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.

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!

Whoops, I forgot to post yesterday’s Friday Feed, so I’m reduced to posting it late as a Saturday Syndication.

It’s a good job I did too, because I came across a new blog tonight that I’ve added to my Google Reader. The first post I discovered was Alister’s “How To Grow Your Blog By 2000 Percent In One Month“, which had some very common-sense pointers for setting up a blog, scalability planning and stuff like that. Then he really hit home with some great viral ideas, latching on to breaking news and creating content with a unique spin and giving value to his readers. Check out his SEM Search using Google Co-op, if you want to see what I mean.

I took a poke through Alister’s archives and came across some pretty interesting ideas on blogging and blog development.

One thing I would say, for a blog consultant, his theme sucks big time and I would have expected something much more attractive. But I’m not complaining - the content is what counts and it seems to be growing pretty well. Well enought for Alister to become Friday Feed this week!

Maybe it’s because John Oxton was once a chef that he opted for Bite instead of Byte, but who cares? Last year (and this year), Drew McClellan launched a highly successful advent calendar for web designers called 24 Ways. Each day in the run-up to Christmas, there’d be a little nugget of information about how to achieve effects in XHTML/CSS.

Well, Bite Size Standards is the all-year-round version of 24 Ways. (Almost) every day, a new article is posted looking at some aspect of site design or another. There’s always a surprise and you end up thinking “Damn, I’ve always wondered how they do that!”

BSS fell by the wayside until recently when management of the site was undertaken by Andrea Arbogast. I’ve been a follower of Andrea’s for a while now (in a non-stalker way) and I think it’s great that she’s involved in this and driving it forward!

Subscribe to the feed: Bite Size Standards.

Just the other week, Rand (who runs SEOmoz) posted about their phenomenal growth as a search industry blog.

We’ve gone from an average of 200 daily readers last year to about 7,500 avg daily visitors and 5,700 RSS subscribers.

The rise and rise of SEOmoz is no fluke. Rand, Rebecca and the team write a variety of witty and insightful posts on SEO techniques, developments in the industry and the odd bit of banal banter too. These guys really know their stuff about Search Optimisation and Marketing, and are one of my absolute favourite blogs to read.

Because there’s such a large team working on the blog, the rate of posting is rapid, but I can just about keep up. I’m recommending SEOmoz to you today because they make search interesting and accessible. Often, search blogs can be dry and uninteresting, but the passion with which these folk write is abundantly obvious. Enjoy!

Subscribe to the feed: SEOmoz

If you’re new to blogging, or even trying to keep your finger on the pulse, Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger is an indespensible resource.

ProBlogger was just hitting its stride when I was getting into blogging and many of Darren’s discoveries or tips proved to be useful in getting some of my blogs started. Some of the debates on his site would make me think harder about what I wanted to achieve from my blogs and blogging.

Darren combines news and insight on professional blogging with tips and tutorials on how to improve your blog - whether it’s content, quality of writing or advertising/affiliate schemes. ProBlogger is an essential read if you’re interested in making money from blogging.

Feed link: ProBlogger RSS