the Shrew and Hamlet are showing in Stratford this season http://www.rsc.org.uk/content/5153.aspx.

#Hamlet @horatio O, I die, Horatio; The potent poison quite o’er-crows my spirit: I cannot live to hear the tweets from England;

Be careful you do not misquote It may help to take a look at The Art and Science of Retweeting for Twitteraholics by Blogging Bits.

• Caroline Middlebrooke’s The Big Juicy Twitter Guide is worth reading if you are a newcomer to Twitter as is
• How to: The Beginners Guide to Twitter – Part 1, the basics by carocat of Cat’s Blog .
• How to explain Twitter and use it correctly, before it’s too late on New Media Bytes discusses twitter etiquette (twitiquette) and includes a video tutorial by Common Craft.
• 20 Things I Learned Using Twitter has some good tips on making the most of Twitter, finding contacts and using it efficiently/

There are so many applications, clients. scripts and extensions for interacting with Twitter (hereafter referred to as “thingies” – no that should be “thwingies”). Twitter is becoming far more than a simple messaging platform; with potential to provide us with valuable targeted multimedia information via computer and phone. Taking advantage of this means using more than the basic twitter site interface.

Where to find out more about Twitter thwingies:

• Twitter Fan Wiki, which is dedicated to keeping up with Twitter thwingies and all sorts of other aspects.
• ReadWriteWeb monitored methods used for interacting with Twitter and have produced a list of the top 20 (out of 142 possible ways). How We Tweet: The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients. The site has recently published The Most Popular Twitter Apps According to the Blogosphere. As I was writing this a Digsby popup informed me they had just published another – Top 10 Twitter Apps
• Mashable list 24th May -Twittermania: 140+ More Twitter Tools! – includes links to their other Twitter tool posts.

How and why to use Twitter:

• Maki of DoshDosh is cluey about Twitter and has written a number of posts on the topic including 17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners
• ProBlogger Darren Rowse is also a good source of knowledge. Take a look at 9 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers for starters.
• 12 ways to use Twitter to increase your productivity on Simple Net.
• Twitter Freaks Group on diigo

That is enough reading material for now. While writing this, I have been trying to think of new twitter terms. How about:

• Twinkling – what the the Twitterati Glitterati do, whereas the rest of us tweet or twitter.
• Twender – how you message your sweetheart.
• Twyslexic – bad spelling in tertwit
• Twenterhooks – when you are waiting eagerly for a reply

I will leave you to guess what these already coined unofficial Twitter terms mean.

• Twisticuffs
• Twitterrheart
• Tweetheart

You can find the answers on the Twitter Fan Wiki Glossary and check out more Twitter terms and shortcuts on their Twictionary.

If you can think of any more of these, or know of good beginner’s guides to Twitter, please leave a comment or send a tweet to @Sueblimely.

Twitter for Beginners | Blogging Sueblimely

• 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.

Blogosphere News 28th April 08 | Blogging Sueblimely