Wednesday, December 31, 2008

40 Excellent Blog Designs

According to Technorati, there are at least 100 million blogs currently in existence. With that much competition, it’s a true challenge to create a unique and stunning blog design.

Here are 40 beautiful blog designs for your inspiration.

Friday, December 26, 2008

Blogworks

Blogworks is a specialist communication offering, from Scenario Communication Partners, delivering strategic solutions and know-how to brands & corporates for using ‘conversational communication and marketing' effectively.

Pay Attention To Mommy Bloggers

From a marketing perspective the ability to reach out and interact with mommy bloggers is critical to building a positive online brand impression.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Askablogr

Logo
A prototype blog that give you a free Q&A widget that enables you to receive and reply to questions from your blog readers.

Apture



Enhance plain text on your blog or website using multimedia. Lets you link relevant content to text on your page, which visitors can view without leaving your site. Add video, photos, even other webpages to create a rich media experience for your readers.

Rejaw

Micro-blogging with real-time chat.

Panels

Panels

This blog integration app produces little information bubbles or panels so readers see information about a topic while staying with the original article. Similar to the Snap plugin but without the ads.

ShoutEm

Shout'Em logo

A free platform where you can easily start a co-branded micro-blogging social networking service. Features range from simple Twitter-like text micro-blogging to more advanced features: posting attachments, photos, comments, or even a private network for your company.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

The Platform

If you're wanting to keep up with Cisco Systems, check out it's great blog site.

NBC World Blog

NBC News World Blog aims to provide a dynamic look at world events and trends -- both big and small -- from NBC News correspondents, producers, and bureaus around the world.

Top 10 food blogs from around the world

At the last count there were more than 10,000 food blogs online around the world with more being started every day.

Here are 10 worth checking out.

Why I Hate Food Bloggers By Mario Batali #01

Restaurateurs are slowly starting to go on the record with hatred for the food blogs (example), citing a slew of sneaky and unscrupulous, often self-serving, tendencies that make dealing with bloggers impossible. Mario Batali certainly has.

Blogebrity

blogebrity-logo.jpg

Blogebrity, the blog about bloggers (but in a celebrity way, not that boring "how to optimize your SEO" way), recently relaunched with voter-determined A, B, C, and D lists. Readers vote how famous a given blogger is, and the votes are combined to form the definitive lists. The site gets precious little traffic, so the rankings will be skewed until more people vote. Treat it like a Q-score: it's not about who gets read, but who gets known. Campaigning to top Blogebrity's A-list would demean you, even to that guy trying to get into Forbes.

BlogPulse

BlogPulse (TM)

BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs. Blogs, a term that is short for weblogs, represent the fastest-growing medium of personal publishing and the newest method of individual expression and opinion on the Internet. BlogPulse applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover trends in the highly dynamic world of blogs. BlogPulse is brought to you by Nielsen Online.

Blogads

Blogads are a unique tool for promoting your wonderful widgets, beat books, awesome auctions, candid candidates, pugnacious pixels, or dragon-headed dreams.

Bloggers are the ultimate intellectual entrepreneurs, networking their expertise with those of like-minded peers. With passionate voices and real-time news, blogs are where influentials converge to forge opinions. Blogs are a uniquely powerful place for advertisers to break through the Internet's gazillion page-view clutter.

Kmart Enlists Bloggers for Social Net Campaign

A sponsored social networking campaign enlisting the help of six well-known bloggers is yielding big buzz for Kmart and encouraging consumers to give the retailer another look during the critical holiday season.
kmart bloggers

Tips for A Successful Blog

Success

Every blogging niche is different and each individual blogger has his or her own approach, but in the vast majority of cases there are a few factors that are absolutely critical to the long-term health of a blog.

Blog About Your Blog

Blog about your Blog (BAYB) is a place for good quality bloggers to come together and collaborate on one big project. At this site you'll find bloggers from all over the world, blogging about a variety of topics.

Weblog Tools Collection

For you bloggers who use WordPress to operate your blog site, here's a blog site devoted to WordPress templates, plugins, and other.

5 Tips for Successful Blog Optimization

Without proper planning, oversight and passion for the topic, blogs implemented purely for SEO objectives are doomed to fail. Additionally, social media referrals and recommendations are becoming a notable competitor to search traffic which can place SEO as a secondary promotional effort in some situations.

Davide Pozzi’s Interview

Davide Pozzi runs a popular Italian blog called TagliaErbe. Go here to read an interesting interview with Davide.

6 Ways To Add More User-Interactivity To Your Blog

One big difference between a blog and a website is the way visitors can interact with the blog author. Bloggers allow all their visitors to leave a comment anytime. If they asked a question, simple say they enjoyed the article or when you don’t agree with the author’s opinion. That’s the power of the blog.

How Blogs Work

There is a good chance you have never seen a blog (also known as aweblog) or experienced the blogosphere. What are blogs? There are now millions of them -- where did they all come from?

screenshot of marshall brain's blog

Blogs Find Favor as Buying Guides

A majority of blog readers say blogs are useful when they make purchases.

Monday, December 22, 2008

How to Market to Bloggers and a Counter Argument

Start your blogger relationships before you need something. This approach allowed him to never start a relationship with a blogger by asking for a favor.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

10 Reasons Web Designers Should Blog

Every designer could greatly benefit from running a blog if they have the desire to share their thoughts with others. Here's a list of 10 reasons for designers to blog.

Saturday, December 06, 2008

Can You Be a Good Parent and a Good Blogger?

Most people believe good blogging is about two things: personality and passion.

Can You Be a Good Parent and a Good Blogger?

Top 11 Lamest Blogs

After an Internet-wide search, here are the 11 blogs that depressed--er, uh--impressed us the most with their lameness.

10 Great Mac Apps for Bloggers

If you’ve grown tired of standard front ends, and would prefer to utilize software to blog for work or for personal enjoyment, here are alternatives that you should know about.

Too Many Blogs in the World?

People had been predicting it for years, and in 2008, it finally happened. This was the first presidential election dominated by the Internet. Those ancient debates about whether the Internet lowers journalistic standards and drags the Mainstream Media into the slime have become irrelevant.

Creating a Podcast with Blogger

Ok, one more tip about using Blogger

How to use Blogger Mobile

How to help make your blog a little faster

The speed at which your blog loads is critical to attracting more readers to your blog. If your blog takes a long time to load, many readers may leave your blog before they have the chance to read it. Here are a few tips and tricks that will help your blog load faster and attract more users.

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Kontain launches a new, pretty blogging service

There's yet another new blogging platform out there: Kontain. It's designed for non-technical users, and it's easy to use and very good-looking. I don't think I've seen an easier platform for beginning bloggers, in fact. Everything on the site is clear and simple. But there's a downside.

The negative of Kontain is that while it's easy to use, it's very limited on the presentation side. You get no blog templates to choose from. While the default layout of Kontain blogs is attractive enough, the lack of customizability is surprising in a product that is so strong on the authoring side. Also, the blog pages display slowly.