If case you don´t know to celebrate the launch of helpmeblog.com BlogExplosion is donating $500 to charity and also rewarding $100 to the member who designs the best logo (see lack of one above) for this blog. These are just a few of the many logos that were submitted to us on our Forums

Now for the winner. We are setting up a voting poll this weekend where all members of BlogExplosion will be able to vote on the winning logo. We will be providing the voting link over the next couple of days where you can directly have input to what logo we will use for this blog!

Thanks to everyone that submitted their logo—They look awesome and this is just an example of the power of 30,000 bloggers combining different creative talents (and a chance for a few bucks isn´t bad either) to come up with some pretty amazing looking creative!

BlogExplosion always needs new creative—More contests like this one coming as early as next week!

I was looking around for anything related to weekend blog traffic trends because blogging activity across the board including BlogExplosion on weekends really drops. I found a really good article for members on Blog Business World about how to maintain readership and blog traffic over the weekend by adding contests and other fun stuff to reward your regular readers. Lots of solid ideas there. Great article.

Looks like famous food blogger Julie Powell talked a little too much about other recipe blogs out there and what she “really thought about them”…

Great blog post by B.L Ochman´s on whatsnextblog. Check it out. Good read.

Negative blogging can be devastating for any company. A single blog post can be circulated around the Blogosphere in hours. For corporations that have spent millions of dollars buiding their brands (think of Coke, Nike, General Motors) over the years, negative blog buzz can potentially severely damage a corporate image in a very short period of time. One post..

Great post by George Simpson on iMedia Connection about how weary corporations still are of blogging and what the consequences can be.

Tessa Wegert of Clickz.com writes about blogs..

“They connect potential customers with products and brands. They’re a breeding ground for consumer feedback and a market research source. From a marketer’s perspective, blogs pretty much have it all.

Now, if only we could infiltrate them.”

BlogExplosion saw the potential problem of splogs or “keyword blogs” the first day we opened the site. Splogs are mass-produced fake blogs designed to attract the attention of search engines by clustering high-paying advertising keywords on their blogs. Search engines like Technorati and IceRocket are having a hard time of separating the good blogs from the bad blogs where these splogs are thriving in blog search engine results because of the way keywords are optimized. Something has to change…

That was the reason since day one we practiced the policy of manually approving each blog before it is listed on BlogExplosion. Without manual approvals the quality level would diminish to the point where we would lose the majority of our good members. We spend hours a day approving incoming blogs (100-300 per day) but that is the only way to maintain a quality base of blogs on BE.

On that note we deny 30-45% of new blogs added to BlogExplosion each day largely due to blog spammers trying to increase traffic to these fake blogs in search for clicks. Splog accounts are automatically deleted without notice. We really need blog hosts like BlogSpot to help do their part as we do our part to help keep the progression of blogging a positive one.

Nobody has been more vocal specifically about Blogspot “splogs” than Mark Cuban (owner of the NBA Mavericks and behind IceRocket.com) in his post Get Your Blogspot Sh$t Together Google.

On CNET News they refer to splogs as “spam re-invented”

The scourge of e-mail–spam–has reinvented itself for the world of blogs, in a phenomenon experts have dubbed “splog.” And Google is in the hot seat.

.. and of course there is a new search engine for splogs called Splogspot launched by our friend Kailash over at Pingoat (our Ping Partner on BlogExplosion)… Search Engine Journal has a good article about Splogspot here.

Looks like this blog helpmeblog.com is on their list. Better notify someone there and get that cleared up

Looking to increase traffic to your blog? Why not rent you blog!

Rent My Blog is now out of BETA where BE members can rent thumbnail space on other member blogs for credits.

Check out Rent My Blog

http://www.blogexplosion.com/rentmyblog/

Remember

- all campaigns are for one week now

- you can rent your blog for 10-500 credits per rent campaign

Check out the stats for the last 50 completed Rent My Blog campaigns! Gives you a quick look at how rent stats look like.

Whether you are looking to rent space on your blog or buy space on other blogs this is a fun way to meet other members of BlogExplosion. 

I was just visiting Podcasting News and saw their article about Adam Curry predicting a boom in adult-related content via blogs, podcasts and videocasting.

We have received a couple of podcasts with with adult-powered content and I have to 100% agree with Mr. Curry.

With mobile video content looking to be the next big thing it´s quite likely that online porn will continue to dominate internet use.

We were searching for some blog usability documents and came across Jakob Nielsen’s Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes

Hmm. Wonder how many of those rules BlogExplosion violates? Probably not good..

Pajamas Media confirms “Instapundit” Glenn Reynolds, CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, Michael Barone, David Corn, and Claudia Rosett among Editorial Board Members

There has been plenty of talk about blog networks lately and asks many questions about how people will receive their media in the future.

Looks like it debuts in November.. Should be interesting.