Archive for the ‘Blogs’ Category

Social media guru Chris Brogan writes about making your blog deliver a business value to your organization by developing a strategy. Strategic Blogging and Some Tactics to Nail It discusses several ways to devise a strategy that works for you.

• A Strategy is the Path You Choose to Take
• Sample Goals to Start our Strategies
• Blogging Strategies
• Tactics to Consider
• What Works For You?

Tom Walker at DesignMag puts together a list of 15 Essential WordPress Plugins for Portfolio Sites. These useful add-ons will enable WP users to create and add image galleries, albums, thumbnails, videos, and even embed music into their blogs. Anyone looking to create a more multimedia and interactive blog or website with their WP installation will want to check out this post.

Selene M. Bowlby writes for Mashable about the Top 10 WordPress Plugins to Promote Your Social Media Profiles. This list includes plugins that help bring in updates from your social profiles, your lifestream, and even enable your blog commenters to promote their profiles. Here are the top 3 plugins:

1. DandyID Services
2. Social Media Page
3. Social Profilr

Chris Brogan, social media guru, details 23 Essential Elements of Sharable Blog Posts. If you want to know how to create link-friendly blog posts which spur conversations, be sure to read the full article. Here’s his top 5 recommendations:

1. It starts with a picture that captures your eye.
2. No. It starts with a title that makes you pay attention.
3. The post is useful to others, and not just about you.
4. It’s easy to read, and not a big clump of text.
5. It’s written in a human voice, and not corporate-ese.

Rajesh Setty, entrepreneur, author and speaker from the Life Beyond Code blog writes about 9 Ways People Respond to Your Content Online. The article discusses the influence your content may be having (or not having) on your audience, and the different ways they may be responding to it including:

1. Spam
2. Skip
3. Scan
4. Stop
5. Save
6. Shift
7. Send
8. Spread
9. Subscribe

Ben Parr of Mashable creates a quick guide to How To Publish Your Blog on the Amazon Kindle. Amazon launched their Kindle Publishing for Blogs program yesterday, a self-publishing tool that allows users to upload their blogs for sale in the Kindle Store - and it’s open to everyone. Mashable’s guide contains the following sections:

• Signing up for Kindle Publishing for Blogs
• Receiving compensation
• Blog distribution on the Kindle: is it worth it?

Online University Reviews aggregates the 100 Most Inspiring and Innovative Blogs for Educators. These blog resources include tips, tools, and lessons and are divided into the following categories:

• General Teaching Blogs
• Specialty Subject Blogs
• Best Podcasts for Teachers
• Best Video Blogs for Teachers

Noura Yehia writes the first in a 4-part series titled The Comprehensive Guide for a Powerful CMS using WordPress. The initial article Part One: 101 Techniques for a Powerful CMS using WordPress, provides code snippets, hacks, and tricks for how to fully utilize WordPress as a content management system. Some of the post’s how-to’s and tutorials include instructions for:

• Creating Two-Tiered Conditional Navigation in Wordpress
• How to widgetize your theme
• Set Up Custom Wordpress post Templates
• and more.

Stay tuned to the Noupe website for the next articles in the series:

• Part Two: 25+ Great Websites Using WordPress as CMS
• Part Three: 40 Exceptional “CMS Enabling” WordPress Plugins
• Part Four: The Big Contest - Winning 10 Premium WordPress Themes

Brett Borders at Social Media Rockstar provides a guide to How to Build a Strong Reputation With Comments. This helpful post points out appropriate tools for making commenting easier and discusses how to strategize about commenting.

• The Reciprocal Nature of Comments
• Tools for Efficient Commenting
• Building an Effective Comment Strategy
• Take the “100 Comment Challenge”

Tripwire Magazine has produced a mega-guide to over 100 WordPress tutorials. Anyone who is just starting out with this blogging platform, or wants to develop deeper knowledge about customization and features will want to check out the 100+ Massive Wordpress Tutorial Collection. Some of the listed tutorials include:

• Social Networking with BuddyPress
• WordPress Theme Hacks
• Separating Pings from Comments in WordPress 2.7
• How to Create a Wordpress Theme from Scratch
• Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO - Keyword Density

Hongkiat.com has put together a collection of 41 Free Great Looking WordPress Themes. If you are using this popular blogging platform, you will want to check out this helpful post. And if 41 isn’t enough for you, see their previous articles:

• 16 Free Premium Wordpress Themes That Don’t Suck
• 49 Most Downloaded Wordpress Themes

The April 2009 issue of Walt Crawford’s Cites & Insights is now available which discusses blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed and more with regard to the library field as well as Google’s Knol, Citizendium, and Wikia. The “Thinking about Blogging” essay raises some thought-provoking issues, here’s a breakdown of some of the themes he addresses:

• Do comments make a blog a blog—and can you deal with the realities of comments (and lack thereof)? Have conversations moved elsewhere?
• Are blogs here to stay? Is the “blogosphere” imploding? If blogging is a maturing medium, how does that affect individual bloggers?
• Why do we blog?
• How should we blog—and what about the auxiliary tools?
• Are blogs plausible replacements for journals?

Other articles in this issue:

• Perspective: Writing about Reading
• Library Access to Scholarship
• Net Media: Beyond Wikipedia

Chris Brogan offers inspiration for bloggers who have hit a dry spell in 20 Blog Topics To Get You Unstuck. The post is divided into suggestions for questions you might answer and fill-in-the-blanks statements. Here are few that I found interesting, be sure and check the full post for more:

• What have I read lately? What points were interesting? Can I add more to it?
• How do other industries compare to what my community is thinking about?
• What do I want to know that I can ask my community?
• __ Ways to Convince the Boss to Try ____.
• How ___ is like _____.

The blog search engine Technorati issues the Technorati Attention Index which reports the top mainstream media websites that bloggers link to the most. This report will be updated each month. Here are the top ten, be sure and check out the full article for the full list.

1. YouTube
2. New York Times
3. BBC News
4. CNN.com
5. MSN
6. guardian.co.uk
7. Washington Post
8. Yahoo! News
9. Reuters
10. Los Angeles Times

via TechCrunch

Steven Snell of Design Mag writes about 11 Non-Traditional Uses of WordPress, the open-source blogging platform. The article points to plugins and tutorials for how to use this powerful content management system in a variety of ways including:

• Membership Directory
• Business Directory
• Job Board
• Email Newsletter
• Forums
• Contact Manager

and more.