28 Sep, 2007  |  Written by Fred  |  under Humor

Well it’s time for FUNNY FRIDAY. Here are my favorite videos from around the net. I have an upset Britney Spears fan and a very loyal campaign volunteer. Have a good weekend!!

LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!!

VOTE FOR RON PAUL!!


Ron Paul GirlThe funniest bloopers are right here

26 Sep, 2007  |  Written by Fred  |  under Social Bookmarking

DeliciousWho is the winner of the social bookmarking battle? Read/WriteWeb has a great article with a lot of empirical evidence to show who is winning. Unfortunately, the evidence for StumbleUpon is no where to be found. Despite the lack of evidence for StumbleUpon, it is clear that Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon are the clear winners with Ma.gnolia being a distant third. Here is an interesting table showing the number of users for the most popular social bookmarking sites.

Social Bookmarking Users

Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is the largest, most active social bookmarking site. According to Read/WriteWeb Del.icio.us has over 3 million users. That is awesome.

Del.icio.us was the first to dominate this market and will continue to do so for years. Who here uses Del.icio.us? I do. Here is where you can find my social bookmarks.

StumbleUpon

While Read/WriteWeb does not include an estimate for the number of user for StumbleUpon, my gut tells me that it is closing in on Del.icio.us. However, I don’t think that users view it as a social bookmarking site. I believe that users give a thumbs up to a site to give it more traffic, not to bookmark it for later reading.

How I Use Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon

I personally use StumbleUpon as a social bookmarking site because I find it super easy to save it. It is so easy to just click on the thumbs up button to save a site. I find it quicker than tagging something with Del.icio.us. However, if I think that I will want to find the article or site three months from now and not tomorrow, I always use Del.icio.us. The tagging feature makes it much easier to find something later.

Where will Social Bookmarking Go From Here?

To be honest with you, I don’t know. However, I know that people want easier ways to find friends with common interests, easier ways to show people cool sites, easier ways to create communities of people with common interests. If I has to predict, the social bookmarking sites will focus on these features.

25 Sep, 2007  |  Written by Fred  |  under WordPress Plugins

With the release of WordPress 2.3 yesterday bloggers are stampeding to upgrade their blogs.  In fact, I upgraded Newest on the Net yesterday and boy was it easy.  What made it so easy?  The WordPress Automatic Update Plugin.  In 6 easy steps my WordPress blog was upgraded from WordPress 2.2.2 to 2.3.

Like any other plugin, you have to download, extract and upload the plugin to your server.  Once the plugin is activated, it walks you through a 6 step process.  The WordPress Automatic Update Plugin does the following:

  1. Backs up your current installation
  2. Downloads the latest version of WordPress
  3. Puts your site in maintenance mode
  4. De-activates your plugins
  5. Upgrades the WordPress files
  6. Re-activates your plugins

Once your plugins are reactivated, you are ready to blog on your new WordPress 2.3 blog.

24 Sep, 2007  |  Written by Fred  |  under Blogging, Newest On The Net

SketchcastWhile Sketchcast is not being promoted as a blogging tool, I think that it could be very useful for us bloggers. Sketchcast allows you to quickly sketch a drawing and embed it into your posts. How many times have you wanted to draw a quick picture and post in on your blog. Well, now you can.

SocialMarkerI just found an awesome new tool called SocialMarker. Social Marker allows you to quickly submit your articles to over 30 social bookmarking and social news sites. I have tried others in the past like SocialPoster.com, but I am finding SocialMarker to be even better. SocialMarker greatly speeds up the submission process. I can now submit an article to all of these sites in about 10 minutes.

Why would you want to submit your posts to over 30 social bookmarking sites?

  • Google Indexing – I find that when I submit my articles to a lot of social bookmarking sites, my articles get listed with google very quickly. Additionally, the social bookmarked pages also rank very high in google.
  • Traffic – I get some nice traffic from each social bookmarking site.
  • Backlinks – Many of the social bookmarking sites that you submit your articles to will give you backlinks. This is an often underutilized strategy among bloggers and internet marketers.

How does SocialMarker work?

  1. Place SocialMarker Bookmarklet onto your Firefox toolbar
  2. Go to the article you would like to submit and click the SocialMarker Bookmarket
  3. Edit the Bookmark Details Box to include a description of the article, tags, title and url. The title and tags should already be filled in by SocialMarker.
  4. Sign in to the first social bookmarking site and submit your article.
  5. Then hit the “Next” button to move onto the next social bookmarking site.

Here is a list of all of the social bookmarking sites currently available through SocialMarker.