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% [?]
Deserta is a fixed-width, 2 column theme with a right hand sidebar, enabled for widgets.
The comments are also gravatar-enabled and will work whether you’re using WP2.5 or lower. There’s also separation of user comments from pingbacks/trackbacks.
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Not 21 years old, but that is now the number of people employed by Automattic. As was reported by Ed Sutherland of ProBlogNews.com, Automattic has hired Warwick Poole, former director of systems at Vidavee which was recently acquired by Vignette. According to his job title as “Systemologist” Warwick will be in control of.
Keeping the barriers to online publishing low, by scaling the infrastructure which runs Wordpress.org, Wordpress.com, Akismet.com and other related projects.
But that wasn’t enough for me. I sent Warwick an email containing a few questions regarding his title, as well as his role within Automattic. Here are his responses.
Jeff - First off, congratulations on becoming the 21st employee for Automattic.
Warwick - Thanks, I am very pleased to be involved with Automattic.
Jeff - Mind telling us how this all came about?
Warwick - I am a longtime WordPress user. So I have known about the company for a while. I found Automattic’s recruitment note hidden in their HTTP headers (an innovation typical of this group) and got in contact. Then I met some of the Automattic team.
Jeff - What will your primary focus be while employed by Automattic?
Warwick - For the next few weeks, supporting WordPress.com users and helping bloggers with any support questions they have. All new employees work the support desk for 3 weeks as a way to grok the user experience and to get to know the product(s) well. It’s a great idea. All companies should do this.
Check this: http://automattic.com/about/how-we-work
Jeff - Your role within the company has been labeled as a Systemologist, just what exactly does that mean?
Warwick - It’s a made up title, like some of the other Automattic titles 
I will be working in the Systems group which looks after the infrastructure powering WordPress.com, WordPress.org and Akismet, and some other projects no doubt.
Jeff - The job criteria states that the employee will be working on keeping the barriers to publishing low while scaling various projects administered by Automattic. Can you give us a couple of your ideas on how you plan on improving the scalability of these projects?
Warwick - Thats not an official Automattic job criteria, I wrote that on my LinkedIn profile. To me, WordPress represents liberty: an instant global publishing system that is accessible to anyone who has the means to be online. The Automattic team is world class and an incredibly talented group of people and their systems are scaling already to impressive levels. This is accomplished with a team so small that it’s hard to fathom. I’ll be working with these guys.
Jeff - What can the end users of the various projects administered under the Automattic umbrella look forward to with your employment?
Warwick - Someone who can speak Afrikaans. But most importantly, a vegetarian amongst the BBQ lovers at Automattic
With the popularity of WordPress.com along with other Automattic projects increasing, Warwick will have plenty of work ahead of him to accomplish. But I think it’s reassuring to see Automattic take a vested interest in trying to make the WordPress software as scalable as possible. Keep in mind that WordPress.com and WordPress.org are live examples of what is capable with WordPress. What is accomplished by those two sites can be equally accomplished by anyone else.
Congratulations to Warwick for becoming the next member of the Automattic team.
Lunarpages have their design contest up and running this year - the deal is, in return for your hard work, you do get some exposure and the few links - and you might even win something as well…
R3colution Continued is a one column theme. Clicking on the menu image will show you a hidden content area which you can manage using a widget provided in the theme admin section.
KeeSheep is a two column widget-ready theme which is made up of bright orange colors. The theme makes good use of rounded corners throughout the theme.
Elegance is a two column widget-ready theme with light colors. It comes with the PSD source files to edit graphics. There’s a cool ajax text loader at the top and other effects.
True Colours is a two column fixed-width, widget-ready theme which makes use of sea-blue and green colors.
Corporate is a two column widget ready theme. The theme uses a flash based plugin to rotate header images. The rest of theme is simple and uses basic colors.
YG Desire is a 2 column widget-ready themes. Theme uses deep background colors but the content area is plain white for maximum readability.
I never get this right. There are times when I will be reading a post and it feels as if the chronological order of comments would make better sense. At other times, such as the comments on this post on IP Democracy (which has newest comments on top), seems opposite. I actually found it quite difficult and counter intuitive to read through the comments on that post to follow the story as it unfolded. Scrolling upwards on a post is just plain weird. On more popular posts, readers tend to complain when the list of comments grows beyond a certain number and they loose the forest for the trees. The TechCrunch comment threads are simply useless if you want to follow any part of the discussion and I tend to just read the highlighted ones from Michael or the other authors. On the other hand, comment reply threads are unwieldy, take up too much space and somehow fail to mirror forum discussions. Alternatively, outsourcing comments to a third party is just not an elegant or attractive solution for most people.
I feel that commenting systems on blogs need to evolve some more. Some blogs have decided to spin off comments to forums. Others have moved their comments to external services such as Disqus. Yet others like TechCrunch move comments to a linked forum for further discussion after the post has become somewhat stale.
What do forums have that comment threads on blogs do not? Are paged comments a good idea? Should comments threads be pruned by type? Are you more willing to participate in a forum discussion than post a comment on a blog? If that is the case, how could we enhance commenting on blogs to mimic the reader involvement of forums?
I don’t think there is a single right answer. However, I do consider our readers’ comments to be the lifeline of our blogs and shy away from shipping them off elsewhere. That being said, Disqus and Intense Debate have the right idea but the execution takes away from blog ownership. Comment editing and tagging, and comment to post and comment to commenter relationships need a lot more TLC if comments are to become as ubiquitous and as widely used as forum posts. Gravatars go a long way in bringing those relationships closer to a global audience but more needs to be done.
I would love to hear your thoughts on the present state of comments in the blogosphere. Did you come across a commenting system that bridges some of these gaps? Was there some feature that stuck with you or made you go Hmmm? What would make commenting less of a hurdle for you?
By Mike Zhmudikov
Generally speaking, web design is a creation of designs in the web pages of the web site. It constitutes more innovated and technical aspects with huge information. Different types of web design technologies contain the process of modeling, designing, structuring and executing the aspects which are suitable for the web site. Web designs may comes up with collections of more designs as per the ideas and plans to make the web site with more new web designs. Web design structure includes contents, files, tags, update pages, graphics and so on. Read the full story
Popularity: 5% [?]
Just noticed that Google maps now has information on bus stop location, each with a list of alleged buses available in the infomarker.
Not good news if you actually wanted to catch a bus, but the saving grace for anyone concerned about the all-seeing eye of the 2 Mr Google’s deep in their underground lair, is that the information is completely wrong… (at the moment). There’s a bus stop there, but it sure as hell doesn’t have those bus numbers stopping at it.
15 Websites / Services I’d Actually Pay For Ryan lists fifteen websites/online services he would be willing to pay for, if they were not free. Worthy of note is the following in the list: Wordpress.org: The benefit of blogging with WP is so significant (SEO, functionality, flexibility) that it’s well worth paying for. I’d probably pay a $200 for an installation… which makes me realize how much I rely on the product.
This is an incredibly interesting line of thought and I am sure a lot of Web 2.0 companies/services would kill to have more user data and input on this. I strongly believe that revenue models and monetization techniques are the stuff that make or break a company in spite of the fantastic idea/concept that it might provide. In that spirit, here is my list of 12 things online (15 things were hard to find quickly) I am willing to pay for.
What would you be willing to pay for? If famous OSS programs were not OSS, would you pay for them? Does the cost of software make it less or more attractive (not the relative cost, but just the fact that it is not free)? Would you pay for Twitter? How about Flickr or Google Analytics? What if TechCrunch went to a registration model? Would it still be as popular? How much do you spend on personal online services every month today? Are online vendors sharing more of your wallet today than say, two years ago? Do you think this trend will continue to increase?
These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night.
This blog has been fine-tuned with 4 WordPress Tweaks.
