Thursday Launch! Members that chat on the BlogExplosion ShoutBox will soon be able to play ShoutBox Frenzy for bonus credits! A very simple game to play, ShoutBox Frenzy is a timed 2 minute game where you need to pick the correct image for a chance to win a % of the credit pool each game. For members that spend alot of time on BlogExplosion this is a really fun way to pick up extra traffic credits!

BTW- We will be looking for members to help us test out ShoutBox Frenzy tomorrow afternoon and find any coding errors. Should be fun! 

Just a note to our podcasters that we have been re-writing our podcast playlist scripts for the last week and now accepts almost all valid feed types.

With so many standards floating around we had to spend a considerable amount of time getting the software to recognize all the format types. Good news is that we have just approved 150 new podcasts over the last 3 days and can be listened to now in the BlogExplosion Podcast Directory. 

See what happens when Budget Rent a Car advertises on a bunch of blogs in Placing Ads in Some Surprising Spaces

“What is most valuable about nontraditional media like blogs, Mr. Deaver said, is their ability to “actively engage the consumer” compared with “passive TV spots” and other traditional choices.”

If anything 2005 has shown that blogs are an increasingly valuable tool for advertisers trying to reach targetted demographics and with each successful case study published will demonstrate that advertising on blogs is a smart and economical alternative to traditional advertising vehicles.

Actually a series of daily updates from Jennifer Laycock about starting out a blog and posting her results to date. With traffic stats in hand Jennifer explains what keywords are bringing her the most traffic and how her affiliate links are performing.

Stats:

Traffic Since Stats Put in Place: 1610 unique visitors

Total Shirt Sales: $108.91

Profit from Shirt Sales: $26.00

Profit from Affiliate Sales: $32.60

Total AdSense Revenue: $19.94

Total Revenue: $78.54

Total Expenses: $4.96

Total Profit: $73.58

Zero Dollars, a Little Talent and 30 Days - Day 10 - Search Engine Marketing Goes to Work and Affiliate Sales Pay Off

“From the very beginning I’d intended to use blogging as a major part of my plan for viral marketing. One of the beautiful things about blogging is that it’s now become common enough that many people actually use blog search engines and sites like Technorati to run regular searches on their favorite topics. That means that if you are writing about a topic that people are interested in, you’ll likely be able to pick up some incremental traffic even before people start to find and subscribe to your blog.”

Not surprising really : Jukeboxes, DJs Being Pushed Out by iPods

“The jukebox at the bar Brian Toro manages isn’t gathering dust just yet — but it may only be a matter of time. The popular nightspot is among a growing number of places across the country where people can bring their iPods and other portable music players and, for as long as the bartender allows, share their personal favorites with the crowd. “

“John von Seggern, a laptop DJ and producer in Los Angeles,” also sees DJing as part of an overall movement toward decentralizing control of many forms of media — whether it be through podcasting, blogging or musicians and authors offering their work direct for downloading on the Internet.”

We see many DJs in the BlogExplosion Podcast Directory tearing it up and extending their music to people around the world!

We just finished setting up the poll script now and there are some awesome looking BlogPhotoHut logos for you to vote on.

Note:

- Only 1 vote per member

- You must have an active blog to vote

Vote for the best BlogPhotoHut.com logo now!

Voting Closes November 30th. The winning logo design for BlogPhotoHut.com will get paid $50 via Paypal.

Good luck to all those that entered their logo designs and thanks!

Since we seem to post about the next coming of the internet Web 2.0 so much, it makes sense that we dedicate a category on HelpMeBlog for anything relating to Web 2.0!

We will start it off with a controversial article

NY Times suspended ethics for Web 2.0 plug

“The New York Times appears to have breached two of its own ethics guidelines when it gave op-ed space to John Battelle last week to promote the Web 2.0 buzzword.”

I was looking around for early Christmas gifts and was overwhelmed by the sheer mass of electronic gifts available this year. Practically every gadget you can think of is available to you whether it be your computer, games, mp3 music players or digital cameras. Simply overwhelming even for the geekiest of the geeks out there. Of course the internet is the main force pushing all of our personal technology adoption curves. Tough to keep up no?

“An interesting phenomenon is coming to a monitor near you, perhaps the one you are looking at right now. The days of convergence are upon us. The trend towards the merging of media via the Internet is already causing significant cultural shifts as witnessed by the power bloggers have exercised in relation to TV and print journalism. What a difference an era makes”

New World Wide Web Emerging :: Meet the New Network

BlogExplosion has seen many entrepreneurial members building their own blog services and developing their blogs to the point where they are actually making advertising dollars! Did you know that Flickr started the same way ?

“How do you create the future of Web apps? By accident. Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield (above) are the husband-and-wife team behind Flickr, the photo-sharing site that launched in February 2004 and quickly got so popular that Yahoo acquired it a year later. Flickr wasn’t born as a fully realized idea–in fact, it wasn’t even originally for photo sharing. But its building blocks make up a successful Web 2.0 application. Here’s how it evolved.”