It hasn’t even been a month since YouTube celebrated their 5th birthday anniversary and now the world’s most popular video sharing service has announced another huge milestone. According to YouTube officials, the site is now exceeding 2 billion video views per day.

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How much time do you need to put into a niche before you can declare yourself an expert? Well, many bloggers seem to disagree, judging by their self-proclamations after only a few months, but once upon a time you were classified as an expert if you had spent roughly 10,000 hours on a skill, in a focused, structured manner. If we’re referring to a career job, at roughly 40 hours/week, that comes out to about five years. But when it comes to working online and establishing your expertise, the Web doesn’t wait around. Five years is too long, since Web technology is always changing.
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If you want your blog to be successful, then you need to start thinking immediately about how your blog is designed and configured. In other words, the way your blog is set up could ruin your chances of building a successful blog.

With that in mind, following are 10 of the easiest and most common ways that people ruin their blogs. Avoid them!

1. Too many ads
2. Blinding colors or colors that are too light to read
3. Pop-up ads – make them go away!
4. Keyword stuffing – you’re not fooling anyone with that list of keywords stuffed into the sidebar or footer.
5. Clutter – where’s the real content? read more

Automattic (the company behind WordPress for you non-geeks) has just blessed Android fans with two new features that may make iFans everywhere envious of their Android friends.

WordPress for Android version 1.2 has been released to Android Market. [...] If you have a WordPress.com blog, video upload works great with VideoPress.  If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, you may need to install the PJW Mime Config plugin to allow the 3gp video files to be uploaded to your blog.

Post geotagging support (enable geotagging first in the blog settings window). If you are running a self-hosted blog, install the geolocation plugin to show your location. (WordPress For Android)

Previously WordPress rolled out geo-location support for iPhone users, a feature that Android fans will probably love (especially travel blogs and geeks-on-the-go).

Although the company has yet to include WordPress stats within the app, the VideoPress option will probably make a few iPhone users extremely jealous of their Droid friends (this author included). read more

It looks like Twitter will be launching premium accounts soon, and is currently beta testing out the features with a few lucky brands.

While the micro blogging company has been rather silent as far as the pricing goes, this upcoming feature should help small and large businesses, as well as large blog networks.

In order to encourage the corporate masses to pay for a service that they have been using for free, Twitter is sweetening the deal by offering a few juicy perks. read more

Blogsmith (a company AOL purchased many moons ago) is probably known mostly (if not entirely) for powering heavily visited sites like Engadget and AutoBlog (as well as many others).

While rumors surfaced in 2007 about a public launch beyond AOL’s official network (which would open up Blogsmith to the masses), nothing much has emerged regarding Blogsmith which thus far remains a “gated community.”

However with AOL facing financial woes (as they struggle to regain their former glory), we may see AOL  re-enter the blogosphere again later on this year by opening up Blogsmith to the masses (at least for a price). read more

With human flavored spam on the rise, Ning is launching 3 weapons to help members fight the good fight and keep those “enhancement” products off of their respective forums and blogs.

While Ning is sadly adopting the use of CAPTCHA’s (a tool that no longer works thanks to nefarious spam bots and human spammers), as well as email verification (which can land in the spam folder), their “Twilight quizzes” may help thwart spammers (whether virtual or in the flesh). read more

After receiving numerous requests from clients, it looks as if the search engine king will be adding Blogger to Google Apps suite (which is used primarily by businesses and schools around the world).

9 of the top 20 requests from Google Apps customers are for their accounts to work with more services from Google, not just for the core suite of messaging and collaboration applications. Later this year we’ll dramatically accelerate customer access to innovation, and give users the convenience of using any Google service allowed by their administrator from a single account affiliated with their organization.

For example, coworkers will be able to publish their organization’s blog on Blogger, share project images with Picasa Web Albums, track industry news in Google Reader, advertise online with AdWords and much more, all without switching back and forth between multiple accounts. (Official Google Enterprise Blog) read more

A long, long time ago in a place not so far away Twitter was born. It was a golden age, full of text messages, retweets and #followfridays. But despite the simplistic and innovative breakthrough, chaos reigned in the mobile twitterverse.

In an attempt to help restore order, Jedi developer masters like Twittelator, Tweetie, Echofon and SimplyTweet emerged, helping to restore balance to the tweet.

For over a 1,000 geek generations, tweet developers were the guardians of twitter lists and hashtags. Before tweetageddon, and before Twitter bought Tweetie.

Flash forward to the present and developers are facing a nightmare. With Twitter HQ launching mobile apps upon Android and Blackberry (in order to help expand their growing empire), developers have to choose either extinction, or to embrace the dark side by embracing Facebook. read more

After kicking out all of the free members and ditching the fremium model, it looks as if Ning is preparing to roll out their premium service to the masses.

What will we be rolling out in July? We’ll start with many of the things Network Creators have been asking for and extend the service from there. The end of Ning promotional links, leading to a more customized, branded experience for you and your members. An ad free experience and the option to run your own ads — if you like. Easy content export and back-up. The end of Ning ID and ability to add Facebook and Twitter sign-in. API access for a more integrated experience. The ability to charge for membership and accept donations. We’ve listened to your more frequent and pressing requests and combined them with our current premium services into three new product offerings — Ning Pro, Ning Plus and Ning Mini. (Official Ning Blog)

Ning is offering premium paying customers 3 options ranging from a paltry $2.95 USD a month (or $19.95 a year) to $49.95 USD a month (or about $499.95 USD year), although in order to blog upon your own domain you will need to subscribe to the plan in the middle (which is about $20 USD a month). read more