Blogging Tune

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Daniel of Daily Blog Tips has a group writing contest in which he has asked the participants to define what a blog is. Blog means many things. It has different meaning to different people. If you ask my friend, he would say it is a website and you can make money from it. While if you ask people who blog they have a different definition.

I’m not going to make this a long post and waste your time. I’ll just tell you what a blog is to me. It is only my way of defining blog your definition may vary.

What is a blog?

A blog is a space in the internet which an individual person/a group create to share their knowledge, offer opinions and provide service.

I use a blog to share my knowledge while a company will use a blog to promote their service.

So what does a blog mean to you? Write a blog post or make a comment.

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If you are a techcrunch reader or slashdot user, you would love this feed reader which I’m going to talk about in this post. Most people use google reader as the feed reader and I’m no exception to it. But I also use this feed reader called snarfer. I have blogged about this reader before and I have been using it for more than a year now. It is a free software.

Few months ago, snarfer started adding message styles and guess what? They have techcrunch and slashdot style message options. They also have few other styles like outlook express style, ALA style and bleached style. But those who read techcrunch a lot wouldn’t want to miss their blog theme in their feed reader too.

Here’s how the techcrunch theme looks like:

Slashdot Theme In Snarfer:

You can install these themes very easily.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Install snarfer

2. Once you have done it, look for an option called “Add Message Styles” in the left sidebar

3. Select a theme you want to have and install it

4. To apply it to your feeds, go to Tools->Options and click on the appearance tab

5. Select the theme you installed and click on apply

Start reading the feeds in the theme you like.

If you need any help regarding this, please post it in the comments.

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I know many of you already know about creative commons website. It is, in my opinion, a must-bookmark for every blogger. There are many reasons why you should bookmark this site. You may want to find an image and that time, flickr maybe down for you. At these times, you can use the creative commons site to find images that permits you commercial or derivative use.

Also you might want to add a video to your blog post. You find a lot of videos online, especially in youtube. But can you use them or modify them? Not all of them. You’ll have to make sure you have the rights to modify the video before doing it. Creative commons site lets you to do this. You can search for videos that let you to modify them.

Most of all, there are some interesting audios that you can find for commercial and derivative use from this by using this site. This site only acts as a search engine that gets you the links to pictures, videos and audios with any type of use you desire. A must-bookmark site for all bloggers.

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Smorty, a paid to write review site, has come up with the In-Text advertising method. The site which is well famous for it paid to write reviews opportunities has started the In-Text advertising which Kontera is pretty famous for (made famous by John Chow actually!).

What Is In-Text Ads?

In-Text Ads is something that appears like a normal link but with a double underline. It will show a popup advertising when the mouse is placed on the link. It looks more like a normal link that readers, sometimes, get confused and click it unknowingly and gets redirected to a new link.

When You Get Paid?

You don’t get paid when someone places their mouse over the link or you don’t get paid for every impression on your blog. You get paid only when the ads are clicked. The difference between Kontera and Smorty is that smorty will be showing products that are available in Ebay, Amazon and such sites in the popup box.

Surely something for bloggers who are trying to make money online. Will you be trying Smorty’s In-Text advertising or mini store (as they call it) method? Please share your views in the comments.

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Twitter is a social media site which is used to update your friends on what you are doing within 140 characters. I don’t know why the 140 characters limit. That should be another big story I guess. I don’t know why, but there is a lot of blog posts on twitter in the recent days.

Twitter is good and I use it everyday to get new friends and to have touch with those who are already my friends. Suddenly, many blogs have started to write about twitter. The reason? Well I don’t know. I have written a post on twitter too. You can read that post here which emphasizes on how to get more twitter friends.

Fine, let’s see few blogs which have blogger about twitter and also some other references.

Take a look at the Social Media category of Sphinn, a social media site which I like.

Social Media Category in Sphinn

The above is the link to the hot topic in the social media category of sphinn. You can see many blog posts in the hot topic column about twitter.

Also many big blogs have started to write about twitter.

Search Engine Land had a post about twitter. It was on the topic “Twitter Wrote This Column For Me“. It was a very interesting post filled up with the answers of the people to the questions asked in twitter.

You can also read Read Write Web writing on Twitter. It was on “How We Use Twitter For Journalism“.

So what is the reason behind sudden increase in the number posts about twitter? Please share it in the comments.

You can also add me on twitter here.

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