I’ve often taken a snarky approach when it comes to people who set up blogs for their pets. I barely want to read about humans’ mundane lives, let alone issues with litter and pooper scoopers. However, there might be a new reason to subscribe to Lucky, Fido or Buddy’s blog.

Animals’ ability to prognosticate goes far beyond the annual Groundhog Day ritual. Since the beginning of time, many have believed that little furry creatures (and fish!) can tip off humans to imminent natural disasters.

…an earthquake specialist from the US Geological Survey in San Francisco kept a record of the numbers of small ads for lost pets in the local newspaper. He found there was a dramatic upsurge in missing pets weeks before a quake. How animals could forecast earthquakes is not known.

Animals also seem to forecast severe weather. There were many reports of bizarre animal behaviour before the cyclone that devastated Bangladesh (then called East Pakistan), in November 1970. For example, dogs howled endlessly for days, cattle became restless and stopped eating and ants moved to higher positions.

Given the recent disasters in Myanmar (Burma) and China, it might be time to start monitoring the moods of our four-legged companions.

Read more here.

I have noticed a great many bloggers I meet are introverted. This is something I can well empathize with as I have had to train myself to be more outgoing. Perhaps communicating online gives us introverts a less intimidating means to connect? The tricky part though is for people who find it hard to connect offline and on.

Fact is, if you want to get anywhere online, increasingly you need to break out of that bubble and connect with people. I am not talking about schmoozing or using people, but talking, doing favors and getting known.

My friend Damian has learned this the hard way. He is a brilliant WordPress plugin developer but until recently nobody knew who he was. Once he put himself out there his traffic has increased and people are now talking about his plugins. The lesson, it doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do if nobody notices. You need the technical skills and the social skills.

• Join Twitter
• Participate in forums
• Comment on blogs
• Take part in carnivals and memes
• Link out - a lot
• Guest post
• Create something useful for the community, for bloggers this would be a widget, theme or plugin

What are you doing to make yourself better known?

Inquisitor is a cool plugin for Safari, and now Yahoo owns it. The developer, David Watanabe, won’t be joining Yahoo, but will continue the development.

I look forward to assisting Yahoo! in refining and extending the Inquisitor user experience beyond where it is today. I truly believe that Inquisitor and its users can only benefit, both from Yahoo’s resources and attention, and from the product integration possibilities that would have been impossible to pursue on my own.

The idea behind this is, of course, to tap in to the search market coming from Safari, which uses Google per default.

Hat tip: Liquidicity

I thought they were already, but obviously not so. Google has been the leading search engine, but overall Yahoo is the most popular web site according to ComScore’s rankings. No more though, according to an AP report:

According to comScore, Google’s unique U.S. audience in April was 141.1 million, an 18 percent increase from the same month in 2007. Yahoo’s audience grew 7 percent, to 140.6 million. Microsoft Corp. was third at about 121 million.

That said, Yahoo still leads in page views, meaning visitors spend more time there or return more often. Many Google users make a simple search request and quickly go elsewhere based on the results. Yahoo had 33.6 billion page views to Google’s 28.7 billion.

YouTube probably helps a lot, and the fact that Gmail is growing rapidly is also mentioned in the news story.

Ryan Caldwell, of Performancing fame, had an idea:

Why not build a tool that only shows the stories that went popular on at least two social voting sites?

The result, via Suffolk Software, is SocialMediaPop. Cool project, in beta for now. I wonder what the social media sites think of services like this?

In an upcoming interview, you will read me say the following:

I hate labels and putting people in boxes. That’s why blogging and the web is so exciting to me and I’ve long been one of its stanchest fans and advocates. I don’t care if you are black, brown, green, yellow, or chartreuse. I don’t care if you have eyes or ears. I don’t care if you have legs or feet. I don’t care if you are young or old. I just don’t care about the surface. I care about what’s inside. I care about what’s under the skin, no matter how much skin you have or don’t have.

I care about your words. I care about your thoughts. Your feelings. Your ideas. I want to know what you think about a subject. Not what you think you should say, and definitely not a regurgitation of what others have said. I’m so SICK of the blog echo-chamber! I want you to matter and a blog gives you a platform to have that say. Make it matter. Make the soap box you stand on count.

As I looked at that on the screen, I realized how much that summed up my feelings about blogging, a closer definition of blogging than most that people come up with.

When I read a blog, I don’t care about the surface qualities or characteristics of the blogger. I care about what goes on inside their head and how they translate that onto their blog.

What about you? Does this match your thoughts about bloggers? Is it important to you to know their color, religion, age, or sex? Or is it honestly the quality of the content that matters more? Have we reached this point in our development as a species?

Knowing that I was robbing Peter to pay Paul, I tentatively entered into an agreement with US News and World Report to provide content for their “Outside Voices” career blog on a gratis basis.

So far, I do not regret this decision. I still think it’s a “resume” booster and increases blogosphere street cred. However, many of you were skeptical…perhaps rightfully so. Two weeks, and two articles later, the entries have referred - drum roll please - 17 clicks from six sources to my main blog. Ouch. That pales in comparison to the click-throughs I get from BH: where I get paid to write!

The blog entries so far are hardly the best thing since sliced bread, but with the amount of traffic the US News site generates, this click-through rate is pretty lame.

I’ve already set an end date in my head, where if the results do not improve, or at least show they will be worthwhile beyond what I’ve already done, I will terminate the arrangement.

If I were to charge $15 for a 300 word blog post, I’d be averaging about $1 per click - and that math doesn’t work for anyone involved.

Hopefully we both will continue to learn from this experience. I’ll keep you posted.

Popularity: 1% [?]

By Jeanette Tan

Making money through blogging are what bloggers are focusing on across numerous revenue streams. Hence, more and more bloggers are learning how to use blogging as a marketing tool. Therefore, i will like to share with you three of the key ways to use blogging as a marketing tool.

• Through Traffics

Firstly, traffics help to convert prospects to buyers, and track them. Thus, it is necessary for you to know Read the full story

Popularity: 6% [?]

A. Aim to be a better blogger every day.  Always try to learn something different and new.  Here is a great site that will help you build your site by personally developing yourself along with your blog.  Either you keep up with the times/technology or your blog will eventually fade into the black-hole of the blogosphere and be but a forgotten memory.

B. Be yourself!  Don’t try to be someone that you’re not.  People will see right through it.  Readers of your blog will be able to connect easier and relate to you in many ways.  Being yourself lets the readers know that you are sincere and helpful at the same time.  Your personality will show through your blogging and the people will love you for just being yourself! Read the full story

Popularity: 6% [?]

Slim lining and fine tuning your blog doesn’t have to be difficult. Having a slim lined and fine-tuned blog is a never ending battle. It’s hard work and you have to constantly fine-tune your blog in every aspect, whether it be monetizing, seo, or for traffic reasons. Fine-tuning your blog can help in various ways. Here is a list as to how to slim-line your blog and design it to be more user friendly.

1. Use categories. They will help your audience find what they are looking for a lot easier. They will appreciate you more for that. Read the full story

Popularity: 5% [?]