Technorati have been analyzing what we’re linking to, and not surprisingly it is mostly blogs. 61% of the links in fact, according to the State of the Blogosphere study. 46% is, however, “non-blog web content” to use the words of Jen McLean. That’s interesting of course, and Technorati are kind enough to supply us with the most linked list over the last 30 days. read more

This is just too hilarious not to mention. Michael Arrington posted about TechCrunch finally getting their own office because of complaints from neighbors. Apparently they didn’t like the traffic or something, read more about it on TechCrunch. That’s all well and good, Arrington can certainly post about something concerning his site, and it is even somewhat relevant.

Then Silicon Alley Insider does a news story on it. I was amazed to see that one, especially since more than half of it is a quote from the TechCrunch post.

And it hits Techmeme, granted, not in a big way, but still. Naturally, we’re adding to this with this post, but this is fun stuff, and interesting as well, when looked at as a phenomenon. Gotta love the blogosphere.

Online advertising service Chitika is risking the wrath of the Twitter community by launching a competition that encourages its users to tweet the same daily message to its followers in order to gain credits for a new competition.

The upcoming SearchAppalooza competition will be held at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in New York on 24th March, where five finalists will present their search applications to a board of judges including those from Microsoft and Yahoo! read more

If one were to strip most of the eye candy away from Byline, they would probably end up with an app like Gazette.

Developed by Matt Rajca, Gazette offers users a distraction free layout that focuses on keeping things simple for the Google Reader addict.

Being relatively priced at $2, some users may wonder whether it would be better to invest their spare change in Gazette rather than spend the extra cash on Byline (which currently costs $5).

So instead of purchasing both apps (and making Steve Jobs richer) here is a brief review of how Gazette stacks up against Byline (with an excel spreadsheet link below comparing Gazette against not only Byline but the gReader web app and Doppler as well). read more

Happy Monday, folks! Today, we have a special treat — an interview with Byrne Reese, an independent consultant that’s done a lot of exciting work with Movable Type. Byrne will be talking with us about some of his recent projects, including his recent upgrades to the Photo Gallery plugin. But first, let’s catch up on what’s been going on in the MT community.

This week, Six Apart released the third release candidate of Motion, the social application built on top of MT 4.25. This release primarily addresses the same issues as MT 4.24 — it includes the security fix and the new password recovery system. Word is we’re getting very close to a final release. read more

Twhirl is an excellent Adobe Air application for posting updates to services like Twitter. Seesmic owns it, and Loic Le Meur is happy to announce that it passed 1 million downloads.

1 million downloads of Twhirl since its creator, Marco Kaiser joined Seesmic on April 20th last year. I always thought Twhirl would be very successful and it is more and more important for us, the latest version 0.9 had more 150,000 downloads in about 3 weeks. That tells me we have about 150,000 active users of Twhirl, and growing.

Congratulations are in order, Twhirl is a great application and I use it myself for Twitter updating since it supports several accounts open at the same time.

Last week I wrote a column asking whether or not blog search was dead. In the column, I lamented how blog search has waned in usefulness from the major providers and explained some the biggest problems with blog search today.

But with blog search being rendered almost irrelevant, staying on top of one’s topic of interest is becoming more and more difficult. There seems to be no one solution to this problem and, over the years, I’ve actually found many different ways to keep up to date.

Here are four of my favorites, complete with how they work and their advantages and disadvantages. As you’ll see, no system is perfect, but by using some or all of these systems together, you can keep on top of your field pretty easily. read more

Twitter is certainly dominating the blogosphere right now. I’m reading about the business model (local is the new black, as you very well know), about why we should be happy that brands are there, about the new search functionality, and it just goes on from there.

Is it indeed killing blogging?

Of course not. Twitter is microblogging, which in itself is empowering blogging, and that is a truly good thing.

It’s pretty simple really. You can easily send a flimsy thought to your followers using Twitter. The ease is unrivaled, a text message and it’s there for the world to see, or a mere click in your favorite Twitter app. That, and the 140 character cap, is making us communicate things that otherwise might’ve been blog posts. One could argue that it would indeed be proof of that whole “killing blogging” reasoning, but it is in fact the opposite. read more

For many bloggers, when they first get interested in SEO, they will go after the most competitive keywords first.  A web design blogger will optimize his site to target web design.  A gadget blogger will go after gadgets.  However, this is usually a bad strategy.

Short keywords like web design, gadgets, and social media are very hard to rank for.  For a new site, if you do everything right, it could take months and oftentimes years before you reach the front page of the search results.  And even then, there could be 10 other sites that do SEO better than you, so your site would be left languishing on the second page.

Now you may be happy with a second page or even a third page ranking, but most people don’t visit those pages.  Aaron Wall, a prominent search expert, writes:

There is no award, little traffic, and virtually no value for ranking on page 2 or page 3, even if it is for an exceptionally competitive and high traffic keyword like credit cards.

So, what’s a blogger to do? read more

Twitter Memes are trends, activities or sayings associated with Twitter. It might be something you do individually (such as the “5 things you don’t know about me”), things that have grown up around Twitter that make it more useful (Retweets and Hashtags are two examples), or might be something people do as a group for fun.

One of the most popular Twitter Memes is Follow Friday. It is a group thing where everyone suggests other Twitter users to follow, each Friday. One problem is inevitably you are going to NOT suggest someone, who will then feel bad – is there a way to make it fair and not have people feeling overlooked? read more