How To Optimize Your Blog For Search Engines

Many clients ask me how to drive more traffic to their blogs. By now you have probably heard that blogs are an excellent resource to get leads as well as clients for your business. The best way to do that is by creating search engine friendly blog posts that get indexed in search engines. When people search for information on topics you discuss in your blog it appears on the search engine result pages. Potential customers then are able to read what you have to say and get on your mailing list.

So now it all boils down to techniques that help you effectively optimize your blog for search engines. Here are tips and ideas to do just that:

- Create A Keyword Rich Header For Your Blog. The header repeats on all pages on the blog. By making sure that your header contains targeted keywords, you are able to get more of your blog pages indexed in search engines.

- Treat Each Blog Post As A Separate, Optimizable Page. Use the process of search engine optimization on each blog post. This means that you need to create an optimized title for each post, find targeted keywords for each post and weave the keywords into your post's text.

- Make Sure That Each Blog Post's File Name Are Descriptive. Different blogging software behaves differently, but some will call your blog posts 2.html, 3.html, 4.html, etc. As you can see, that is not very descriptive and not particularly helpful to either people or search engines. When you create a post called "How Coaching Helps Business Owners", calling it "how-coaching-helps-business-owners.html" is a much better title than "5.html"

Make sure that your blogging software creates descriptive file names for your blog posts; it is better both for human readers and search engine spiders.

- Get Links Pointing To Your Blog. Quality links to your blog means more blog visitors and higher search engine rankings. Current search engine algorithms value links to your blog, which means that having links pointing to your blog will improve your blog's search engine rankings.

- Get Your Blog Listed in Blog Directories. Blog directories are a great source of getting unidirectional links to your blog. Since blog directory links many times are unidirectional (they link to you, but you don't link back to them), they are great for boosting your search engine rankings. Having many unidirectional links pointing to your web site will improve your search engine rankings.

A blog is an excellent marketing tool, but your blog will not attract more leads and clients for your business if you don't use search engine optimization techniques to optimize your blog and attract targeted search engine traffic to it.

Biana Babinsky shows you how to drive thousands of targeted visitors to your blog in her Step by Step Search Engine Optimization Special Report. Learn more about the report at http://avocadoconsulting.com/rlinks/zseo

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Article Sources:

• How to Optimize Your Blog for the Search Engines - flyte: web marketing strategies for small business
• How to Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines " Netscape.com
• Free Articles and Content Generator for Webmasters

Getting Blog Links

A lot of time is spent by bloggers trying to get other blogs to link to them. A lot of traffic can be gained by doing this with blogs that are both related to your topic and blogs that have a lot of readers.

This can sometimes be very difficult for new bloggers because they do not yet have enough readers or page rank to interest the bigger blogs.

Talk to other bloggers who are in the same position as you right now and develop a lasting relationship. You link to them, they link to you and as both of your blogs grow those links will pay off for you.

Many people find a blog they like, then will take suggestions from that blog about other blogs they might like. So someone goes to a blog you have traded links with and likes them, then they follow your link and if your content is good, they add you to their reading list. The same happens in reverse for the one you link back to.

Sooner than you think both of your blogs will become ones that a circle of people read. The more blogs you do this with, the more your circle will eventually grow.

Don’t be too concerned with page rank. Many of the established blogs with good page rank are not going to link to you until you build up your readership at least a little. There is a reason for this and it isn’t arrogance, though it may feel that way at times.

The reason is that many people start blogs, but few people actually become bloggers. Blogging daily takes a commitment that many are not willing to make. The established blogs might link to you regardless of page rank and traffic issues if they see you are committed to writing your blog and becoming a blogger.

They don’t want to link to someone’s blog that may or may not be around next month. It is a disservice to their readers and a hassle to remove your link later or check and see if you are actually still blogging. They do not have the time to hold your hand on it.

If they check out your blog and you have been posting to it every day for quite awhile, say 6 months at least, then they might give you a helping hand and welcome you to the blogosphere.

Put it into your schedule to make a post every single day, even if it has to be a short one due to lack of time. When there is a time you know you will not be able to post for a few days, make a post for each of those days and if you are using wordpress you can timestamp the posts so that each one appears on the scheduled day. That is one way to keep your blog fresh for your readers every day.

Another tip is, as we post to our blogs daily, there are times when you have two or three things you want to blog, but if you are finding it hard to post daily, timestamp the second or third post for other days rather than posting them right now unless it is something time sensitive. Try to stay two or three days ahead so that if you miss a day, it won’t hurt you.

If you are using blogger or other blogging software that doesn’t have the timestamp feature, save them as drafts, then log in when you have little time and post your draft. If you have time to blog a post, then leave the draft there until you need it.

Don’t let yourself get frustrated if everyone doesn’t want to link to you right away. If you are blogging good content, you may find they are linking to you before you even ask!

Catalogue: Internet Business | Blogging
Title: Getting Blog Links By: Chris McElroy AKA NameCritic

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Article Sources:

• Getting Blog Links
• Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality
• Good Advice for Getting Blog Links · MarketingVOX
• Free Articles and Content Generator for Webmasters

How to Find a Niche For Your Blog

It is important to realize that your choice of a niche can have a significant influence on the success or failure of your new blog.

Deciding on a theme can be a daunting task. What exactly are you going to write about? Your niche needs to be a popular topic that many people are interested in.

If you are going to blog about yourself, then you better have a very interesting life, or you will have difficulty keeping your readers coming back for more. You should choose a topic that will make it comparatively easy to grow your readership and build a strong following.

Since many bloggers write about their favorite subjects, it's not a bad idea to start brainstorming by writing down a list of your hobbies, interests, and any areas of professional expertise. Now try to determine a niche you can target within one of those areas.

Should you blog about automobiles in general, or the latest sports cars? If you choose too narrow a theme then you may struggle to come up with regular, fresh content. And if you choose a topic that's too general your readers may be confused by a jumble of seemingly unrelated posts.

You might consider niches within the following general topic areas which have proven to be popular for blogging:

. Automobiles
. Computers & Information Technology
. Digital Cameras
. Gadgets
. Music
. News
. Photography
. Politics
. Shopping

If you plan to use Pay-Per-Click advertising to get traffic to your blog, then remember also that the hottest topics might have the highest pay-per-click fees.

You can sometimes get great niche ideas by browsing at Blog directories and sites like Google Blog Search: http://blogsearch.google.com

Since it is so time-consuming trying to com up with the 'perfect' niche idea, many bloggers and webmasters have turned to specialized niche discovery tools. I particularly recommend Online Gold Finder and NicheTopics.

With Online Gold Finder you can uncover profitable, undiscovered online markets with just a couple of clicks. Read more about Online Gold Finder at: http://www.moneyforblogging.com/goldfinder.htm

NicheTopics is quite handy in a different way. You get to use some great research that's already been completed by an expert. It is a ready-to-use report on 109 unique, untapped niches. Read more about NicheTopics: http://www.moneyforblogging.com/nichetopics.htm

The tools above are not free but consider for a moment. If you are planning - or would even like - to make some money from your blog, then it will be worthwhile to start off with a well-researched niche.

If a particular tool uncovers a good niche that pays an additional $5 a day, it will pay for itself inside the first month!

Don't forget, it will be very difficult to change the theme and niche of your blog later. So invest some time wisely during your planning stage.

You will be off to a strong start in building a successful blog.

Mike Seddon is a writer, entrepreneur, and webmaster. He is the author of the popular e-book, 'How to Build a Money Making Blog', available from http://www.MoneyForBlogging.com

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Article Sources:

• How to find a niche for your blong
• How to Find a Niche For Your Blog
• 3 Help, How to Find a Niche For Your Blog
• How to Find a Niche For Your Blog
• Free Articles and Content Generator for Webmasters

Introduction to SEO: What Is SEO?

Tough question, "What is SEO?". As with pretty much all internet-related terms, concepts and notions, that of "SEO" does not have a unique definition and it is a blurry concept in most people's mind.

Still, what is SEO? Since there is no ultimate, fully comprehensible definition for "SEO", the only way to go is to take a look at several definitions and try to merge them in order to have the right perspective.

Wikipedia : "Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine listings. The term also refers to an industry of consultants that carry out optimization projects on behalf of client sites."

Fakezilla : "The changes that are made to the content and code of a web site in order to increase its rankings in the results pages of search engines and directories. These changes may involve rewriting body copy, altering Title or Meta tags, removal of Frames or Flash content, and the seeking of incoming links."

The Web Search Workshop : "The term used to describe the marketing technique of preparing a website to enhance its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken. A number of factors are important when optimizing a website, including the content and structure of the website's copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags and the submission process."

6am Media : "The process of improving web pages so that it ranks higher in search engine for targeted keywords with the ultimate goal of generating more revenue from the web site. There are many SEO techniques. In general, these techniques can be categorized as On-Page Optimization, On-Site Optimization, and Off-Site Optimization. There are also two schools of SEO: white hat SEO and black hat SEO. White hat SEOs are those that play by the rule (actually guidelines provided by search engines). Black hat SEOs are those that push the limit of SEOs and employ some questionable or prohibited techniques (according to the guidelines). These black hat SEO techniques are also commonly known as spam."

Website NOVA : "acronym for search engine optimization. This is the process of making a website 'search-engine-friendly. Search engine optimization is primarily used to increase rankings in SERPs, and effective SEO can increase the potential of your website and bring in more traffic."

Thousands more definitions are available, almost as many "SEO guru's" you will find online ("The Guru Problem" is actually the title of another article to be published soon).
As you can see, no definition is like another, but they all tend to converge to a certain common understanding.

There are numerous techniques and tools used to achieve SEO goals, and they should NOT be included within a definition.

Since it is not correct to define a concept through its tools, here is a definition I have come up with after long deliberations. The suggestion is to define SEO as follows:

SEO = abbreviation for "Search Engine Optimization", the process of optimizing and tuning a web site and gaining online awareness for it, in order to deliver targeted visitors and ensure high conversion rates.

When done correctly, SEO activities must:
- make search engines crawl the site;
- make search engines index the site;
- ensure a high ranking among SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for given keywords;
- achieve a high page rank;
- drive targeted traffic;
- achieve high conversion rates among the site's visitors.

Since nothing is definitive and ultimate in the world of SEO, I'd like to receive your feedback and comments: TeaWithEdge.com is a way to contact me and speak up about your Marketing concerns.

Otilia is a young certified professional with expertise in e-Marketing and e-Business, currently working as independent consultant and e-publisher. She developed and teaches Principles of e-Marketing, available at UniversalClass.com and has recently launched MarketingWHO.com, a professional Marketing Directory.
Contact Otilia through TeaWithEdge.com, her Marketing and eMarketing articles portal.

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Article Sources:

• Intro to Search Engine Optimization
• Search Engine Optimization Company and SEO Services - Real SEO ...
• Introduction to Search Engine Optimization
• Introduction to SEO at The Tlog
• Free Articles and Content Generator for Webmasters

Blog SEO - For A Rank Beginner

You've optimized your website why not your blog.

Picture it this way.

Each new post to your blog is fresh and new. I know you know this - search engines like fresh content.

I call it feeding the spider.

In this case the food is the new fresh content. What's more appealing fresh fish or fish that's been lying around for a while? See my point? Fresh fish is always better, who'd stick around smelly old fish anyway?

The same with search engines, they like fresh content that's updated often.

Even you return to a blog because of the new fresh content.Update your content often.The search engines like the fresh new content.

So, put a keyword or keyphrase in the title of each post and a few scattered out through your post and you now have optimized your content.

The search engines will love you for it!

Internal linking plays a part too. I've done this myself and the results are the search engine spider crawls my site everyday.

This is a tip that is so simple and cost you nothing but more free traffic to your site.

Wayne Hurlbert from Blog Business World says,

"Blogs are optimized using the same techniques as static websites. Keep in mind that a blog is simply another website. What works in the search engines for other sites will also work for optimizing a blog".

Great piece of advice.

The reward for the fresh content (food for the spider), the search engine spider will frequent your site more often.

Now don't forget to link to your main site with your rich keyword or keyword phrase. Many new bloggers just starting out forget to do this.

If your site is theme based, your blog page or the many pages you have on your blog can boost your PR (page rank), so by starting to blog it will benefit you in the way of more FREE traffic.

I've only scratched the surface on blog seo but you can see it is another strategy in marketing you can't afford to neglect.

Believe me, everybody and his brother are talking about blog seo. The reason why? It WORKS!

To your blogging success,

Cindy Warner owner of Christian Book Outlet writes about practical tips that work and how to get FREE traffic to your site without spending an arm and a leg. Main site: http://www.christianbookoutlet.spreadtheword.com Blog: http://onlinechristianbusiness.blogsome.com

Cindy Warner owner of Christian Book Outlet, enjoys giving practical tips that work and helping others succeed in their online businesses.

Article Sources:

• Aaron Wall's SEO Book.com
• Blog SEO - For A Rank Beginner
• SEOmoz | Daily SEO Blog
• SEOmoz | Beginners Guide to SEO
• Product Review :: Advanced Web Ranking - Beginner SEO
• Free Articles and Content Generator for Webmasters

Find A Reference From Youtube Video

YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. YouTube was created in mid-February 2005 by three former PayPal employees. The San Bruno-based service uses Adobe Flash technology to display a wide variety of video content, including movie clips, TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as videoblogging and short original videos. In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the company for US$1.65 billion in Google stock. The deal closed on November 13, 2006.

Unregistered users can watch most videos on the site, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos. Some videos are available only to users of age 18 or older (e.g. videos containing potentially offensive content. The uploading of pornography or videos containing nudity is prohibited. Related videos, determined by title and tags, appear onscreen to the right of a given video. In YouTube's second year, functions were added to enhance user ability to post video 'responses' and subscribe to content feeds.

Few statistics are publicly available regarding the number of videos on YouTube. However, in July 2006, the company revealed that more than 100 million videos were being watched every day, and 2.5 billion videos were watched in June 2006. 50,000 videos were being added per day in May 2006, and this increased to 65,000 by July.

http://en.wikipedia.org

With all its fame, you tube has an important contribution to people with its knowledge consisted in every video which people upload. Including blogging knowledge which may be shared by professional or experienced blogger, we can get the advantage of this situation that we can use as a source of reference when building our blog post.

You can find such a source of reference for your blog post example here about blogging with these kind simple steps without registering as youtube member:

1. Go to youtube home page: http://youtube.com
2. In its search box, type such a keyword about blogging like: blog promotion, blog optimization, how to get blog traffic and etc. then click "Search" button.
   
   example:
3. Then you will have some thumbnails of video according with the keyword you've typed.
   
   
4. Choose or click one thumbnail, then you will be directed to main page of that video. Here you can play the video, read more about the video, subscribe to video publisher, copy url code or embed script code when you want to embed the video to your blog. More, you can write a comment about the video and when finished playing the video you can choose another related video which listed in the page.
   
   
   
5. Now, you can write a blog post regarding to the video content.

You can play the video directly from the page, but if you wish you can download the video to your pc/laptop as your personal reference collection. In order to download a video from youtube you can use youtube downloder software that you can find when you type a youtube downloader keyword in google search box or you can download from this location:
http://www.download3000.com/download_19063.html
This software is free and easy to use and It's absolutely work because I've proved it. :-)

Favicon - Personalize Yours

What is Favicon?

Favicon (short for 'favorites icon'), also known as a website icon, a page icon or an urlicon, is an icon associated with a particular website or webpage or webblog.

You can create such an icon, and many recent web browsers can then make use of them. Browsers that support favicons may display them in the browser's URL bar, next to the site's name in lists of bookmarks, and next to the page's title in a tabbed document interface. Not all browser support this feature, but it works with firefox.

Here are some steps that you can try to personalize your blog favicon. The example here I use blogger.com, but you can try this for other blog platform which support blog html template editing.

First Step, provide a picture with ico or png extension (ex: picture.ico or picture.png) which you will use as your webpage favicon and preserve the picture in image hosting service.

To provide ico or png picture, you can make it from any picture format such as jpg, gif and png as you desired and convert it to ico or png format which can be done with any picture editing software. But don't worry if you don't have it, there is an easy way to make icon picture to be used as your favicon, you can use a free service from www.htmlkit.com. Here are the steps:

1. Go to site http://www.html-kit.com/favicon
   *stick a pie inside red mark circle
   
   
2. Click "Browse" button to choose your desired favicon picture from your pc or laptop.
3. Click "Generate Favicon.Ico" button, then the page will be:
   
   
4. Your favicon has been generated now. Click "Download Favicon" button to save it to your pc/laptop but it still in zip file so you have to extract the zip file. The icon file usually has a name "preview_16x16.png".

You've had the favicon picture stored in your pc/laptop, now you have to store this picture to the image hosting service, here I recommend you to use free image hosting service from "http://photobucket.com". Here are the steps:

1. Go to http://photobucket.com
   
   
2. Login or create an account if you don't have it yet by click the "Join now" button, log in to your account after finishing the sign up process.
   
3. In your photobucket page account, there is a form to upload your image to their server like this:
   
4. Click "Browse" button and point to favicon file stored in your pc/laptop, in this case is "preview_16x16.png" then click open.
   
5. Add a favicon title if you wish and then click "Upload Button".
6. When the file upload finished, you will have the stored image page like this:
   
   
7. Copy the address link inside "Direct Link" box to safe place, or you can paste it first to notepad. This is the example of this blog favicon link address from direct link box: "http://i251.photobucket.com/albums/gg300/smile-fathur/preview_16x16.png"
   

Second Step, inserting the favicon code to your blog template.

1. Log in to your blog account and go to template page and choose an option where you can edit your html template code. In "blogger.com" template page click the "Edit HTML" tab.
2. In html editor place, go to line just below head html script code and type in the favicon script code there like this:
   favicon script code format:
   
   XXX refers to favicon link address from image hosting in this case from photobucket.com
   is "http://i251.photobucket.com/albums/gg300/smile-fathur/preview_16x16.png".
   You just have to change that link (XXX) address with yours.
   
   
3. Save the template and view your blog in new tab or window.

Bingo! Now you have your blog with your new personal favicon. It's easy, isn't it? Have a nice try!

MyBlogLog Community

Another blog community to make your blog more popular in the net is MyBlogLog Community. Member interactions facilitated by web widget that many members install on their blog. Bloggers sign up for free accounts or using their yahoo email account on MyBlogLog and can initiate a blog community for one or more blogs they author. Other registered members can subscribe to these communities, effectively bookmarking them for future reading and sharing them with their own contacts.

The most advantageous which bloggers can have when joining this community is they can submit whatever kind of their blog without reviewed, so this is good for all beginner bloggers to build network for the first time.

Bloggers can then display widgets on their sites which show MyBlogLog online community members who have recently visited their page. These widgets also contain links to visiting members' community pages, and are one way in which users connect with one another.

All members can see certain basic information about how many people visit their blog, what links they clicked and where they come from. Members may also view more extensive information about traffic on their site for a small monthly fee.

MyBlogLog is launching this new Communities service to empower authors and readers to operate at the same level. For the first time, everyone who reads a web site or blog can learn about and engage with one another, and in the process take the conversation to a whole new level.

MyBlogLog was acquired in January, 2007 by Yahoo for slightly more than 10 million dollars and with over 45,000 blogs subscribed at the time. Currently, there are approximately 100 million visits to pages with MyBlogLog widgets per month, and the site has over 140,000 registered members. MyBlogLog has an Alexa rank of under 500 and Google PageRank of 7 out of 10. Similar blog networking sites with similar widgets and analogous community functions also exist, such as Blog Catalog.

Goto and Join Mybloglog Community, Click Here!

ref: mybloglog.com, wikipedia.org, forbes.com

Image Hosting For Beginners

Now, image or picture is always used in almost every webpages or weblogs as a logo, banner, button, link, advertising etc in order to make a web or blog looking good and interesting. Do you know how they put the images to their web or blog? For a webmaster or a professional blogger it isn't hard thing to be done. But what about us as a new comer in the blogging world? Here I just try to give you a little manner I know about how to use or put your own edited or optimized image to your blog as header image.

First, I give you an example by looking this my blog template accurately. This is not original template that I get from "charmkins.com" I have modified the template especially I change the image header. You can look the original template here "http://adsense-tech.blogspot.com".

In order to change the image header to your desired image, you need to host or upload your desired image to the server first using image hosting service. Make sure that your desired image have same size with the original one. You can edit or create it with an image processing software like photoshop, fireworks or any other image processing software.

Here is brief explanation about image hosting:
"An image hosting service allows individuals to upload images to the internet website. The image host will then store the image onto its server. Because many blog users do not have personal webspace, either as a paid service, or through an ISP offering, Image Hosting services especially for free services have become massively popular as the demand for hosting services increases. With the explosion of the popularity of blogs, forums, auctions, and other interactive pages, image hosting services have become extremely popular among end users."

After your desired image have been created and uploaded or hosted, usually this image hosting service will give you a kind of report for you and show the individual different types of code to allow others to view that image. These code types has different length and script adjusted to your need what you will use it for. But the important thing is all those different code types always consist of image location or image url or image address.

Back to the case. After you download and apply that template to your blog (here I use blogger.com) go to edit HTML page and find code:

#header-image {
background: url("http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t219/freetemplates4/tech-header-image.jpg") no-repeat center center;
width:930;
height:150px;
margin:0;
padding:45px 0 0;
clear:both;
}

Look the code inside parenthesis after the text background: url(". . .")
The "http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t219/freetemplates4/tech-header-image.jpg" is the image address where the header image hosted or placed in the server, means that the header image was hosted in "photobucket.com", one of the most popular free image hosting service.

Then I replace that link address with my desired image that I've hosted into the server:
That is "http://www.imgplace.com/users/smile.fathur/header/1197967937.jpg". This means that I've hosted my own header image to "www.imgplace.com".

Then after you change that image address code you must save the changed template and view your blog with new your desired header. Here you have done change your blog header as you desired.

How to host or upload your picture to image hosting service is different for each provider, but it is easy to be done, usually you will be directed step by step. There are many free image hosting service you can use. Here is a list of some free image hosting service provider:

http://photobucket.com
http://www.free-webhosts.com
http://www.freeimagehosting.net
http://www.imgplace.com
http://www.screenshots.cc
http://www.free-webhosts.com
http://www.4freeimagehost.com
http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com
http://www.imageshack.us
http://www.photobucket.com
http://www.theimagehosting.com
http://www.picshome.com
http://www.freeimagehost.eu
http://www.pictiger.com
http://www.msplinks.com
http://www.freepicturehosting.com
http://www.freepichosting.com
http://www.imagecave.com
http://www.tupics.com

At last, you can use this image hosting principle to create, hosted and placed an image to your own blog as image header, background, banner and even button link.

**Wisdom of The Day**
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
by: Albert Einstein

Year in Review 2007 from CNET News.com:"Social networking gets its geek on"

By Caroline McCarthy
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: December 27, 2007, 4:00 AM PST

For most of 2007, buzz in the social-networking world could be summed up in two syllables: Facebook.

At the beginning of the year, MySpace.com was on top of the social-networking heap. And as 2007 draws to a close, the News Corp.-owned site is still far ahead in page views and user accounts. It continues to expand into both new language markets and original media content like the Web series Quarterlife, and it has earned critical acclaim for the interactive "presidential dialogues" that it organized in conjunction with MTV. Parent company Fox Interactive Media has also expanded its social-media offerings, acquiring image-sharing site Photobucket and widget start-up Flektor.

New social-networking start-ups also flooded the Web (MC Hammer, anyone?) and big names like Yahoo and Viacom made plays in the field, as well (Mash and Flux, respectively).

But this was the year that Facebook caught fire, and even a court battle over the site's true origins couldn't stop its momentum for much of 2007.

The real game changer came on May 24, when 23-year-old Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the site was releasing code that would let third-party developers create applications to run within the service. Experts considered the Facebook Platform launch a milestone in the evolution of social networks, and developers saw it as their ticket to success. Start-ups devoted entirely to embeddable social-network widgets, like Slide and RockYou, became some of Silicon Valley's hottest new companies.

Soon after, other social networks decided to follow suit. MySpace, LinkedIn, Bebo, and others all announced that they would be opening their services to developer applications, too. Google, meanwhile, had its own plan: the search giant unveiled OpenSocial, a standard that any social network could use for a developer platform. With just about every major social media player onboard except Facebook, OpenSocial was the only real threat to the Facebook platform that emerged in 2007.

The hype culminated when Microsoft confirmed that it would invest $240 million in Facebook, putting the social network's estimated value at a jaw-dropping $15 billion. But things started to unwind when several activist groups, including MoveOn.org, alleged that Facebook was violating user privacy through its new Beacon advertisements, which shared information about users' activity on retail partners' sites with their Facebook friends. In the wake of the accusations, Facebook apologized and added more privacy controls, much as it had done a year earlier when users protested the debut of the "news feed."

Smaller social networks also made headlines. The much-talked-about Digg remained a hot topic. Acquisition rumors floated around late in the year, and in the spring, some ugly legal action almost unfolded when the site refused to obey a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice. Twitter, a start-up devoted to "microblogs" where no entry is longer than 140 characters, took off at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March. Meanwhile, its chief rival Jaiku was snapped up by Google.

Some of the year's other social-media acquisitions included music-based network Last.fm, purchased by CBS Interactive; kids' site Club Penguin, acquired by Disney; StumbleUpon, which eBay bought; and Clipmarks, acquired by Forbes Media.

Not surprisingly, privacy and safety issues remained on the horizon. Both Facebook and MySpace grappled with demands from state attorneys general who were concerned that young people could be exposing themselves to online threats through social networks. Their efforts didn't do much to stall either site, but served as a continual reminder that even though Silicon Valley might tout a company as the future of communication, legal authorities might beg to differ.

Used with permission from CNET Networks, Inc., Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.

Original Page, Click Here!

How To Download Norton Antivirus Virus Definition Update

Norton or Symantec Antivirus is one of big provider leading in antivirus product which proved for protecting our computer from virus threat and a sort of another threat. The most important thing that we should do is updating our virus definition database of our antivirus installed on our computer in this case is Norton or Symantec Antivirus. This have to be done daily, weekly or at least once a month to ensure that you are protected from recent virus threat which quickly spread usually from internet activity. Because it is known that virus is created in every minutes in somewhere in the world.

Norton or Symantec Antivirus preserve their virus definition updates to be downloaded freely from their website. Of course we can update our antivirus directly from the net if we do online directly from our own computer or laptop, but if we want to update our family or friend computer antivirus (Norton and Symantec Antivirus) which do not have internet connection we have to save the antivirus updates file to hard disk or flash disk first. After the file is downloaded we can execute this file in our family or friend computer which use Norton or Symantec Antivirus to update their antivirus virus definition.

These are some steps to download Symantec or Norton Antivirus virus definition updates:

1. Go to their website, "http://www.symantec.com"
2. Click text or button "Downloads" on "Quick links" bar
3. There are three categories here. In "Home & Home office" and "Business" category, there is text link "Virus definitions" or "Virus Definitions and Security Updates", choose one.
4. In "Download Virus Definitions" section, click text link "Download Virus Definitions (Intelligent Updater Only)"
5. In the bottom part of this page there is symantec product updates list box. By default choose the first product "Norton Antivirus for Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/Vista" for different Operating System you can choose by yourself. Then click the "Download Updates" button above the list box.
6. It is the last page. Here there are multiple update choices with different specification which provided separately in box. Click one of the filename, example: "20080104-002-i32.exe" and download process will start immediately and save it to your desired folder place.
   

To begin update to your computer, execute (double click) the file and approve (click yes) what they ask for. You will be confirmed when the updates process finished whether successful or unsuccessful then click yes. To make sure that your computer Norton or Symantec Antivirus virus definition updated, it is prefer to restart your computer.

What is "NICHE"

Recently, people talking about niche, niche and niche. So, what does it mean? The word niche can be inferred in term of ecological glossary, but here I means niche in term of net world glossary. In the net world, niche can be inferred as "Niche Market" or "Niche Blogging" and another niche term which in the end it is a kind of effort to get traffic or get prospect of a product.

Honestly, Now I don't know what is niche and what does it do in our blogging activity. Firstly I found this term when I wanted to join Squidoo Network in squidoo.com because I had to build a niche to became their network. In my opinion it is a kind of way to grow our blog or web traffic. Here I just try to give some reference to open our horizon about niche in online activity.

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What does the word "niche" mean? And what does it mean to you? By definition, the word "niche" means: something perceived as special, unique, one-of-a-kind. What that means to you is that once you can identify what can be special, unique or one-of-a-kind about your business or service, price won't have to be the factor when consumers buy from you. You can be in a position to offer something unique which will drive a clientele to your business who will not be as price sensitive as the mass market shopper.

A niche focuses your energies on a small segment of a market instead of the whole market.

This small segment of the market must:

1. be unserved or underserved
2. have a need for what you are selling
3. be large enough to be considered a market segment
4. be geographically workable for you
5. be easy to reach through marketing and advertising

http://www.isquare.com/niche.cfm

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A niche market (also known as a target market) is a focused targetable portion (subset) of a market sector.

By definition, then, a business that focuses on a niche market is addressing a need for a product or service that is not being addressed by mainstream providers. A niche market may be thought of as a narrowly defined group of potential customers.

A distinct niche market usually evolves when a potential demand for a product or service is not met by any supply, or when a new demand arises due to changes in society, technology, or the general environment.

Niche market ventures may become profitable even though they are by nature small in comparison to the mainstream marketplace, due to the benefits of specialization and focus on small identifiable market segments; even without the benefit of economy of scale. Niche markets may be ignored or discounted by large businesses due to what they consider to be small potential; this in turn is part of the process that makes the niche market available to smaller businesses. The key to capitalizing on a niche market is to find or develop a market niche that has customers who are accessible, that is growing fast enough, and that is not owned by one established vendor already.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niche_market

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I'm sure that this is just only a little explanation about niche and it's circumstances. But at least we know that blogging world is always grow and develop by itself because the need of business advertisement and I'm sure that this growth happen very rapidly. Keep on moving blogger!

Get Popular with "Spicypage"

Spicypage is a social online community where anyone including blogger shares, review and talks about what websites or blogs they discover on the net. Founded in September of 2006, It is a friendly community that allows everyone to find easier ways to spread the notable sites or blogs when stumbled upon them.

SpicyPage lets you post, comment on, vote on, and share your favorite's sites or blogs with your friends and others like you. You can post not only your blog but also an article or story about anything you are interested in. Even you can create or start a group to make your private or public community.

You will quickly build your network when you vote on other blog that listed in your spicypage account main page or you can choose by categories listed on the left of the page. Besides that, you can grow your network by inviting your friend by email. Just click "invite friends" and input your friend email accounts to the form up to six accounts. More blogs you vote on, more network and friends you will have. It means more traffic would come to your site. Usually, spicypage member will vote you back if you vote on their web/blog. If you wish, you can ask them to vote your web/blog by sending them a message while you ask him/her to be your friend. There are some another tools which can help you to be popular in spicypage community. It's easy and fun.

Recently, spicyage become a new way of web-ranking solution to determine the best sites or blogs, 100% powered by its members. Discover and bookmark the new and the best sites/blogs out there and connect with people of the same interest as you.

Join Spicypage Community, Click Here!

Analyze Your Blog with Sitemeter

In order to improve our website (webblog), we have to know what exactly happen to our site. Sitemeter offers some services to bloggers where it can track their blog activity and count how many audience that come to their site comprehensively.

This vital data and information is provided in your sitemeter account in some differents ways such as in term of visits, page views and in term of time that can help us to analyze our site easily. Another kinds of benefit from sitemeter are sitemeter provide us traffic prediction which predict our site visitors in advance, we can request our site (blog) statistic summary to be emailed to us daily or weekly and another beneficial tools which you can found after you sign up to sitemeter.

This is an example of my blog prediction which provided in sitemeter account. Eventhough this prediction is not figured the real condition of my blog, at least this kind of report could encourage me always to update and improve my blog continuously.

Site Meter offers detailed, step by step instructions for integrating Sitemeter into all the top blogging and website hosting services.

We just have to do three simple steps:
1. Create an account (Basic for Free or Paid Premium).
2. Copy code from your account.
3. Paste code into each page you want tracked.

That's way I suggest you to use this service immediately. It's free, easy and fun.

Go and Sign Up To Sitemeter.Com, Click here!

BY THE WAY,
HAPPY NEW YEAR 2008
WISH ALL THE BEST THINGS COME ALONG WITH US THIS YEAR!
BE AT PEACE