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Useful Tools for Flickr

admin — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 01:53:11 +0000

Desktop Applications

Flickr Finder – Mac OS X application for browsing your photos.

1001 for Mac OS X is a desktop client to be used in conjunction with Flickr. It not only uploads photos to your Flickr account, it notifies you anytime new photos from either your contacts, everyone, or your favorite tags are uploaded. 1001 allows you to step into the stream of photos passing through Flickr and to quickly see what’s new at the moment. Just run the app in the background and if triggered, 1001 pops up a small unobtrusive window to notify you of new photos.

Background Switcher periodically changes the background image on your computer (like every hour or every day). You can specify which pictures to choose from in any of the following ways: you can select a list of specific pictures on your computer, you can point it at a selection of folders on your computer, such as ‘My Pictures’ and it will select random pictures from there. You can select pictures by person, tags, sets or just plain random and there are a host of options to narrow down the pictures and increase the quality of those chosen.

Desktop Flickr Organizer for Gnome allows online/offline mode management of your photos. You can upload, search and download photos, through the easy to use interface.

Flickr Exporter for Aperture is an export plugin for Aperture which provides a direct export interface to Flickr.com. It allows to edit photo titles and descriptions, and add tags to them, create a new photoset with your photos, or add them to an existing photoset, automatically send your photos to a Group Pool on Flickr, choose from a list of your Flickr tags and add them to your photos before uploading, and many more.

Flickr Exporter for iPhoto is a plugin for iPhoto which provides a direct export interface to Flickr.com. FlickrExport can update iPhoto’s database with the titles and descriptions you give your photos. It can resize your photos before uploading.

Flickr Notifier is an RSS reader that displays photos on your desktop from your friends’ accounts as they are uploaded. Perhaps, the first RSS notifier that displays images.

Flickr Screensaver v3 turns your screensaver into a slideshow of your Flickr photos.

FlickrDown makes it easy to save photos from Flickr to your hard drive.

FlickrFaves is a small, simple, cross-platform tool for downloading high-resolution versions of your Flickr favorites to your harddrive.

FlickrUploadr is a tool for Linux to upload your pictures to Flickr. It is is written in Python and Gtk.

jUploader is a cross platform, cross-site Photo uploader. Currently it runs on Windows Linux and OS X and supports both Flickr and Zooomr. It allows you to set all properties of a photo before you upload it. It also supports batch editing, so you can make short work of uploading a bunch of files.

Nostalgia an easy and elegant solution to get our photos online. It is a feature rich application that allows you to search flickr remotely and create local sets from the photos you discover. It also supports local photo management and synchronizes to your flickr account, allowing you to update your online photos as well.

PictureSync is a convenient utility that simplifies annotating and batch uploading your photographs and video clips to online services—directly from your albums in image-management applications, or files, and whilst preserving metadata.

Firefox Extensions

PicLens delivers an immersive full-screen experience for viewing photos on the Web. It allows to view photos in full screen with a single click, play a slideshow of image search results and photo albums, and more.

Fireflix is a sidebar extension to upload, manage and search photos

Flickr Sidebar is used for viewing and searching photo lists. You can access it by the command key Ctrl+Shift+F, the toolbar button, or clicking on the menu option View|Sidebars|Flickr Sidebar. Once you have authorized the extension to work with your flickr account, you can search through or view a full list of your photos, your favorites, everyones photos, your individual contacts, or your groups.

FlickrFox provides an easy way for Flickr group administrators to monitor their group pools.

flickrgethighrez lets you directly get any Flickr photo in the larger resolution possible.

Fotofox allows to easily select, tag, title and upload pictures from your computer to an online photo service. Works with Flickr, Tabblo, 23hq, Smugmug, Marela, and Kodak EasyShare Gallery.

OakFlickr4PFF is Flickr photo Uploader Addon for Performancing (1.3+) for Firefox. It will check the pictures in the publishing blog, upload the local ones to flickr and update the link to url of flickr.

Uploadr for Flickr is a localized flickr.com in china, which provided an extension to directly upload images on web pages to it.

Website Tools

Gickr lets you instantly create Animated GIF online, free, right now! Just upload pictures or grab them from your Flickr. Create funny flashy slideshows with you and your friends, cartoons, previews, banners, etc. Post them anywhere you can post pictures: MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, HI5 etc. No need for flash.

Chasr is a mini web application that allows you to display your photos from Flickr on your own website for absolutely free. You can download Chasr and install it on your own server, allowing your users to see your photos on your own website.

‘Color Fields’ Color Picker choose a color from the color picker, pictures featuring that color pop up.

Flickr Anywhere allows you to put flickr in your myspace account or on any webpage with just a quick search. It takes all your public flickr photos and displays them in a compact flash player. Users can click on the larger image and be taken directly to your flickr site to comment.

Flickr Color Selectr – Use a color picker and search only images that are Creative Commons Licensed and match the colors you need.

Flickr Module for CMS will allow you to integrate your photo albums at flickr.com into you CMS Made Simple based website. The module is very flexible and the output is templates based and can thus easily be modified to suit your needs.

Flickr Slideshow Generator allows you to generate the HTML necessary to embed a custom Flickr Slideshow in your page or blog.

FlickrLilli is a nice way to search Flickr.

flickrSLiDR allows you to easily embed the classic flickr slideshows on your website or blog. All you need to do is enter the flickr URL address of the user, photo set or group you would like to embed along with some options. You’ll receive the HTML embed code in return.

PictoBrowsr is a simple widget that allows the display of pictures stored on Flickr on a site or blog. Flickr is one of the most popular and advanced photo management and community applications on the web.

Travelr is a free photo gallery viewer that you can put on your own site. Travelr lets you display your Flickr photos geographically on a world map.

Fun and Games

Bubblr is a tool to create comic strips using photos from Flickr.

Big Huge Labs – a huge collection of little games to play with Flickr photos like making badges, motivational posters, mosaic, calendars, and many more.

Fastr is a game that uses flickr images. It loads ten images that all share a common tag, one by one, and you guess what the tag is. When you guess right, the tag will turn blue, and you’ll get points. The faster you guess, the more points you get.

Flickr Chia Pet grow Chia hair on any photo.

FlickrLogoMakr turn any words into a Flickr-type logo with their font.

Flicktionary offers a compound word game.

Hamster Sudoku uses images of hamsters from Flickr for you to play a picture version of Sudoku.

Memry is a classic memory game based on Flickr images. You can enter a tag and play with images that match it.

Mosaickr offers to create beautiful mosaics from your flickr pictures, and even print them on posters. Creating a mosaick is free. Printing posters starts at 0.99 Euro.

Printr Killr offers to make a calendar with your photos.

Tag Man is the classic game of hangman by guessing the letters in a random photo tag.

Greasemonkey Scripts

Flickr Auto Tag gives you a select box to quickly access the tag combinations you often use.

Ajax Photo Blogging in Flickr allows to post a story about the photo to your blog and add a description or comment on it automatically. There’s no need to save your blog password in Flickr.

Flickr 5 Stars Ratings adds star ratings to your photos.

Flickr Ad Removal gets rid of text ads in Flickr (the ones that show up after using AdBlock to get rid of the graphical ads).

Flickr All Sizes Menu adds a menu to select which size to see when hovering on the All Sizes button.

Flickr AllSizes+ allows you to access all sizes for a Flickr photo, copy the code and download the image. It provides quick access to shortcut functions – download images, copy code to clipboard, view images, etc.

Flickr Auto Page is a greasemonkey script makes small changes to the interface removing the need for you to click on the pagination number and wait for loading times every time you go to the next/previous page. When you browse paginated pages on flickr*, the script will fetch the next page and append it automatically at the end of the current page while you scroll down.

Flickr BBCode Generator is a text box with the BBCode automatically generated when you go to the “All sizes” page for a given size. Creates BBCode to display the image and provide a link back to the Flickr page, as per Flickr’s user agreement.

Flickr Contacts Organiser lets you add tags to any flickr user, you can then view the tagged users via a whole range of different filters, including view by tag, view tagged users photos, favourites, testimonials,most interesting photos, photos of that user etc.

Flickr EXIF Decorator – lets you hover over a photo and puts a translucent overlay in the top left corner which shows you information about the camera.

Flickr GeoRadar is a GM script to search closest photos. A radar screen will be displayed on the left, and green points on radar indicate the locations of nearby photos. The thumbnails are on the right in order of distance from current photo, and arranged from left to right, then top to bottom. When the mouse is moved over any of the thumbs, the corresponding green point on radar will turn to red and a small compass will appear to show the direction.

Flickr Group Display helps manage memberships in groups based on number of views and favorites. When viewing your photos sorted by Views or Favorites, the script will determine which groups each photo belongs to, and display the group information next to the photo, to make it easier to determine which photos need to be moved to new groups.

Flickr Image Src Exposer adds an “IMG LINK” tag making it so you can download any photo.

Flickr Keyboard Navigation adds keyboard shortcuts to some of the most common navigation moves on Flickr. It will work on any flickr page that has those numbered boxes at the bottom (photostreams, searches, long group stuff, etc..)

Flickr Mail To adds an email button to the Flickr photo toolbar, and also a “Send Page” link to the top of every page on Flickr.com clicking it takes you to either the Flickr Mail compose page, with the subject and body prefilled, with the link and title of the photo.

Flickr More Home add more content to your home page.

Flickr Photo Magnifier – Adds a magnifier to the toolbar to see details in photos. This is an adaptation of the TJPZoom image magnifier by János Pál Tóth to work on flickr images.

Flickr Photostream Graphr lets you graph how many times your stream has been viewed.

Flickr Quick Comment Adds a select box with pre written comments. You can create new comments and manage existing commands via the User Script Commands menu. This script is now localised in French, Portuguese and English.

Flickr Q u i c k r v0.3.3 – Add thumbnail/buddys & NavBar. Also removes all Yahoo ads and bloacked images.

Flickr remove spaceball removes the empty image (download deterrent) positioned over some photos on Flickr.

Flickr Rich Edit – Gives you more options in the comments box when it comes to the font.

Flickr Search for Creative Commons will force all searches on Flickr to return creative commons images.

Flickr Show Licenses shows licenses on all pages, to load those licenses automatically (no mouseover), and to leave (cc) licenses alone, displaying only the (c) symbol where appropriate.

Flickr Titles + Descriptions Batch Tools adds 7 new tools for batch editing titles and descriptions.

Flickr/Shutterfly Integrator gives you the ability to order prints of Flickr photos via Shutterfly.

FlickrCommentTools allows you to edit HTML into your comments and include your own photos. Lets you set bold, italic, underline, blockquote, links and insert an image straight off your photostream.

FlickrMailManager adds some options to help manage your Flickr mailbox. Including “Mark all as read” and delete all Notification emails, such as “you are x’s newest contact” and Group Invitations.

FlickrPM adds icons for mail, profile, favourites, Scout, Interestingness and the user’s photo archive next to usernames in forums and on individual photo pages. It also allows you to send Flickr Mails without leaving the current page you are on.

FlickRate adds a rating panel under a current photo in an effort to give Flickr a better ratings system.

Geotag Flickr with Multimap adds “add geotags” link to photo pages, which lets u add the latitude and longitude geographical data, via the maps on the MultiMap.com mapping website, to your Flickr photos.

WordPress Plugins and Tools

FAlbum a Wordpress plugin that allows you to display your Flickr photos and photosets on your site. It features configurable and maintained through standard WordPress administrative page. It allows to view album of most recent photos, view photos using tags, view your tags in a cloud format, and more.

Flickr Comment Importer imports comments from your Flickr account into your WordPress blog.

Flickr Photo Album plugin will pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your WordPress site. There is a pretty simple template provided, but you can customize the templates 100% to match the look and feel of your own site.

Flickr Tag Cloud Widget is plugin for the Widget Sidebar in Wordpress. It will display your flickr tags as a tag cloud in your blog’s sidebar.

FlickrFaves is a plugin to display users’ flickr favorites on their Wordpress sites.

Kubrickr is a tool that lets you replace that giant blue blob at the top of your WordPress 1.5 blog with a nice photo from Flickr. You just need to type some words that relate to your blog and push Submit. Choose one of the photos from the that appears, and save the resulting file to your Default WordPress theme directory.

SimpleFlickr is a plugin for Wordpress that allows you to embed a flickr integrated simpleviewer into your Wordpress site.

Best Online Photography Tools

admin — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 05:16:54 +0000

Photo Sharing

Flickr is certainly one the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. It helps people make their photos available to the people who matter to them. Flickr gets photos into and out of the system in as many ways as possible: from the web, from mobile devices, from the users’ home computers and from whatever software they are using to manage their photos. It enables new ways of organizing photos. In Flickr, you can give your friends, family, and other contacts permission to organize your photos – not just to add comments, but also notes and tags. With Flickr you can create prints, calling cards, photo-books, slideshow-DVDs, postage stamps, and much more.

Picasa is a free software download from Google that helps you locate and organize all the photos on your computer, edit and add effects to your photos, share your photos with others through email, prints and on the web. It is fast, easy and free.

SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations on the web.

Snappages is a collection of online tools designed to make your life easier. You can quickly organize and share your life with friends and family, and do it all online. This service is free.

Zooomr is a site where you can share, search, store, sort and sell your photos online.

Zoom and Go is about inspiring travelers about where to go, what to see, what to do and where to stay based on the experiences of other travelers or on the recommendations from locals around the world. It is a place where people submit pictures, reviews. Zoom and Go members put themselves on video as guides to the world for the places they live or the places they’ve visited.

Photorgy -is the online photo site . You can use it to post your photos, upload entire folders, link any photo from your blog or MySpace, get photos in a shared album, and more.

Clickfriends makes it easy to upload, organize and share your photos online. Create your free account and join the photo-sharing fun. It offers to create unlimited albums, upload you photos to each album, add titles, caption and description to your photos.

DPhoto lets you easily share your photos with family and friends in your own online gallery, while also creating a secure backup of all your photos. A free account allows you to store 100 photos. For $7 per month you can store an unlimited number of photos.

Photo Search

Pixsy – is an image search engine that provides PixsyPower, a custom video and photo search for your own site.

Google Image Search remains one of the best ways to find images of any kind on the web.

PicSearch – image search with special options – you can choose to search only black and white or color photos.

YotoFoto indexes images in the public domain or available for free usage under various forms of copy left licensing.

EveryStockPhoto is a search engine for creative commons photos. It is aimed to be a community for designers, developers, photographers and other media publishers who want better, easier access to license-specific media on the web.

Free Photo Hosting

SmugMug is a photo uploader, editor, and community portal all in one. It keeps 4 backup copies of each photo in 3 states. Retrieve them anytime. It offers unlimited storage. Your friends can see your photos without registering, and without spam. No Ads.

Photobucket is the most popular site on the Internet for uploading, sharing, linking and finding photos, videos, and graphics. Your free Photobucket account can store thousands of photos and hours of video. Photobucket also offers free tools for making slide shows of photos, videos with music. You can share your photos and videos with friends by email, IM and mobile phone.

ImageShack is an intuitive and easy-to-use free media hosting service. It can be used to upload images, flash files, and movies, and share them with friends using any imaginable means.

TheImageHosting allows to upload multiple pictures at one time, link your photos in web sites, email, blogs, register an account to manage your files, create online photo galleries for free, and more.

ImageVenue is a free image hosting solution. It is designed for you to share digital pictures with friends, post images on message and bulletin boards and blogs. You can also hot link images from your personal website or eBay auctions.

Online Photo Editors

Phixr.com allows you to edit your pictures and directly upload them to Flickr, Fotopic, Livejournal, Photobucket, Fotolog.com, and others.

With Pixer.us you can edit your photos online using only your browser. You can apply functions like saturation, colorfx, blur and sharpen, brightness and contrast.

Fauxto – image editing application which allows you to free-transform beautiful, anti-aliased text within a layer, and then apply a multi-colored radial gradient with a variable focal point in another. You’ll be quite surprised with what you can do within Fauxto.

SnipShot is a browser based image editor. It enables to save pictures as GIF, JPG, PDF, PNG or TIF. It has basic editing tools like crop, rotate, resize, and basic image adjustments like contrast, brightness, saturation, sharpness and hue. There is unlimited undo and redo.

MyImager – is free online image editor. Upload or call images from anywhere on the web and edit them freely with the the dozens of tools and filters that myImager.com offers.

OnlinePhotoTool allows you to edit and save your images, screenshots and photos online. The following functions are possible: resize, crop, add text, sharpen, rotate, flip, colour balance, saturation, levels, paint, add icons, sepia, black and white.

Pixenate is online photo editing software that you can use stand-alone or integrate into an existing photo-sharing or photo-printing website. If you provide a photo-based web service, Pixenate can significantly enhance the ’stickiness’ of your website by offering an easy-to-use integrated photo editor that doesn’t require your users to download and install additional software.

With XMG Image you can host, edit, organize, and share your images with ease. XMG Image gives you the ability to manipulate your images in any way possible. Do simple functions like, crop, rotate, resize, and constrain images with 1-click. More advanced features include, advanced effects, image enhancing and more.

Photo Mixing and Slide Shows

Slide is the largest personal media network in the world, reaching more than 134 million unique global viewers. It helps people express themselves and tell stories through personalized photos and videos created on Slide.com and viewed anywhere on the web or desktop.

RockYou offers free services, including slide show creation, photo hosting, photo enhancement and more. RockYou is free.

Mixercast allows to create professional multimedia experiences by mixing your images, video, and sound easily with our unique templates and share across the web in one click.

Flektor hosts your photos, videos, and music. You can make customized slide shows, polls, text, or direct and edit your own movie with hundreds of effects and next generation glitter graphics all online. You can record or even broadcast yourself live on a webcam. When you’re done, post them on MySpace profile layout and comments, Facebook, Blogger, Digg, Photobucket…or any other website of your choice.

Photo Printing and Book Creation

Snapfish -is a leading online photo service with more than 40 million members and one billion unique photos stored online. It enables the members to share, print and store their most important photo memories at the lowest prices – online or off. Snapfish offers professionally-developed digital camera prints as low as 10¢, film developing for just $2.99 per roll, free online photo sharing, unlimited online photo storage, free editing tools and software, wireless imaging services, and more than 80 personalized photo products, ranging from calendars, mugs and mouse pads, to boxer shorts, and dog leashes.

Moo can help you turn your virtual contents into excellent print products. You can make note cards and mini cards from your photos and design. These can be used for promotional materials or business cards.

Use Shutterfly for free to organize and edit your pictures. You can get 2 Web addresses to showcase your pictures. Save with Shutterfly Studio -4×6 prints for 12¢ each.

Fotki provides free unlimited photo hosting for sites, blogs, auctions and emails. Enjoy the best prices: 9 cent pro quality prints! Besides, you can participate in photo contests.

Photography Blogs

Chromasia a blog where you can find photographs in a wide range of subjects and topics in a unique and contemporary style: scenes from the Fylde Coast (in and around Blackpool), items washed up on the shore, portraits of children and adults, a range of abstract things and scenes, and a variety of other topics.

Thomas Hawk – Zooomr’s Thomas Hawk on photography, Zooomr, Flickr and general tech news.

PhotoCritic – an excellent DIY photography Web blog.

Stuck In Customs – blog by one of the greatest HDR photographers on the net.

Black and White Photography is a great photo blog focusing on black and white photos.

Shutterlog - a photo blog designed and fed by Stéphane Alaimo.

DPreview is a place where you can find all the latest digital photography and imaging news, reviews of the latest digital cameras and accessories, the most active discussion forums, a large selection of sample galleries, a digital camera database and buyers guide and the most comprehensive database of digital camera features and specifications.

Premium Blogger Resources

admin — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 01:42:06 +0000

WordPress Themes

Wordpress Themes provides a great amount of WordPress themes that are conveniently categorized according to the theme and theme properties.

ThemeViewer provides WordPress users with the opportunity to view the huge amount of themes available and allow them a quick test run or demo at the same time.

TemplateMonster provides an excellent collection of WordPress Themes that is updated regularly. If you fail to find the design for your blog, you can use the wishbox to request the design you desire.

Movable Type Styles

Style Library helps to make your Movable Type blog look fresh. You need just to choose a category, select a style, then click “Show Details” to download CSS and image files.

The Style Contest enables the design community to indulge and explore the contribution their expertise makes to the quality of blogging tools and the user experience and then to reward them for it. The Style Archive was created to provide a permanent home and gallery for the designers who contribute so greatly to all of our blogs — both directly and indirectly.

Style Generator can be used to create your own Styles with Movable Type.

Best WordPress Plugins

Flickr Photos plugin will pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your WordPress site. There is a pretty simple template provided, but you can customize the templates 100% to match the look and feel of your own site. This plugin will also add a new Photos tab in your WordPress edit screen which will allow you to easily insert your Flickr photos into your blog posts with just a couple clicks.

Sociable bookmarking sites allow websurfers to save, catalog, and share interesting pages they find online. The Sociable plugin appends links for your readers to use those sites to the end of each of your blog’s posts, increasing your potential audience.

Akismet is a blog comment spam prevention plug-in. It restores the innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

Wordpress Backup creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.

Adsense Deluxe is an easy-to-use plugin for WordPress 1.5+ (including WP 2.0) for quickly inserting Google or Yahoo! ads into your blog posts, and managing when and where those ads are displayed.

WP Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.

Sitemap Generator generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

Preview Pane is a plugin which returns the preview frame which was formely at the bottom of the edit screen showing a preview of your edits.

Facebook Photos provides easy access to your Facebook photos by allowing you to easily post them to your blog. After you have linked the plugin to your Facebook account, photos you upload to Facebook will automatically show up in a convenient “Photos” tab in your WordPress powered blog.

Feedburner Feed Replacement is a reliable way to track your entire feed-reading audience and can even result in that elusive “bump in subscribers” effect when you first activate it.

LightBox 2 is a Wordpress plugin used to overlay images on the current page into neat Javascript-powered overlay popups.

Ultimate Tag Warrior is a multi-headed hydra of a plugin. It allows you to add tags either through the Write Post page in wordpress in a tag box, on posts using an AJAXy box, and in posts using special syntax from external editors (or internally). From the write post page, you can also get suggestions for tags using the Yahoo! keyword suggestion service.

Stat Traq provides detailed statistics in a nice graphical format. The plugin tracks public activity of WordPress and reports: hits, number of Unique PHP sessions, page views, IP Addresses, browser, referrer.

Wordpress Plugin Repositories

Official Wordpress Plugins Site is one of the best collection of WordPress plugins.
Wp-Plugins – a comprehensive list of Wordpress plugins.
Wp Plugins DB – is a large database of plugins for Wordpress.
Weblog Tools Collection posts regular Wordpress news, updates of themes, plugins, ideas, hacks, quick fixes and everything about blogging. The site is available in Spanish and German.

Movable Type Plugins

MT Notifier plugin for Movable Type greatly increases the notification options you have available on your site. It extends the notification process by allowing subscriptions to individual entries, so that visitors to your site can keep up with comments that are left, as well as providing new entry notification for individual categories or even across an entire blog.

InlineEditor adds links to entries in your weblog which when clicked display the entry form inline – right there on your blog. This allows you to quickly edit entries without having to leave your weblog – a great way to correct those typos. InlineEditor also extends this functionality to comment inline editing – a blog administrator or a commenter (for a set amount of time) can edit a comment inline in a similar fashion to entries.

MT Blogroll – is more than a simple link manager. It has the ability to interact with a number of web services including Technorati, Ping-o-matic, del.icio.us and digg.com.

Blog Search Engines

Ice Rocket is a Google-like blog search engine.

Google Blog Search is a very simple blog search engine. It looks through blogs and comments on blogs.

Sphere is a blog search engine that offers a contextual widget which shows related posts from other blogs.

Technorati searches, surfaces, and organizes blogs and the other forms of independent, user-generated content (photos, videos, voting, etc.)

Free Blog Hosting Services

Blogger is an easy-to-use web site, where you can quickly post thoughts, interact with people, and more. All for free.

With WordPress you can get a blog started in less time than it takes you to read this sentence. You can blog as much as you want for free, your blog can be public to the world or private for just your friends, and our paid upgrades are completely optional. You can change the look of your blog with over 60 attractive themes ranging from professional to crazy, and you can switch themes instantly with just a click of a button.

LiveJournal lets you express yourself, share your life, and connect with friends online. You can use LiveJournal in many different ways: as a private journal, a blog, a discussion forum, a social network, and more.

Tumblr lets you easily post videos, pictures, links, and of course you can write there too.

Vox is a great place to build your online neighborhood. Add seamless integration with popular web services like Flickr and YouTube. Vox makes sharing your life with friends and family, easy, safe, and fun.

Xanga is a lively community of online diaries. Create your own profile and interact with other users.

Dedicated and Shared Hosting Services

HostGator provides Reseller Web Hosting and Shared Hosting solutions. The reseller hosting program is for both businesses and individuals. All plans include a 99.9% uptime guarantee, 24/7 support, and a 30-day money back guarantee.

Blogsite combines multiple weblogs, syndicated guest weblogs, and automatically maintained public briefing channels to create a formidable Internet presence that can be maintained easily by non-technical users. It provides daily market intelligence briefings, delivered securely to your authors, to help them be more informed and productive in their blogging activity.

CirtexHosting brings professional, affordable and qualitative Web hosting to users all around the globe. It provides Shared Hosting & Reseller Hosting Solutions for both individuals and businesses. All customers enjoy 24/7 Support, 99.5% Uptime Guarantee and a 30-Day Unconditional Money back guarantee.

BlueHost offers professional Web Hosting plans that include all the features you are looking for at the best possible price.

Dreamhost offers a premium blog hosting for a very small amount of money.

Media Temple provides Grid based hosting. It eliminated roadblocks and single points of failure by using hundreds of servers working in tandem for your site, applications, and email. You always will be ready for intense bursts of traffic and the growing audience resulting from your online success.

TypePad is the premier blogging service for professionals, hosting many of the world’s most popular blogs and small business web sites. TypePad’s ease of use enables you to create a blog in minutes.

Blog Statistics & Analysis

StatCounter is a free yet reliable invisible web tracker, highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats. Insert a simple piece of our code on your web page or blog and you will be able to analyze and monitor all the visitors to your website in real-time.

Site Meter’s comprehensive real time website tracking and counter tools give you instant access to vital information and data about your sites audience. With the detailed reporting you’ll have a clear picture of who is visiting your site, how they found you, where they came from, what interests them and much more.

Feedburner is the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. Its Web-based tools help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web.

Alexa has the statistics for all of the Internet. It lets you compare your blog to another one.

Google Analytics can help you learn even more about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site.

MeasureMap helps you understand what people do at your blog, and what influence you are having on the world.

Blog Monetization

PayPal allows you to set up a donations system on your site. Your readers can click a button that will bring them to a page where they can send you some cash.

Chitika helps you earn money by placing Chitika ads.

LinkAdage allows to get revenue from your website by way of bidding, brokering, and exchanging text advertisements.

Txtswap is a text link exchange network. It allows you to show links for your own site on other websites in return for showing links to other websites on your own site. The result: More visibility and more traffic to your site.

Google AdSense matches ads to your site’s content, and you earn money whenever your visitors click on them.

Yahoo Publisher network – display ads that are relevant to the content of your site and earn money from qualified clicks.

AdBrite – Get paid for text link advertisements on your blog.

Text Link Ads a supplier of text link advertisements. Sell simple, relevant text ads on your website, and make money.

BidVertiser - display the BidVertiser text ads on your website or blog, get paid for every click and have the payments sent directly to your PayPal account.

ReviewMe – get paid to review products and services on your site. You control what you review.

PayPerPost Get paid for blogging. Write about web sites, products, services, and companies and earn cash for providing your opinion and valuable feedback to advertisers. Disclosure required.

BlogBurst - increase your reach, visibility, and readership by making your blog available to the network of leading publishers. Best blogs get paid for their content.

Mobile Based Blogging

Jaiku brings people closer together by enabling them to share their presence. It offers a way to connect with the people you care about by sharing presence updates with them on the Web and mobile.

TextAmerica allows to send images and video via camera phone, upload Images and video from your desktop or digital camera, post instantly to the Web (no MMS or email needed).

Twitter lets you say what you are doing in 140 characters or less.

Blogs about Blogging

Advanced Business Blogging is designed to pull back the curtain of confusion surrounding the use of blogs, podcasts, MySpace, YouTube, and many more Web 2.0 tools. It takes you way beyond the technology to the strategies proven to get results when using New Media to win new business online.

Andy Wibbels is the author of Blogwild! A Guide for Small Business Blogging. He has helped hundreds of businesses all over the world get started blogging, increase traffic and make money online.

Blogging for Business focuses on practical business implications and uses of new media and technologies, including Blogging and Business, podcasting, and other “Cool Internet Stuff.”

Blogging Pro provides news, plugins, tips and technical support for bloggers.

Blogs in Education is designed to provide you some resources if you want to get started using blogs for yourself or with your students.

MasterNewMedia is the new media communication expert that researches, writes and publishes on the effective use of new technologies for learning, business and social change.

Problogger is dedicated to helping other bloggers learn the skills of blogging, share their own experiences and promote the blogging medium.

Blogging Forums & Sites

Blogger Forum is a primary Internet source for blogging information, help and tips. It provides help to new bloggers to start them off in the world of blogging.

Bloggst is a community for bloggers. It provides daily updated articles on blogging and a discussion forum.

Blogger Talk – great resource for bloggers who want to share their experiences.

The Blog Herald is a premium source of blog and blogging related news for bloggers.

True Blogging – a forum completely dedicated to bloggers, blogging resources and blog monetization.

Webloggers focuses on marketing blogs, software for bloggers, blogging news and mobile blogging.

Useful Tools

MyBlogLog – Possibly the coolest blog community building tool around. Doubles as a simple analytics tool.
BlogRolling is a one-stop linklist manager for your blog or journal, helping you manage your ever-evolving linklist with ease. Managing your linklist meant having to crawl through the HTML in your template every time you want to add or remove a link. No more! Now it’s as simple as clicking a link or making a pit stop at BlogRolling.

PollDaddy is a free online tool, which allows you to create polls and place them on your website or blog, or anywhere online that you can paste a bit of HTML A poll allows you to ask your website visitors or email respondents a question for which you will give them a series of answers to choose from. Once people start to vote, you can view the results by logging into your PollDaddy account or subscribing to the poll RSS feed.

Favicon Maker is the first web tool for creating still / animated favicons from regular images.

Qumana is an easy-to-use desktop blog editor, enabling you to write, edit and post to one or more blogs. You can use Qumana even when you are offline. Save your blog posts to your hard drive and upload whenever you like. Great for bloggers on the move. Qumana features include easy text formatting and image insertion, simple Technorati tagging, and advertising insertion with Q Ads. Make money from your blog content by inserting the ads of your choice with the built-in Q Ads tool.

Blogjet is a Windows blog client for managing multiple blogs, with features no web-based blog editor can match. Your photos on Flickr and videos on YouTube will complement your blog – and now it’s easy to insert them to your posts, as BlogJet supports these services natively.

Blogarithm lets you easily manage all the blogs (or any other pages you’d like) that you track. Any time one or more of the blogs you read changes, you’ll get BlogMailtm – a morning email listing all your blogs that have new content – including excerpts when available!

BlogSticker is a new and original service which allows you to display stickers on your blog. By placing a single sticker you can: support any topics, specific campaigns, your favourite teams, your favourite brands, tell the world what you are up to, tell the world what you are against to, and much, much more.

MyOpenId is a new way to identify yourself all over the web. With your own personal OpenID you can login to any OpenID-enabled site and identify yourself as you.

BlogFlux tools offers 4 useful tools – Button Maker, Email Scramble, Quick RSS links, Who’s Online (find out who is visiting your website).

Must-Read Articles to Become a Blogger

editor — Thu, 10 May 2007 15:14:35 +0000

Many of you are always looking for ways to improve your blogs. I think the best way to be successful is to learn from those who have already made their mark. Here is a listing of must-read articles which have enough information to help you to make your blog the best.

Content

5 Ways to Building a Better Blog

5 Tips for Writing Timeless Content

Bring Your A-game to Write for Blogs

5 Steps to Writing the Best Blog Posts

10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas that Work

What Are You Learning from Leading Edge SEO Bloggers?

Better Beginnings: how to start a presentation, book, article…

Bring Your A-game to Write for Blogs

Increasing Traffic

How to Get Traffic for Your Blog

21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic