Raj Dash wrote something a couple of weeks ago that struck a chord with me. I’ve essentially been running too many blogs lately, and Interweb World is one of them. Unfortunately.

At the moment, it makes sense for me to merge Interweb with my web design blog over at Scribble Designs.

There are a couple of reasons:

1. Although I’ve been running AdSense since I started the blog, it doesn’t earn terribly well.
2. I like writing technical content. Writing about web design, search optimisation and social media will hopefully reinforce my credentials and help attract more consulting work.
3. Running two blogs on a similar subject matter is splitting loyalties - it’s easier to gain backlinks and PageRank on one blog than to double your workload for no good reason.
4. I want to try some experiments with linkbaiting, and I hope an ad-free website will be more effective than this one has been.

What I Want You To Do….

Simply keep reading my work, and subscribe to the new RSS feed over at Scribble Designs.

I’ll be hoping to blog more with one focussed blog, and provide more advice and dissemination of news and new SEO and marketing techniques around the Interweb! I may spin this template off as a free WordPress theme at some point as well, after a little bit of tidying up!

I’ve been toying with link blogging recently. I know some big guns like Steve Rubel post their del.icio.us links regularly on their blog.

While I read blogs voraciously, I don’t always have the time to respond to everything I read with a post of my own, so link blogging gives me the chance to share with you what cool stuff I’ve read and pass a few comments on it.

A little-known fact about me is that I’m a non-conformist. I hate doing what everybody else is doing. So, instead of using del.icio.us as my bookmarking tool of choice, I’ll be using the grossly underrated ma.gnolia bookmarking service. I’ve been playing with ma.gnolia recently and really enjoying some of its social features, which I’ll cover in a later post.

The tool I’m using to achieve the regular link blog is the Postalicious plugin for WordPress.

These are my links for March 16th through March 17th:

• WordPress - From Install to Pimped Out - WordPress - From Install to Pimped Out… the title says it all. Very well written and enjoyable article.
• How to Get Your Blog to 100,000 Visitors and Beyond, Step 13; Participate in Carnivals - Another one about blog carnivals - today’s post is sponsored by blog carnivals! The advice here differs slightly from other articles I’ve posted, but as part of a traffic building campaign, it has obvious merit.
• Link Building via Hosting Blog Carnivals - Another useful summary post about blog carnivals by Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal.
• How To Get Great Inbound Links and Connections Too - Ben Yoskovitz gives a good introduction to blog carnivals as a source of links. Again, though, he emphasizes that blogging is about connections and not just inbound links. Blog carnivals are an excellent way of connecting to other bloggers in your space.
• Five Questions (and Answers) About Blog Carnivals - Some very good information about link building via Blog Carnivals in the form of a question and answer session.
• Marketing Your Site on Yahoo Answers - Loren Baker elaborates on Matt McGee’s posts about marketing your site on Yahoo! Answers. Some useful pointers about getting on the service, helping others and promoting your site.
• Why I Love Yahoo! Answers - Matt on using Yahoo! Answers as a source of potential traffic. I should point out an obvious trend toward ethical use of social websites - Matt participates and drops a link when it’s helpful. Besides, links are nofollowed anyway, so there’s only the benefit of whatever eyeballs are looking at your answer - no Google-juice

Check out my ma.gnolia bookmarks.

These are my links for March 14th through March 15th:

• WoogleCal: Google Calendar WordPress plugin - Another possiblity for a blog-based events calendar using Google Calendar as the engine.
• Google Calendar Widget » Nothing to see here - Possible contender for an events calendar I want to host with Google Calendar but display on the sidebar of my blog. There doesn’t seem to be too many of these on the market, let me tell you!
• Put on Your Game Face - ProNet recommending that we put a little extra information into our About pages. Nothing new here, but good advice. I’m considering improving my About pages and perhaps implementing profile pages for some of my other blogs.
• Report Says Ajax Monkeys with Search Crawlers - Steve Rubel has been declaring the end of the pageview due to the prevalence of AJAX, but whoops! he forgot that Google likes individual pages when crawling. A commenter points out that this is due to implementation, but I still can’t help thinking Steve’s been a bit premature in ‘killing’ the pageview.
• The best source of free images for your blog posts - There’s no doubt that a striking graphic can improve the look of a blog post. Alister Cameron takes a look at Yotophoto, a meta-search for images that simultaneously searches many sources of free images.
• Vitamin Interviews - Ted Rheingold - I’m not normally one for reading loads of Interviews, but this one with Ted Rheingold is particularly interesting, especially Dogster’s (his company) approach to securing sponsorship.
• Usability in the Movies — Top 10 Bloopers - Excellent deconstruction of usability issues in the movies. They even managed to make it through without mentioning Sandra Bullock in The Net! There’s a great link in the article that deals with integration issues between Earth computers and Alien technology in Independence Day.
• Automattic » WordPress Consultants - Must add myself to this at some stage.

Check out my ma.gnolia bookmarks.

These are my links for December 31st through March 13th:

• The Dangers Of Too Many Sites: Blogger’s Dilemma - So you’ve started too many blogs on too many topics all too soon, and you find you can’t maintain them all after all. And you’re loathe to let go of your babies, even the free-hosted ones. What do you do?
• Web 2.0 Tutorials Round-Up | Smashing Magazine - Web 2.0 is beautiful. In fact, many designers manage to create really amazing, particularly dark and fresh web-designs, which are visually appealing and make a great first impression. However, if you are planning on designing a web 2.0-project, you probably should know how and where to start from. Badges, Gradients, Mirror and Shadow Effects as well as Shiny and Glassy buttons are trendy. But do you know exactly how to design them?
• 10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox) - Several usability findings lead directly to higher sales and increased customer loyalty. These design tactics should be your first priority when updating your website.
• How-to style WordPress author comments - How to make comments from the post author stand out by hacking the WordPress templates and using CSS - of course.
• How to install Wordpress on a USB stick - Very useful how-to- on installing WordPress on a USB drive. This can be very handy when theming WordPress on the go. It also has application as a portable digital notebook. Can also run other PHP/MySQL apps like Drupal.
• 10 Things You Must Do When Changing WordPress Themes : Instigator Blog - WordPress makes it very easy to change themes and completely change the design of your blog. That’s a great feature, and it allows non-designers and people with limited CSS/HTML/etc. experience to do some amazing stuff. But, there’s a number of critical steps you need to go through after changing your blog’s design, in order to make sure it’s going to work perfectly.
• 83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen - Some excellent WordPress themes - worth a look for design inspiration.
• 4 Easy Steps to Kill Blog Spam Forever - Currently there are 3 main types of blog spam:* Comment Spam* TrackBack Spam* Contact Form SpamComment Spam1. Akismet (this is the best anti spam plugin you can ever get).After installing the Akismet plug-in for WordPress or one of the third party Ak
• Lowdown on Press Release Optimization » Online Marketing Blog - Excellent, top-quality resource about optimizing press releases for uptake in the media and follow-on on the web.
• PRWeb::The Online Visibility Company - Press Release Distribution for small business. Press Release Marketing Service. Direct to Consumer Press Release Distribution.
• PR Newswire - news distribution, targeting and monitoring - News and press release distribution services for small business marketing, corporate public relations and investor relations, government and organizational communications.
• Business Wire: public relations, press release distribution, investor relations, SEC filing - Business Wire is the leading source for full-text breaking news and press releases, multimedia and regulatory filings for companies and groups throughout the world.
• Press Releases as Marketing Tools - Realizing the opportunity news search offers, many company marketers continue to flounder at making sure their press releases receive maximum exposure. To that end, here are 10 tips for maximizing the visibility of press release content.
• Boycott RIAA In March » Interweb World -
• SEOmoz | Put Your Best Foot Forward: 19 Gorgeous Website Footers - Footers are important. Usually, they are a repetition of the primary navigation and contain anything that is considered “the fine print,” such as copyright information and privacy policies. With the rising popularity of standards based design, they also have become the home for buttons that show off standards compliance. While doing a …
• Shifting Mind » Postalicious - Plugin for WordPress that allows automatic posting of ma.gnolia bookmarks

Check out my ma.gnolia bookmarks.

Hi peeps, just popping my head in to mention the March boycott of the RIAA that’s been talked about over on Gizmodo.

Having read various horror stories about the RIAA on Digg and elsewhere across the net, it’s obvious to me that this profiteering pack are only interested in serving their own interests. The way that they are using the legal system to attack people is nothing short of shocking, and I want to voice my opposition.

The RIAA has the power to shift public policy and to alter the direction of technology and the Internet for one reason and one reason alone: it’s totally loaded. Without their millions of dollars to throw at lawyers, the RIAA is toothless. They get their money from us, the consumers, and if we don’t like the way they’re behaving, we can let them know with our wallets.

I want to echo that sentiment over here on Interweb World. I also came across an excellent post suggesting ways to support non-RIAA artists, which I recommend to you.

Both the Gizmodo article and the Unofficial RIAA blog recommend RIAA Radar, which helps you to research whether an album has been released by an RIAA record label. I also recommend switching to an Internet radio program like Pandora or Last.fm.

I don’t think realistically you’ll manage to shut these people down, but more people need to send out a message to the RIAA and major record labels that bullying consumers is wrong!

I haven’t done a Friday Feed in a couple of weeks - time to rectify that with a link to a very popular Web Tech blog that covers a bit more than your average pro-blogging type blog or SEO guru.

The Read/Write Web team seem to write far more in-depth articles than I’ve seen in this sector so far, and on a wider range of topics. Take for example their recent analysis of social sites and how you can harness them to see what’s popular on your blog.

I had managed to avoid subscribing to R/RW for quite some time, but this week I bit the bullet and added the site to Google Reader.

Feed Address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/readwriteweb

Don’t forget to subscribe to Interweb World at the same time!

I keep reading more and more about the negative Digg effect - that increasing numbers of domains are being permanently blocked by the Digg admins and the users are digging down stories en masse.

Admittedly, the majority of complaints come from pro-bloggers and social media marketers. They all have very valid things to say in their respective fields, and personally I enjoy reading their posts and subscribe to a number of blogs in the area.

But the Digg users don’t want them.

Sad but true. A lot of these bloggers have got hooked on quick fix traffic off the back of Digg, and they’ve been writing about techniques to get on the Digg home page - optimal time of day to post, write about Digg, using the friends system, etc.

What’s worse is they all focussed on Digg and totally excluded other areas of social media. Where are the posts about Reddit, StumbleUpon, mag.nolia, NetScape and all the other (often better) communities out there?

A Message To Social Marketers & Pro-Bloggers

Rejection always hurts, but you have to move on.

The pro bloggers and SEO practitioners helped build the Digg userbase through their enthusiastic support for Digg. You can do it again. Choose another social bookmarking service and focus on it for a while. Write about it, promote it and analyse how to succeed with it.

The Digg userbase has spoken, and though many of you have loved the spikes in traffic, others have disdained the snide and insulting comments left by Digg visitors.

Too many bloggers have come to rely on Digg as a quick fix way of getting new visitors, but its been an eggs-in-one-basket scenario and it looks like Digg is no longer a friend to pro-bloggers and SEOs. Which is a shame, but there you go.

Now, let’s start the debate: Which social media platform should we use as an alternative to Digg?

I had my first visit to Search Engine Journal today, and their excellent 13 Reasons Why NoFollow Tags Suck.

NoFollow is an attribute you can add to any link on a website. Its usage tells search engines that the link is not endorsed by that site. As a result Google will not use the link in PageRank calculations.

The idea was to thwart the increase in blog spam and to prevent spammers gaining PageRank from a litter of links they’d left across the blogosphere.

For responsible bloggers, though, NoFollow means they get no credit for their comments and contributions to other blogs (which is a bit of a disincentive to leave a comment, really). But on the other hand, the less SEO-aware masses may let blogs go dormant or not bother checking their comments, therefore allowing spammers to amass links back to their sites with relative ease.

One of Loren’s points is that NoFollow is a mark of failure by the search engines to deal with the problem of blog spam, identify it and penalize it in the rankings:

No-follow is a poor search engine’s solution to conceal its own failure to rank websites appropriately. What’s next, No-linking?

Search engines should be able to develop a method of identifying and devaluing links to spam sites which were placed in blog comments. Why should everyone who posts in blog comments suffer from the actions of a greedy few spammers.

Which may be a valid point, but I still think it’s a good thing that Blogger, WordPress et all have NoFollow on by default. More savvy WordPress bloggers can disable NoFollow links with a plugin called DoFollow.

By the way, if you want to be able to tell what websites use NoFollow, grab the SEO for FireFox plugin. It has a feature that highlights NoFollow links in red (might be hard to read - I usually tone down the colour!). You’ll be surprised at how prevalent the NoFollow attribute is!

Oh, and here’s a few thoughts from Dougal Campbell on the implementation of NoFollow in WordPress.

I came across Gimparoo this morning on del.icio.us Popular. It’s a relatively new blog that aims to convert popular Photoshop tutorials for users of the Open Source GIMP image editor.

The author’s style is light and easy to follow, and the tutorials come complete with before and after screenshots and some process screenshots showing what settings were used.

There are some great tutorials on the site already, and perhaps it’s worth subscribing to to learn a bit more. The author of Gimparoo is also an open source advocate and gives a bit of information about his setup on the info page. Reading this stuff always gets me salivating for Kubuntu again!