Archive for the ‘Blogs’ Category

Cindy King at the Social Media Examiner recommends 17 Ways to Grow Your Blog From Top Bloggers. They asked the finalists of their Top 10 Social Media Blogs contest for their best tips on how to grow your list of blog subscribers. Here are her top five suggestions:

• #1: Be Active in Other Communities First
• #2: Write About What You Love
• #3: Write Insanely Great Content
• #4: Answer Questions for Your Audience
• #5: Offer Real Value

If you’re a WordPress blogger and have always wanted to be able to create or edit your own themes, you won’t want to miss this helpful guide to 8 Fantastic Tutorials On How To Build Your Own Custom WordPress Theme. Here are just a few of the tutorials:

• How to create WordPress Themes from scratch
• The ultimate WordPress Theme tutorial
• Build a Newspaper Theme with WP_Query and the 960CSS Framework

One of the best ways for a blog to gain visibility and traffic is through links on other people’s websites or blogs. Tara Hornor at Slodive offers 9 Tips for Encouraging Others to Link to Your Blog. These are all valuable suggestions, here are the first five:

• Write Content that Will Benefit Others
• Post Original Content
• Address an Issue that Already Exists
• Know What Topics are “Hot”
• Post Interviews

Blake Carver at LISNews has published this year’s list of the 10 Blogs To Read in 2011. Here are the top five blogs that made the list, be sure and check out the post for the full list as well as the lists from 2006-2010. (iLibrarian made it onto the 2008 list!!)

1. All These Birds With Teeth
2. Forgotten Bookmarks
3. Hack Library School.
4. InkDroid
5. The LSW Friendfeed Room

Amy Porterfield at the Social Media Examiner offers 7 Blogging Tips From Top Bloggers. If blogging is a part of your social media strategy, you’ll want to check out this post with tips from the best-of-the-best in the blogging and social media arena. Here are the top three tips:

• #1: Measure Your Blogging Success
• #2: Pursue Guest Blogging Opportunities
• #3: Reframe How You Look at Business Blogging

Richard Byrne at Free Technology for Teachers writes about How to Back-up Your Blog and Why You Should. This quick but effective post provides instructions for how to back up your content on Blogger, Edublogs, and WordPress as well as tips for what to do with the blog backup files.

Ryan Malone at the Social Media Examiner suggests 11 Ways to Improve Your Blog Posts With Interviews. This excellent article discusses ways to take an interview and turn it into eleven different types of blog posts. Here are just the top five:

• #1: Informational Post
• #2: The Numbered List
• #3: The Mini Case Study
• #4: Link or Resource Round-Ups
• #5: Expert Guide

Yogesh Mankani at SaveDelete creates a mega-list of the 50 Most Creative Free WordPress Themes Of Year 2010. These are each stunning templates that can be downloaded and used on your own WordPress blog for free.

Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra presented the annual State of The Blogosphere presentation at the ad:tech conference last week. The findings of the report are based on a survey of 7,200 bloggers.

Some key takeaways:

• Self-employed bloggers now account for 21% of those surveyed, compared to 9% last year.
• But only 11% say their primary income comes from blogging.
• Hobbyists still make up the bulk of bloggers at 65%, but that is down from 72% last year
• Corporate bloggers now make up 4% of the total, up from 1% last year.
• Two thirds are male
• They use many types of social media (LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Digg), but when it comes to driving traffic back to their blogs only two social media services really count: Facebook and Twitter
• Tablets and smartphones are impacting impacting blogging styles for 39% of bloggers
• Of those, 70% are writing shorter posts, 50% are posting photos from their smartphones, and 15% are using less Flash
• When writing about brands or products, 71% will only write about brands they approve of.

via Stephen’s Lighthouse

Peter Wylie at the Social Media Examiner tells us How to Turn Your WordPress Blog Into a Social Network.

Michael Stephens, Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University, did just this when he implemented a WP/BuddyPress installation for his LIS classes at Classes.TametheWeb. This effective site was designed by Kyle Jones, Knowledge and Learning Services Librarian at Darien Library who discusses the tech in WordPress as a Learning Management System – Move Over, Blackboard.

Christine Schwartz, Metadata Librarian at Princeton Theological Seminary Library and author of Cataloging Futures has created a mega-list of Cataloging and Metadata Blogs in 2010. All of these blogs are currently active. Here are just a few on her list:

• Planet Cataloging: “Planet Cataloging is an automatically-generated aggregation of blogs related to cataloging and metadata designed and maintained by Jennifer W. Baxmeyer and Kevin S. Clarke.”
• All things cataloged: Author, Saskia is a library cataloger currently based in Vienna, Austria, following stints in Stuttgart, Leipzig and London. This is a new blog, just started in August 2010.
• Bibliographic Wilderness: Author, Jonathan Rochkind, is the Digital Services Software Engineer at Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries.
• Catalogablog: Author, David Bigwood, is the Cataloging Librarian at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston, Texas.
• Cataloguing Aids: Author, Lynne LeGrow, is a cataloguer at the Halifax Public Libraries, Nova Scotia, Canada.
• Celeripedean: Author, Jennifer Eustis, is a Cataloguing & Metadata Librarian, at Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts.

The November 2010 issue of Walt Crawford’s Cites & Insights is now available. Here’s this issue’s table of contents. I particularly enjoyed the article on Blogging Groups and Ethics, and of course since I’m a huge horror movie fan, the Legends of Horror review article.

• Bibs & Blather 1-4
• The CD-ROM Project 4–8
• The Zeitgeist: Blogging Groups and Ethics 8-18
• Offtopic Perspective: Legends of Horror, Part 1 18-24

Carol Tice at Copyblogger comes up with 50 Can’t-Fail Techniques for Finding Great Blog Topics. These are all spot-on, here are just a few:

• Read small publications.
• Tackle a controversy.
• Make a prediction.
• Do a book review.
• Recruit a guest. Or two.
• Review the past.
• Hit an industry networking event.

The folks at the Best List of Lists round up the 50 Best And Astonishing WordPress Themes Of 2010 For Free Download. If you’ve got a WordPress blog, be sure to take a look, many of these professionally designed themes look good, including #17 the Cat Lady theme.

The Blog Herald has issued The State of the Blogosphere 2010, with some interesting stats in the form of an infographic. They report that there are currently 146,628,598 blogs online today.