Thursday, November 4, 2010

10 Best Sites on the Net For Blogging

10 Best Sites on the Net For Blogging

1. Wikipedia.
ADDRESS: www.wikipedia.org
WHAT YOU CAN TAKE AWAY: Images, Writing, Some multimedia.
ABOUT: Wikipedia is a great resource, first and foremost for gathering information for whatever you’re writing. If you want something with considerable integrity then you’ll also want to scroll right down to the bottom and follow the outgoing links and references at the bottom of the articles.
Every image on Wikipedia can be used for some purpose – some only under fair use, but others can be chopped, changed, modded and demolished to your hearts content. Simply click the image to see what conditions apply. You can find a larger library of multimedia at the Wikimedia commons; http://commons.wikimedia.org.

2. Youtube.
ADDRESS: www.youtube.com.
WHAT YOU CAN TAKE AWAY: Vidoes.
ABOUT: Youtube is excellent in three ways. Firstly, you can browse content, and embed it into your webpage. Secondly you can create content and upload it. Finally, similar to the second option, Youtube allows Webcam users to record directly off a webcam making Vlogs, video blogs, extremely easy.

3. Houndbite.
ADDRESS: www.houndbite.com.
WHAT YOU CAN TAKE AWAY: Audio Clips.
ABOUT: In almost every way, the Youtube of audio. Just like Youtube you can find something interesting and embed it, or you can make your own.

4. LastFM.
ADDRESS: www.last.fm
WHAT YOU CAN TAKE AWAY: Music and Clips.
ABOUT: You can use Last FM for information or content. Content comes from the fact that a majority of artists have a few songs that can be embedded in another page – mostly for 30 seconds, sometimes the whole song. These can be found by going to the artist’s page and clicking on the song you want. You should then see an embed link. For information, not only do most artists have an information wiki, but various Charts tell you how many people using LastFM are listening to certain songs – you can find of the most popular artists, the most popular track, the songs most and least listened to by certain artists and users. Most of you won’t care, really but this is going to send the music nerds giddy. In a similar vein, www.songza.com offers similar embedding services, but was ironing out a few creases last I checked.

5. PDPhoto.
ADDRESS: www.pdphoto.org.
WHAT YOU CAN TAKE AWAY: Images.
ABOUT: Basically a place to find Public Domain images to be used to your hearts content.

6. Flickr.
ADDRESS: www.flickr.com
WHAT YOU CAN TAKE AWAY: Images
ABOUT: Flickr is a place where users can share images. Because they’re not public domain, they’re not all up for grabs, but if you follow the arrows to where you can perform an advanced search, you can find a whole stack of Creative Commons images. (If you don’t understand Creative Commons, click here).

7. Adsense.
ADDRESS: http://www.google.com/adsense
WHAT YOU CAN TAKE AWAY: Advice, Money.
ABOUT: Google Adsense is basically the biggest tool you have in blogging for money. Essentially it allows you to make money of advertisements hosted on your webpage. Good eh? The process is a bit tricky at times but there’s enough advice and tech geeks on the net to help you work it out.

8. Reddit.
ADDRESS: www.reddit.com
WHAT YOU CAN TAKE AWAY: Promotion.
ABOUT: Reddit like digg.com is a great tool to promote your blog. Don’t submit every singe thing you do, because you’ll just give people the shits. It’s a very usefull tool to promote your work. I think you’ll find reddit better than Digg not because there’s less wankers per say, just there’s a better class of wanker.

9. iGoogle.
ADDRESS: Here.
WHAT YOU CAN TAKE AWAY: Thee’s a lot of stuff you can do with this little page, but the best of it is you can use it to sign up to RSS on various WebPages. Meaning no matter what you want to write about – politics, art, film etc; you ill be able to find a multitude of sources that let you know what to cover. Really, any RSS gatherer will help, but this one being connected to your google account (hence, email, adsense) makes it a very convenient choice.

10: Stumble Upon
ADDRESS: http://www.stumbleupon.com/
WHAT YOU CAN TAKE AWAY: Promotion, Content.
ABOUT: Stumble Upon is a tool where users can stumble across interesting content by clicking the little ‘Stumble Button’. You can press the ‘I like it’ button, or the ‘I don’t like it’ button, and through this, your search results become better and better. For those who have problems with writers block (though not with procrastination) this is a gift from above. The other glorious element of stumble upon is that it can be used to promote your work, but really, only bother if it’s up to standard.

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