I was very happy to know that my online friend Brad from Melbourne, Australia, finally got a web hosting account. Since 2006, he has been actively blogging using Wordpress.com’s free blogging service. He finally broke that record when he decided to purchase a Rudolf Mini hosting plan from Top Hosting Center. Now, he names his blog “Brad’s Blog” dot ORG and it appears crappy for the moment but will improve over time. It’s really weird for me because he chose to register for a .ORG than to pick another domain name (the .NET and .COM versions of his domain were already taken, which could have been better).

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Just a few weeks ago a guy named Brad from Melbourne, Australia, popped up on my channel’s chat page while I was broadcasting on Justin dot TV. Since then, we got in touch and shared thoughts about blogging, traffic building, computers, and lifestyle differences between our countries. It’s always cool to have some new friends from different cultures and learning from them. Just today, Brad invited me for a YouTube interview I never had yet ever since — so he made a new record for me.

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Blow all your whistles and toot all your horns for BlogRush, but I beg to disagree that their web service is able to drive substantial traffic. The teaser on their homepage, which reads “the fastest and easiest way to instantly drive a flood of targeted readers,” is none other than just a highfalutin blurb. I’ve been using it for months and the highest traffic I got from a single post was one – quite a drought.

BlogRush is a cooperative syndication network launched by John Reese. Their web service binds the blogs of their members through their widget which displays five clickable blog post headlines. Each member earns one syndication credit every time the widget is loaded on their respective blogs. It also costs them same value to have their recent blog post title displayed on another member’s blog.
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For three days starting May 2 next month, bloggers inclined towards online business and marketing will meet in Chicago, United States, for an annual conference dubbed this year as “SobCon08 Biz School for Bloggers.” The conference will be held at Summit Executive Center, popularly known for hosting meetings of most influential international brands. The 48-hour summit will touch various topics concerning social business, social media, business management, and online marketing.

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Last March 29, I saw another notice in my WordPress control panel telling me that the latest version of WordPress, version 2.5, has been released and my installation must be upgraded. I’ve read from many blogs that this version will bring new looks and speed to the WordPress control panel. So, without further ado, I instantly downloaded the new version from WordPress official website and upgraded mine.

The upgrade process went very smooth and definitely transparent. As usual, WordPress guys made things easy – no “computerese,” no jargons whatsoever, just good steps. After I upgraded, I was redirected to the WordPress login and it is where my impression begins.

The login design has been changed for better. It looks very neat and fresh now, unlike the blue one that we used to see in the previous version which, in my opinion, was large.

The center of improvement came after I logged into my WordPress control panel. I was surprised – indeed, there are big changes. The first thing I noticed basically is the design. The new WordPress 2.5 default dashboard configuration displays recent comments, incoming links, WordPress development blog, popular plugins and the typical box news.

The default main menu now comes with only five items: Write, Manage, Design, Comments and Ratings. The Write menu item when clicked displays the Write Post page featuring the revamped (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) WYSIWYG WordPress blog editor. The Manage menu item lets you manage posts, pages, links, categories, tags, link categories, media library and like before, boasts WordPress Import and Export function. The Design menu, on the other hand, is equivalent to previous “Presentation” menu. The Settings, Plugins and User menu items are now displayed in small font to the upper right portion of the administration panel.

Another thing that is noticeable with the new WordPress is the speed. It is a whole lot faster than the previous one – one thing many bloggers will like (including me). The one-click plugin upgrade is superb. It asks for your domain’s FTP login information, and then it upgrades the outdated plugins for you.

My conclusion is that I very much prefer the previous blue-themed control panel. When I found that the color scheme can be changed to classic through the Settings, however, my little disappointment vanished. Now, WordPress 2.5 looks good and I love it like other bloggers do.

Becoming a blogger is a good thing. First, you’ll start learning how to write articles properly, then you’ll begin to appreciate doing research that you never really liked when you were still at school. You’ll learn how to promote your blog to various social networks, and then finally decide to monetize it at the same time. The difficult part is, when you immerse into blogging, you can hardly stop.

One thing about blogging is that is it very time-consuming but very satisfying when your published articles are able to make good traffic to your sites and clicks on your affiliate advertisements. Blogging is very addicting indeed. The bonus is that you also get to know with new people from anywhere in the world and befriend them simply because of a popular blog post you submitted on Digg or get stumbled in Stumbled Upon by other users.

Today, to celebrate the Fool’s Day, I’m going to show you the first craziest video I ever did in my whole life that was uploaded in YouTube. I did not make it for nothing, it is for this blog and for other bloggers. The video actually tells bloggers to take a while and get a break from writing or doing tasks related to blogging. And if you want to know what bloggers should do during breaks — well, just do the locomotion!

If you are a blogger and you want to join the “locomotion” phenomena, then just download that song, get your webcam to record a video, and use that dance step. Send it to me after and I’ll weave all our videos to become a global blogger locomotion.

Earlier today, I came across a website called JS-Kit from nowhere. I was immediately caught by it when I read that it offers something interesting to websites and blogs. Because it sounded like there’s another useful WordPress plugin to me, I decided to peruse further and give their services a try. Now, here’s my honest review after playing with their services for few hours.

What is JS-Kit?

I was intrigued when I found out that JS-Kit is not a set of WordPress or any blog platform plugin – and it’s not exclusive to blogs either – it works with any web page. JS-Kit is in fact, a package of web services that you can take advantage in many ways. It works similar to a widget. JS-Kit comprises of five different services that work amazingly with each other: Navigator, Ratings, Reviews, Comments and Polls.

The installation is flawless and very easy. You only need to insert the code snippet they provide for each service, and then load the page in the browser and poof – there you go. If you’ve ever tried using Google Analytics or StatCounter’s web analyzer codes then you’ll find the installation process similar.

One of JS-Kit’s weaknesses is that it will not run on websites that block JavaScript (since it is mainly powered by that scripting language). Therefore, there is no hope adding it on MySpace or Friendster which potentially could promote socialization.

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Bloggers commonly have two sources of significant income: money earned from the sponsored advertisements of affiliate programs, and the income coming from paid reviews. Signing up for an affiliate program is much easier to do than registering for programs that pays for every review post you make. Affiliate programs only require you to have a running website – that is why it’s the easiest thing to do if you want to monetize your new blog site.

Paid review programs usually require a certain reputation, PageRank (PR) level of a blog and number of existing blog posts, before an applicant is accepted to the program. Rumors about Google penalizing blog sites who participate in paid reviews, which in their view is a way of building links “artificially”, also discourages new bloggers to get involved to the said program. However, doing paid reviews still and yet the biggest income source of popular bloggers like John Chow.

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