Blogging Sueblimely

Welcome to Blogging Sueblimely. To keep up with my posts you can subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

News

• Join in Conversation Week 2008, March 24-30 discussing the Top 10 Questions in the World Today…
• Pop Culture Heroines is a new multi author site dedicated to the promotion of strong female characters in popular culture. Writers from all backgrounds are invited to submit a request to write articles for the site. A forum is being considered too, so if the subject interests you, you can vote in the poll currently taking place.
• Alltop, a news aggregation site that provides “all the top” stories for forty of the most popular topics on the Web. Review by Guy Kawasaki - Announcing (Formally) Alltop
• On Imaginif blog - WIN $50.00 cash. Write a blog post about Child Safety by April 3rd to coincide with:
• Blog Against Sexual Violence Day April 3rd
• Snoskred has created another set of feed icons for free download - Introducing The Green Collection- Thanks Snos, they are great.
• From Znet -In-flight Internet cleared for take-off and AOL acquires Bebo for $850 million; Social networking field narrows
• NOTCOT Inc is a growing network of design sites currently including NOTCOT.com, NOTCOT.org, TasteSpotting.com, NotCouture.com - "a visual filtration of ideas + aesthetics + amusements". Definitely a site for sore eyes

Reading

• Top 10 Personal Health Blogs
• 11 Ways To Create Your Own Traffic Jams by Blogtrepreneur
• The Sisterhood of the travelling Bra - follow the Bra’s progress as it travels around Australia courtesy of All for Women
• 16 Top Social Media Strategies for Success
• 99 Free Online Classes on Business and Entrepreneurship
  
• The Top 100 Productivity and Lifehack Blogs

Blogging Tools

• Round II - 50 Directories With Good Google Page Rank To Submit Your Website (No Reciprocal Link Required!) from Blogging Tips

Social Networking

• Trusera is the place to tap into real world experience about people and their health. Stay awhile and tell us your story.
• I have been using Friendfeed for a week or so now, since it opened up to the public. The name describes the service nicely - a kind of social networking aggregator. Add your friends/friends of friends and receive an online feed of their activity from their blog’s RSS feed, on twitter, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, flickr, picasa, vimeo, netflix, jaiku, last.fm, pownce, reddit, tumblr, zooomr, ilike, status updates from GoogleTalk. Once I am able to find more of my friends on their it will be very useful. Here is my pageif you want to find me. More info from
  SheGeeks FriendFeed is THE Next Big Thing 10 Ways to Get More Out of Friendfeed
• Kill Them With Kindness - guest post by Saphrym on CK Marketing Blog

Wordpress

• How to Setup Gravatars for your Blog - Plugin Free!
• Free WordPress Icon Pack

Search Engine News

• Topicle is a new search engine community.
  Every Topicle search engine only searches handpicked URLs, instead of the whole Web.
  Members can create new Topicle search engines and maintain all existing ones.
• 10 Tips to use sitemap file for faster crawling and indexing of your site pages
• Installing WordPress Locally Under Windows XP
  

Popularity: 4% [?]

Adimade
- is a user created advertising video site launched at the end of January this year; co-founded by Jake Lawton and Nat Graf of Nudge Marketing, who also produce the Gen Y Marketing Podcast. Jake who, like many of us, turns to the laptop when TV ads come on, says “It dawned on us that if the ads on TV were half as funny as what we were watching on YouTube, then we probably wouldn’t feel the need to stop watching”.

If you have talents at video creation you could try your hand at creating ads for one of the Adimade project partners which include businesses, charities and causes. Viewers can vote on the submitted ads and at the end of the project the top 10 are selected, Ann overall winner is then chosen for a "Grand Prize" by the project partners.

If you are not interested in creating your own ads you may prefer to view or submit one of your favourite add or commercials to the Ad Hall of Fame

One of the current project partners is My Planet Ads . The following link takes you to one of the entries in this category Choose Sides

The site is in its early days still and I look forward to seeing more ads being submitted. You can keep up to date with the site via the Adimade Blog. It is interesting to note that all their blogs are on blogspot.

Adimade is one of the entrants in the Australian Start Ups Carnival 2008 . I am now going off to have a look at some of the other carnival entrants. Oh dear, more sites for me to join up with no doubt.

I was right, even before I posted this I had joined up with one of the start ups: The Fame Experiment. I will tell you more about this once I have had more time to explore.

Popularity: 2% [?]

News

• Ad Lib Group Writing Project on Essential Strokes
• wowOwow (The Women of The Web) site is launching today 8th March - no idea what it is about but the current front page intrigued me - “If you could choose any women in the world, living or dead, which four faces would you put on Mount Rushmore?”
• UN Data gives free online access to the United Nations Data Access System database; an integrated information resource with current, relevant and reliable statistics. If you are interested in stats - there are currently 55 million records to search.
• Andy Beard Exclusive: Activity SocialStream Goes Portable With Blogcatalog. Andy describes the BlogCatalog’s new social network widget and feeds.

Reading

• Bending the Web: Become Popular in 2 Monthsfrom Super Blogging Tips
• Top 10 Worst Capthas by John Willis
• How can you tell if a site is a link farm?from about.com
• How to Easily Boost Your Technorati Rankby Chris Garrett
• GreenDev: 50 Environmentally Friendly Apps, Hosts and Resourcesby Virtual Hosting.
• Procrastination: Procrastination Killers Part 4 of a series by Gaetano Caruanaon Liz Strauss’ Successful Blogger. Gaetano also has a free book Stop Procrastination Now available at Fruitful Blogger. I downloaded this but will read it tomorrow.
• Vincent the Wright Hand Blogger gives6,500 Reasons Why You Should Join My Wright Hand Power Forum on Linkedin Groups

Blogging Tools

• Use Snipping Tool to capture screen shots with Windows Vista - Create an image of a rectangular area, an irregular shaped area, a whole window or whole screen with this tool that is built into Vista. Thanks to Michael, who visited me via Entrecard,for this information.
• To easily see which sites are linking to you add the code given to you on the Who links to mesite.
• PicMarkr lets you to add custom watermark (image or text) to your images online and free.It is useful when you need to protect your copyrights or if you want to add comments to your photos.
• Aviary is a suite of web-based applications (RIAs) for ” people who create” - includes image editing, typography, music, 3D and video tools. Currently in beta for trialing.
• MyLiveSignature.com Online tool to create a personalized signature image. Choose from 120 fonts and a selection of colors, sizes, and degrees of slant.
• 100+ Resources for Web Developers by Blog Well
• Blog Headers For Free Download on Smashing Magazine.

Social Networking

• Reddit - Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About It Not an applications I have used much although I have read reports on its usefulness.
• BricaBox some social networking tools into the personalized homepage niche. We’ve taken the best of blogs and social networks, added some amazing new tools and features, and created a platform for you to create your own version of your favorite social content website. Choose from our one–click selection of BricaBoxes below to get started.
• Blogged.com is a new interactive blog directory launched this week. One interesting difference between this and other directories such as BlogCatalog is that most of the blogs have been reviewed and rated by professional editors hopefully filtering out spam blogs and keeping quality high. You can read a review at Will Blogged be More Than a Typical Blog Directory?
• 30,000 weblogs. One Day. One Voice Have you ever wanted to shout to the world? Here’s your chance.
• Jaanix is a new social news website - submit stories or click, rate, tag, comment or save posts submitted by others. Find stories of interest using a slider system which weights the topics you wish to search for or just view recent or popular posts. Over time Jannix learns your preferences, feeding you stories accordingly. Your saved posts can be exported to del.icio.us and Twitter. More information and reviews can be seen on my own Jaanix page

Wordpress

• 48 Unique Ways To Use WordPress
• Project Files - Is That Really WordPress?
• BuddyPress will “transform a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform” - More info at from the Download Squad at Automattic acquires BuddyPress social networking plugins (MU=Multiuser)

Popularity: 3% [?]

Popularity: 4% [?]

Ultimate Blog Party 2008

All women bloggers are invited to the 2008 Ultimate Blog Party. Sorry guys, you are not invited to participate, but you can of course read the resulting entries. All that is required is that you write one ‘party post’ during the week of March 7-14th. and leave a link in comments of the central Ultimate Blog Party Post on the 5 minutes for Mom site so that you can be added to the list of participants. Last year the Ultimate Blog Party had 1000 participating bloggers. More details and instructions can be found at Are You Coming to The Ultimate Blog Party 2008?

sk*rt

sk*rt is a social media platform of “pure goodness. A plaza for the peachy. A portal to the pretty.” This is what the site proclaims about itself and having a penchant for pure peachy and pretty I have joined up. sk*irt powered by pligg and is a submit and vote site similar to Digg.

sk*rt has been created by Gabrielle Blair, also known as Design Mom, Laura Mayes who writes for, among other things, The Queso and Cool Mom Picks and Laurie Smithwick who blogs at Upside Up

All Women Blogging Carnival

The All Women Blogging Carnival is held ever Monday. To submit your post, visit the Blogcarnival -All Women Blogging Carnival page and fill in the form to submit your post.

BlogHer

Then there is the BlogHer site and the BlogHer conferences - BlogHer Business in April and BlogHer ‘08 in July, and six one-day conferences to cities along the East Coast USA.

WomenBloggers Web Ring

• I have joined up with theWomenBloggers WebRing webring, which at present has 291 members, after being impressed by the quality of the member blogs that I read. The code is unobtrusive too - see my sidebar. Instead of the “go to next site” type of navigation that I am used to seeing for webrings, in this case member sites can be browsed within a frame on the WomenBloggers webring page. You can visit the actual sites from here too. You can find more details of the webring and how to go about joining at at the RingsAround.net WomenBloggers Webring page.

Powered by WebRing

More Women’s business:

• Blogs by Women Directory
• Liz Strauss presents The W-List: Gathering a List of Outstanding Women Bloggers She also explains why we should care that there are 5+ to 1 men bloggers to women bloggers.
• Top 100 Australian Women’s Blogs

Popularity: 2% [?]

MyBlogLog has a problem with security - page tampering, sites being interfered with and taken over but never fear a solution is at hand.

This entails verifying your blog. To do this:

• Log in to your MyBlogLog account and click on your individual blog page.
• In the “Author” section in the right sidebar you will find a “Verify your site” link just above the Community Members section. Clicking on this takes you to a page explaining what you need to do and providing you with the necessary code.

There are two options:

• Writing a blog post with the verification link included.
• Adding a meta tag between the <head> and </head> tags of your theme or template. (Wordpress users - go to Presentation/Theme editor and add the code to your header.php file. Blogger users go to Template/edit html.)

Then go back to the MyBlogLog verification page once more and click on the “Authenticate” button under the option you chose.

Repeat this procedure for every blog you have listed on MyBlogLog.

It is an idea to keep your post or template edit page open as once the blog has been authenticated you can remove the post or the meta tag.

Now you can sleep well at night safe in the thought that your MyBlogLog is not going to become “their” MyBlogLog - no one is going to take your identity, masquerade as you on other blogs (at least not through this particular loophole)

I am not sure if these security problems are part of the same MBL issues that Shoemoney revealed last year or if other loopholes have been discovered since. Shoemoney was banned from MBL and bloggers were revolting. I mean they came out in sympathy with Shoemoney and ditched their MBL accounts. If I had known at the time I would have joined in. (I was a hippy wanna be when young and wanted to take part in protest marches and go to Woodstock but mummy would not let me go. I had to make do with wearing cow bells round my neck and flowers in my hair. In any case at that time I thought Woodstock was in Oxfordshire, UK. By the time I got to Uni, the marches had almost ground to a halt and we were forced to party instead of protest. It was a hard life

I feel a song coming on. Well the subject of security is a bit tedious isn’t it - a necessary evil to counter the efforts of unnecessarily evil people.

Scott McKenzie and " San Francisco"

I was going to play Joni Mitchell’s "Woodstock" as she unfortunately missed the event too. There the similarity ends. While I was home likely playing with Barbies”, she wrote the song Woodstock.

Thanks to Colin of “Life” for putting me on to this authentication procedure.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Reading the condolence messages for Benazir Bhutto led me to search further for information that would fill in the glaring gaps in my knowledge on current day Pakistan. Reading newspapers gives me some (hopefully) factual information but this does not tell me how people live, feel and think in countries where the overall culture is different to mine.

My natural reaction, since starting blogging myself, is to search for blogs that will give me this sort of insight. I started writing this with a heavy heart, having read posts by people trying to go about ordinary daily life in countries torn by civil strife, people with the same daily routines, hopes and aspirations for life that are typical world wide. I was inclined to stop reading and go on to something more pleasant, things that made me feel better. The truth is, that this is what I normally do; after all there is nothing I can do about it is there? I do not normally comment on such blogs, feeling I have nothing worthy to contribute, and move on to something that makes me feel more comfortable. I wonder if I am unusual in this? I wonder if I bury my head in the sand more than others?

Then it occurred to me, I often leave comments purely to offer support, as a thank you for a good post. I give link love by mentioning posts here, to create backlinks for blogs I want to help promote, so that they get more exposure and more readers. I develop friendships with people worldwide. I may not be able to offer words of wisdom, or solutions to problems that those far far wiser than me have tried to solve, but I can do this. As a29th December resolution (I don’t see why they should be restricted to New Year) I am going to take more advantage of the world that blogging has opened up; to learn and understand and try to get to know those of different cultures and lifestyles, their likes and dislikes, their hopes and dreams, their daily routines.

My mood brightened then, realizing that I am not so powerless after all; blogging means we have the privilege of being able to reach out to people world wide. I do not have to read all sad stories, those that cast a heavy shadow over me. Delving further into the blogs I looked at showed me that they were far from sad, even though my initial search had landed me on stories of that nature. This has taught me that I should not read a blog ‘by its cover’ but delve deeper to find the richness within.

Now I am going off to find some more really wonderful and inspiring reading. I will keep you informed of what I found but would appreciate your input here too, to point me in the right direction.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Apologies for the title, I could not resist. What I have been dropping is my Entrecard - a kind of internet calling card. You can see where Entrecard members drop theirs for me - in my right sidebar. Once I have built up enough credits by pressing on the “drop yours’ button on other member sites I can then use these to advertise my site. I also earn credits when others drop in on me.

It is too early to say if this will just bring some one off visitors or returning readers but I will keep you informed. In the meantime I think the concept is clever and it appealed to me as being a fun way of gaining some more recognition for this new blog. I only need to visit and drop on sites that interest me, giving kudos where it is due. I only have to accept ads and place ads on sites I choose. I can avoid spammy sites and even if they visit this site they are not leaving - “will you drop on me/fav me, vote for me’ type pleas.

I suspect I should have a site logo on my calling card rather than my image but I did not realize it at the time. At least I did not use the Christmas hat picture I have put on MyBlogLog

Have any of you found such link exchange type schemes effective?

PS. I forgot mention that it was Mark of Me and My Drum that put me on to this. Thanks Mark. I showed my appreciation by buying a text link for the first time ever, on your Top Spots.

Popularity: 2% [?]