Remember BlogRush? Back in October ’08 the site – which had promised a “rush” of traffic to your blog – closed its doors.

Believed to be a scam by some and a useful tool by others, the concept was relatively simple; place a widget on your site that shows links from other “related” blogs and in return earn “credits” for your headlines to be shown on other related blogs.

Looking to fill the void left by Blog Rush’s death, is eConnect (Entrepreneurs Connect) – a free service that shares and displays members’ latest RSS entries across the network. read more

Twitter was, quite literally, made for mobile phones. Its character limit was created in part to make the posting of tweets via text message possible and even very basic mobile phones can manage Twitter accounts and post tweets relatively well.

So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that, when you use a smartphone, such as an iPhone, that your mobile device becomes a real Twitter powerhouse, one capable of rivaling many desktop clients in terms of usability and features.

On the iPhone, two apps have emerged at the top of the pile, Twitterrific and Tweetie (though Twitterfon remains a highly-regarded free alternative). Both apps have their supporters and their detractors but both of them have turned into very powerful Twitter applications.

For the most part, the two applications mirror each other feature-to-feature, so, in order to compare them, we have to look a bit deeper at what distinguishes them. In the end, it is tough to say which app is the “best”, even though there are many people who one app will clearly fit their needs better. read more

Mashable writes about the Scribd Store, and it got me thinking. Ebooks is often the logical spinoff product for a blogger, and while it might sound appealing to end up on a Kindle, the chances of that are just ridiculously small at this time. No, if you want to be read on an e-reader of choice that is not in fact a disguised surf tablet, you’ll have to rely on ebooks.

Enter Scribd, the document hosting service that lets you embed docs in all their glory, and their store. If Scribd could built a central place for people to buy ebooks and reports, then that would be a great deal for bloggers. read more

Over at the WordPress development blog, we can read about the first beta of WordPress 2.8. If you’re the tinkering type, do give it a go and help kill all the nasty errors that inevitably have snuck in there. There is no release date for the final 2.8 version yet, but the Codex page listing all the changes says May. I’ll believe that when I see it, but it shouldn’t be more than a couple of weeks at least. And remember, this is beta software and will act funky on you, so think twice – nay, thrice! – before running it on a public blog.

Consumer electronics giant LG has launched its “Life’s Good” blog in Malaysia as part of its ongoing commitment to new media and online interaction with consumers.

Designed as a platform for users to provide feedback on products as well as to publicise events and run various promotions, LG is being touted as the first electronics manufacturer to launch a blog in the country.

I know LG in the UK has been keen to engage with bloggers, to the extent that it has run several “exclusive” product events to which tech bloggers were invited ahead of journalists from traditional media outlets. read more

In a survey of 37 search experts, the 2nd highest SEO factor was the anchor text of links from other sites.  However, many webmasters who want to rank better on the search engines don’t know what anchor text is.  Fortunately, anchor text is an easy concept to understand.  In this post and next week’s post, we’ll look at what anchor text is and how to use it well for your blog.  read more

As I was doing some research for a future blog entry, I happened to stumble upon some good blogs from years past. What I mean, is that I was reminded about blogs I enjoyed reading at one point, but for whatever reason, forgot about.

That’s one of the many obstacles bloggers are up against. With most of us on a limited (invisible!) budget, it’s easy for our readers to forget about us. read more

Chitika has announced a new, large contextual ad unit that they’ve chosen to name the MEGA-Unit.

At first glance it’s just another ad size (550×250 in fact) but what’s more extraordinary are the claims being made by some of the people using it.

Chitika reckons that, across the network as a whole, the unit’s click-through rate (CTR) is four times higher than other ad units.

Added to which, Chitika cites three real-world examples. read more

And all you need is a blog with an RSS feed. Amazon has opened their platform to bloggers with a US bank account. Defining yet another way to make money through blogging, Amazon allows blog publishers to keep 30% of the income generated from blog subscriptions on their Kindle reader. That’s roughly USD 0.60 cents per subscriber per month if it costs USD 1.99 to subscribe your blog.

To sign up, you will need a separate account from your regular Amazon account. This service is still in Beta, so we’re bound to see some changes in the rates in the future. Of course, subscribing to feeds should be free (because it is free everywhere else), yet we’re also interested to see how this new business model develops for Amazon and bloggers.

We do wish that this service opens up to the rest of the world, as it alienates non-US based bloggers who want a hack at monetizing this new platform. It is indeed a sad reality that the Kindle isn’t available outside the USA in the same way that buying intellectual properties such as audiobooks, eBooks and music from Amazon (and iTunes) is very much restricted. Maybe it is time for a second version of the Florence Agreement?

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