Blogging for profit – get more people to your site

• Simple, little article about blogging for profit
• In summary, it recommends doing a bit of ‘blog promotion’ to get lots of users to your site, rather than just doing lots of posts to get your site to the top of blog directories

Cool web games, reviews etc at Web Game Magazine

• Growing blog-style magazine that reviews and rates web games
• You can look up games by type or popularity. They also have some handy quick links to their favourite games in the left hand column.

Funny… Weekly caption competition archive at the BBC

The BBC do a weekly caption competion. You can see the archive here.

BBC’s ‘ten things we didn’t know last week’

• The BBC do a weekly magazine item listing ‘10 things we didn’t know last week – you can see the archive here
• Some examples… ‘Scouting for Boys by Lord Baden-Powell is the fourth bestselling book of the 20th Century, after the Bible, the Koran and Mao’s Little Red Book’
• ‘We each get a completely new skeleton every 10 years, because of cell renewal’
• ‘Spiralling obesity rates are forcing councils to upgrade their crematoria, to take wider coffins.’
• ‘It is cheaper to ship waste from London to Shenzen in China than it is to send it by road from London to Manchester.’

Very cute and funny kitten pics

• Some very funny/cute pics from ICanHasCheezburger
• In case you’ve never heard of the site (how?!?) – it seems to be top/almost top of the ‘today’s hottest blogs’ section at wordpress every day!

Take visitors to a random post on your WordPress blog

• All you need to do is add ‘?random’ to the end of your URL and the link will go to a random page on your blog e.g. click here for a random post from my blog
• See the article on this function here

Share big files with a ‘Box.net’ widget

• WordPress have just joined forces with Box.net to give us a cool widget to let people download big files
• You can see an example and learn more here

The rich getting richer on the back of the poor – sculpture pic

- Picture of a sculpture in Ringkobing (picture/sculpture says it all)

- BBC have a very relevant article about the richer getting even richer!?!?!

- There are lots of other cool/funny sculpture pics at the site e.g. Man at Work

Laughter quotes

- 10 or so ‘Laughter quotes’ at Sugar Shock
- e.g. ‘He who laughs, lasts!’

People sharing their secrets anonymously by post card…

- VERY cool site where people send in postcards with their secrets written on the back
- Some are quite intense/adult in nature (you have been warned!)
- Cards are usually done in quite an arty way
- Site claims it is ‘the largest advertisement-free Blog on the Web’ (hit counter shows 74 million + visitors)

Cool (though a little weird) pics of ’sculptures’…

Nice little collection of pics on someone’s blog. Some are pretty gothic, using skulls and bones etc. The site (uncommonpictures.blogspot.com) has some other arty pics as well.

Becoming/being self-employed… hints and tips

*Becoming/being self-employed article here*
Especially aimed at web-workers, a nice little summary of ‘best practices’ for the self-employed is available at WebWorkerDaily (lots of other interesting posts here as well.)

Free traffic! Increase web site traffic for free.

Get some free traffic to your blog / web site (through a site called ‘ipings’.) All you do is fill in 4 boxes on a form (name, URL etc), and click submit. When you do, a bunch of sites get notified that you have new content for them to come and index. Its a dead easy way to increase traffic to your web site / blog.

**WARNING! – you should only use the service when you add new content to your site. Pinging without having new content “probably will get you banned or ignored”!!

If you want to know about how the site works and what happens when you ‘ping’, check out the ‘about‘ and ‘to ping or not to ping‘ pages. Well worth reading IMHO – there are good explanations of how web spiders work and how pinging can help you get listed on major search engines!

Do you Digg?… Digg this post at Digg.com

Digg is a GREAT place to go to find out what cool/interesting/fun sites people have come across. Its a major (ranked 88th most popular site in the world! at Alexa.com) ’social bookmarking’ site, where members submit ‘content’ (weblog posts, news articles, etc.) Other users then check out the content themselves and if they like it they ‘Digg’ it.

**To Digg this article, click here **

Robots in our future

Scientists are predicting that in the very near future (within 5 years) we’ll have robots for things like child-minding, care-home work, and prison monitoring! This is according to an article in the Daily Mail, a large UK national daily paper… “Are we safe from robots that can think for themselves?“

The BBC also have some interseting articles on this subject. An article written yesterday talks about future robots being autonomous, decision making machines. It also talks about ‘robot rights’! amongst other things. There are some other good robot articles in the right hand column as well.

Blog marketing – get your blog known

If you want to do a bit of ‘blog marketing’ and get your blog known, there’re a whole bunch of blog directory sites where you can get your blog listed. There’s a good list of them at Google, and another list here from IsPopularOnline. The IsPopularOnline site also has a big list of sites (on the same page) where you can submit the RSS feeds from your blog.

(a few of the links seem to be down, but most of them are good)

Kryptonite is REAL!

The BBC have reported on the discovery of a new mineral which was described in the film Superman Returns as Kryptonite! See for yourself here. Does this mean the real Superman is out there as well?!?!? lol

Its a small world – video

Very cool video about how small the world is. Not your normal kind of ‘its a small world’ – this video shows how small the earth is in comparison to other planets and stars (almost 100,000 views and 4 star rated at YouTube.)

Funny Cat Pictures

Funny cat pictures… LOADS OF THEM!! There are around 2,500 pictures of cats in all kinds of funny poses over at the ‘Kattalogen.’ Some have funny quotes on them, and some are just plain funny pictures.

NB. all of the pictures are thumbnailed on one big page!

Reiki healing for free

Free Reiki healing is available at The Reiki Experiment. All you need to do is leave a comment on the ‘Request a healing’ Page and someone will ’send’ you a healing. There’s a Wikipedia entry on Reiki if you want more info about this type of healing.

The pleasure of finding things out

You can see this and other snippets from a Richard Feynman interview on the BBC Horizon Webiste. You can also see the full interview (in 6 parts) at YouTube. The sound’s out of sync with the picture, but the interview is still very good.

Online checkers with power-ups

Awesome 2 player web based ‘checkers’ game with tons of power ups and squares that can be raised and lowered (you’ll see what I mean.) This game could get to be VERY addictive

Click here for the quick video tutorial.

To get started, enter a guest name, click ’start’, then click on a few names in the opponents box and someone should give you a game fairly quickly.

Crazy gadget pics (slippers with headlights etc)

The Daily Mail has pics of some very unusual gadgets. After the slippers with headlights, my favourite is probably the ’shuffling shoes’, which might actually be quite useful?…

Have you caught the latest bug?

‘Who is sick?’ is a site where users record their illnesses. The data gets plotted on a Google map so, for example, you can see if you’re the victim of the latest bug going around. There’s a bar chart showing whether reports of different types of sickness are growing or falling, various search functions and a discussion forum. The site’s still in its infancy but this could well be an interesting site to come back to once its been going for a while. Remember to ‘Digg’ it up if you like it

Satellite launch rocket exploding

Awesome video footage of a satellite launch rocket that blew up just after take off. The debris was so hot, it melted the wheel rims on a car!