How to Get Featured on the New York Times, CNN, CNET and Newswee. Best WordPress Sites. DIY Themes — The ultimate premium WordPress theme marketplace. 50 New Beautiful Blog Designs | Design Showcase | Smashing Magaz. Advertisement There are things that can’t be showcased too often. For instance, beautiful blog designs. We have presented hundreds of beautiful blog designs in the past and now it’s time to provide our readers with a fresh portion of tasty design inspiration. All blogs listed below have an original, unique design.
Below we present 50 new, beautiful, creative and (hopefully) inspiring blog designs. Beautiful and Original Blog Designs Duiwaigh Iemai Douglas Menezes A Crayons Life Blog me Tender Nice Web Type Foodtease Mike Matas Questionable Characters idsgn SushiMonstr Brown Blog Films Addicted to New Nalden The Klog Guns & Donuts moradito Daustralala Digital Mash Jack Cheng Huwshimi: A robot blog Cocoia Blog Metalab Mateus Neves Ryan McMaster Rin & Wendy Markup & Style Society Get and Give The Astonishing Adventures of Lord Likely Fritz Quadrata Argee Steven Mullen Owltastic Snailbird Henry Hoffman Guillermo Esteves Skylab Gary Nock 5Pieces Ethan Marcotte Dino Latoga tehCpeng Darren Hoyt Elliot Jay Stocks From The Couch Mike Rundle.
15 useful Firefox extensions for bloggers | Webware. As a Firefox user and blogger, I realized not too long ago that the best way to be more efficient was to find useful add-ons for the Mozilla Web browser. After trying a variety of Firefox extensions, I've found 15 that do a fine job of making my blogging more productive. Firefox extensions Apture Editor: Apture Editor enables you to easily add contextual images, videos, reference guides, links, and more to a blog post. Whenever a reader moves her mouse over an Apture-linked term, a box is displayed, showing the related media you chose. Whenever a reader clicks on an item, a new window opens, displaying the source of that media. It's a great way to add more value to your blog posts. Clipmarks: Clipmarks lets you "clip" (copy) sections of a Web page , including text, images, or video, and add them to your Clipmarks profile.
Fire Analytics: If you want to track how well your blog is doing, the Fire Analytics Firefox extension will help. MeasureIt: MeasureIt is an extremely useful tool. 1. 2. 12 ways to track traffic for your blog | Webware. Earlier this week, I listed some useful Firefox extensions that help you become more productive while you blog. Now it's time to see how well your blog is performing. I've found and tried 12 online applicatons that track your blog's traffic. Some are better than others, but they're all designed with the same goal in mind: helping you grow your blog. Web apps Clickdensity Clickdensity not only tracks the number of page views and unique visitors to your site, it overlays a "heat map" on your page that tells you where visitors are clicking. It's a helpful tool. You can see if the way you place content on your site is helping you increase traffic. Clicky Don't let its childish name fool you; Clicky is outstanding.
Google Analytics Google Analytics is a free service that provides you with a graph showing how many people visited your site. Histats.com Histats.com sports the slickest design of any tool in this roundup. Opentracker Opentracker is ugly. The top 3 Looking for the best of the best? Why sponsored conversation -- aka paid blog posts -- can make se. By Josh Bernoff I'm ready to weigh in one a very controversial topic: is it ethical and appropriate to pay bloggers to post about your products? A couple of months ago an uproar arose because, by working with a company called Izea, Kmart had paid some prominent bloggers including Chris Brogan to post about their stores in the run-up to the holidays. It wasn't just them; Panasonic also paid some bloggers to make videos at the January consumer electronics show. Some thinkers including David Churbuck savaged the idea. But here at Forrester we've been thinking about it, and we're ready to tell marketers to go ahead -- if they obey some very clear rules about the right way to do it.
In a piece by my new colleague Sean Corcoran, we call this practice "sponsored conversation. " The challenge, of course, is can bloggers do this and retain any credibility? We believe they can, if -- and only if -- they obey two rules. They must disclose that they are being paid. Pick blogs that match your products. Blogs Influence Consumer Purchases More than Social Networks. “Harnessing the Power of Blogs,” a research study of more than 2,000 online consumers in the US, was conducted by JupiterResearch, a Forrester research company. The study aimed to uncover changing behavior around blog discovery and consumption, how blogs factor into consumer purchase decisions, and the nature of blog influence on buying behavior.
For example, frequent blog readers (those who read blogs more than once per month) – constituting 20% of blog readers – say they trust relevant blog content for purchase decisions more than content from social networking sites, the study found. Below are additional findings released by BuzzLogic. Buying Behavior: The Nature of Blog Influence Niche focus ups influence factor: For those who have found blog content useful for product decisions, more than half (56%) say blogs with a niche focus and topical expertise were key sources. Blogs’ Place in the Purchase Cycle Blog Ads and Reader Trust The study also suggests ads on blogs spur various activities: The State of Blog Search, 2009 - ReadWriteWeb. What blog search engine should you use? That depends on your needs. In order to join a conversation, you've got to be able to find it first. Three years ago "blog search" was expected to be a booming industry, startups left and right developed different technologies and more than a few raised millions of dollars to help users search the part of the web made up of blogs.
These days no one thinks consumer-market blog search is a serious business, but many of us still have a need to limit searches to blogs. What should we do? ReadWriteWeb offers some recommendations and an assessment of the state of the industry below. Choosing a Blog Search Engine Different circumstances call for different search engines. Where These Services Stand Today Technorati is the old stand-by, the blog search engine that the smartest blog lovers used to use. IceRocket is Mark Cuban's baby and has improved more in recent years than anyone else on this list. People don’t trust company blogs. What you should do about it. By Josh Bernoff Consumers trust company blogs less than any other channel. This result comes from a survey we did in Q2 of 2008. Have a look at the data yourself. Not only do blogs rank below newspapers and portals, they rank below wikis, direct mail, company email, and message board posts. Only 16% of online consumers who read corporate blogs say they trust them.
For our clients, the full report is here. Now I suspect this report is going to generate a lot of discussion in the blogosphere, and it’s easy to misinterpret. We examined these results further. In fact, those who trust company blogs are the most trusting of all consumers. In retrospect this result is not that surprising. So, what should you do about this? Make no mistake. It is a plea to be thoughtful in how and why you blog.
This means that if you blog, your goal should be to create a blog about which people say “I like that – I don’t think of it as a company blog.” Instead, adjust your strategy based on your objectives. Maioria não confia em blogs de empresas - Info CORPORATE. New 2008 Social Technographics data reveals rapid growth in adop. By Josh Bernoff Data is my secret weapon. Every time I visit a company, we bring data we’ve collected about the social behaviors of their customers, structured according to the Social Technographics Ladder we introduced last year, a technique we rang the changes on in chapter 3 of Groundswell. When I go to Vanguard, I show them the profile of their customers – and their competitors'.
I went to a company that makes replacement hip joints – I showed them the profile of people with arthritis. But data gets old, especially in the rapidly changing social world. Forrester clients can see our complete analysis of the 2008 data in a document we just published, called The Growth Of Social Technology Adoption. Looking at the US data, the big news in 2008 is that, not unexpectedly, social technology participation has grown rapidly. I find it just as interesting that the Creators group grew only slightly, from 18% to 21%. As usual, the real story comes when you look behind the statistics. Blogs and the Purchasing Decision. One-half of US blog readers surveyed thought blogs were useful for getting information about purchases, according to a BuzzLogic-sponsored study conducted by JupiterResearch. More than one-half of respondents who had trusted blogs for purchase decisions in the past said the information they found on blogs helped determine when they decided to make a purchase.
“For a portion of Web users, blogs rival search as a navigation tool, which has really interesting implications for advertisers,” said Rob Crumpler, CEO of BuzzLogic, in a statement. “Blogs are becoming trusted guides, steering users who are seeking very specific information to places of interest online.” Four out of 10 blog readers surveyed had taken action as a result of viewing a blog ad, and one-half of those who read blogs at least once a month said so. The number of consumers influenced by blogs will rise, based on overall blog readership projections.