These are my bookmarks for May 31st from 09:31 to 14:50:

• Monday Note – media, tech and business stories – A potentially interesting blog
• Revealed: where Google’s data centres are around the world | Technology | guardian.co.uk – Analysis of data released by Google shows where its data centres – the places that keep it going .
• Zivity » The home of independent artists, models and rock-stars. GET EXPOSED. – A social network for artists, models & musicians. By paying a $10 subscription one gets the ability to view great work and vote whilst generating micro income for content providers. So fr the majority of the images on the homepage (I have not subscribed) include scantily clad females..
• New Economics of Advertising: 101 Twitter Tools to Help You Achieve All Your Goals – Twitter has become an incredible tool not just for communication, but for improving your life. Anyone can use it to expand their social circle, promote their side business, keep their coursework organized, and more. Whether you want to achieve your Twitter goals, or just use it as a tool to achieve others, these tools will help you get there.
• Listing all ideas – Ideablob: where ideas grow – Where business ideas have the best chance to succeed

These are my links for May 30th through May 31st:

• Listing all ideas – Ideablob: where ideas grow – Where business ideas have the best chance to succeed
• iList Classifieds – Post and Search Free Classified Ads – iList is a classifieds service for Twitter

These are my links for May 26th through May 28th:

• The Forrester Blog For Interactive Marketing Professionals – Microsoft announced today its Bing search engine, a "decision engine" that will replace live.com worldwide as of June 3. A distant third place in the search engine game, Microsoft hopes that this engine will help it gain more searcher share by delivering results and content more relevant to how users actually search. What makes Bing different from existing search engines?
• Micropayments for content and services | Contenture – Every time a Contenture user visits your web site, you make money. Your slice of every visitor's monthly payment is based on how many visits they made to your site divided by the total number of visits they made to all Contenture sites.
• Mozilla Labs Jetpack | Exploring new ways to extend and personalize the Web – Jetpack is a newly formed experiment in using open Web technologies to enhance the browser, with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play
• Linkbait Writing Services | Unique linkbait writing services to help your website grow and get more traffic. – At Linkbait Writing Services, we are determined to bring your website or blog more traffic by creating quality linkbait articles. Our small team of writers strive to create linkbait articles that will not only help you reach the front page of social bookmarking sites like Digg and Stumble Upon, but also bring you traffic for the lifetime of your blog. Save your time for marketing your blog and interaction with your readers and let us take care of the time consuming task of building linkbait articles.
• WordPress Designers – Premium WordPress Themes – WordPress Designers is a small team of talented developers and creative designers. We pride ourselves on our intimate knowledge or WordPress and our ability to push it to its limits. Since discovering the WordPress platform several years ago, we have strived to learn as much as we could about it so that we could bring you some of the most creative and well coded themes on the market.
• Outlaw Design Blog » 34 Brilliant Ads on Semi Trucks – a great post showing loads of advertising designs on lorries
• ConceptShare: – ConceptShare is a simple, cost-effective tool for gathering feedback from team members and clients.
• 5 Basic Rules for Creating an Effective About Page — Des Walsh dot Com – This short list of basic rules for creating an effective About page has been prompted by my frustration with the number of blogs and other websites that either do not have an About page or, more commonly in my experience, do not put their About page to work effectively in the interests of their business.
• Small Screen Blog: All about mobile – (by MoFuse) – If you believe that mobile is a strong medium to reach your customers – you need to be thinking about how your brand will evolve on the mobile web. Today you have a few interesting options and they are not mutually exclusive.
  As consumers wake up to the idea that they can actually reach the internet on their phone, we are about to see an explosion of new mobile devices; ITouch, Kindle, “netbooks” and even Sony Playstation Portable already are rapidly changing the ‘connection’ landscape.
• D u s t y T u n e s | Let your music collection see the light…. – Dusty Tunes automatically creates your own personal web page with a list of all the music in your iTunes library (although you can cheat). It will organise it all into a nice list and provide you with links so you can share it with your friends, on blogs, forums, websites, digg, facebook or simply keep it as a personal reference. You can come back at any time and update your page with all your latest tracks.
• WordPress › SEO Ultimate « WordPress Plugins – SEO Ultimate was developed with WordPress plugin "best practices" in mind:

  * Integration with WordPress's contextual help system
  * Internationalization support
  * Nonce security
  * An uninstall routine
  * Integration with the new WordPress 2.7 menu

• Privacy Policy Plugin For WordPress – At the end of February, 2008, Google started requiring AdSense publishers to display a privacy policy on all sites that displayed AdSense ads or search boxes. Since many WordPress blogs are monetized with AdSense, I decided to write a plugin that would automate the creation of AdSense-compliant privacy policies for WordPress users. Thus the Privacy Policy Plugin for WordPress was born.
• WordPress › CMS Navigation « WordPress Plugins – Do you want to use WordPress to create a full website, with easy navigation and menus? This plugin will let you add essential navigation functions to your template.
• WordPress › WordPress Navigation List Plugin NAVT « WordPress Plugins – The WordPress Navigation Tool (NAVT) plugin is a powerful tool designed to provide you with complete control over the creation, styling and contents of your web site's navigation.
• Why Twitter beats RSS: Context + Content = Added Value – broadstuff – Twitter

Why is it than when I lack inspiration for writing (like today) I go surfing around for new template styles? There is never any shortage of templates out there which can be tailored and I am really seeing the value in paying for the professional themes like ithemes which I love (this design is based on the Flexx theme).

I spend a lot of time admiring other blogs, thinking ‘why can’t mine look as good as that‘ but if I spend too much time on the design there will be no time for the content. Like a good sandwich, it needs both bread and jam. So maybe I can pull this post into something useful by talking about design inspiration. If you don’t know me, I have a great desire and admiration for great creative/beautiful work but don’t have the ability to actually design myself. So like a kid at  the sweet shop window I have started hanging around some great sites for design inspiration. Here are my top 5 places, I would welcome other suggestions if you have them.

1. Blog Spoongraphics

This site is regularly updated with some awesome inspirational designs and loads of freebies. The blog is the ‘digital playground’ of Chris Spooner, a freelance designer from Sheffield.

2. My Ink Blog

Another site that is chock full of design inspirations. Often showcasing the latest design trends for websites and blogs, it is never short of jaw droppingly beautiful design examples.  The site also offers links to freebies and tutorials to help you achieve similar results (although not in my case!)

3. Line 25

Like the first two, another excellent blog that covers design trends and tutorials. (can you spot a trend here?) This is the second blog from Chris Spooner, of Blog.spoongraphics – very impressive!

4. ithemes – WordPress Templates

iThemes work hard to continue delivering new and great looking blog templates. I found their designs inspirational and very well put together, offering a wealth of customisation at the back end making the whole package really excellent.

These themes also come with the Billboard plug in which can also be bought as a standalone plug in. If you have seen many sites that have neat rows of social media icons and wondered how to achieve that, well you can do it with the Billboard plug in. It is also used on many sites for the ad panels you see (like on www.thenextweb.com). The billboard plug in allows you to create containers in which you can add images, defining size and other details before wrapping them up into a widget for site placement. You watch a video of how it works here.

5.  The Next Web

Whilst not strictly a design site, I have always loved their content and find the layout of the blog brilliant, and constantly evolving. A combination of great design, awesome plug ins (things like the Greetbox I found on TheNextWeb) make it probably my fave site out there at the moment.

So that’s just some of the sites I keep up with. I am always looking for new sites, new inspiration – what or who do you think I should be reading?

These are my bookmarks for May 14th from 12:56 to 16:39:

• 10 Ways To Put Your Content In Front Of More People (Guess where mobile is?) « The Mobile Marketer – 10 Ways To Put Your Content In Front Of More People
• 12 ways to track traffic for your blog | Webware – CNET – I've found and tried 12 online applicatons that track your blog's traffic. Some are better than others, but they're all designed with the same goal in mind: helping you grow your blog.
• Digital Engagement | Director of Digital Engagement – Welcome to the new Digital Engagement blog at the Cabinet Office. The digital engagement team will be using this to talk about what we are up to, the technical challenges we are facing and to test out early solutions. Everything the Power of Information taskforce did on their blog we will do here, as we take forward their good work.

These are my bookmarks for May 12th from 13:28 to 16:43:

• Byte Night 2009 – Each year, over 500 people from the IT and business community give up their bed for one night to experience a little of what it might be like to be homeless. The money they raise helps Action for Children tackle the root causes of youth homelessness and gets thousands of children and young people off the streets and into secure accommodation with education and training opportunities.
• UserVoice – Customer Feedback 2.0 – Harness the ideas of your customers. Build great products. Turn customers into champions. – Cool tool for monitoring user feedback on your site
• Virtualisation & Dedicated Virtual Servers – Mesmet is a UK company based in Guilford offering reasonably priced hosting
• Linking to bad neighborhoods can KILL your SEO efforts – Search and Internet Marketing rants, news and views – the Fire Horse Trail – A great article outlining how you can find out who your neighbours are and how that may affect your SEO.
• ThisNext – Recommend, Share and Discover Great Products! – Looks like a place you can shop for inspiration and generally be part of a community.
• Brochure Templates, PDF Templates, Indesign Templates, Graphic Designs – BrochureReady – magazine design templates
• YippieMove – Email transfers made easy – Whether you want to change email providers or you just want to make archive copies, YippieMove can help. We’ll transfer your email between whichever email providers you choose.

These are my bookmarks for May 12th from 11:09 to 14:03:

• ThisNext – Recommend, Share and Discover Great Products! – Looks like a place you can shop for inspiration and generally be part of a community.
• Brochure Templates, PDF Templates, Indesign Templates, Graphic Designs – BrochureReady – magazine design templates
• YippieMove – Email transfers made easy – Whether you want to change email providers or you just want to make archive copies, YippieMove can help. We’ll transfer your email between whichever email providers you choose.
• IABUK : Mobile ad market worth £28.6 million in 2008 – Expenditure on mobile advertising in the UK exceeded market expectation in 2008 to reach a total of £28.6 million, according to a study by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

As a blogger I spend many hours trying to translate what I am looking at and what I am thinking into coherent sentences that would make up something you would find different and interesting. I am personally finding I have days where I can write, and others when the words just won’t come. But I don’t stop looking and consuming. On an average day I think I must view 50 web pages/posts, bookmarking almost everything I see for future reference.

For bookmarking I have come to love Delicious. Since joining in Jan 2006, I have saved 5,074 bookmarks but only in the past three months have I realised how important they can be when indexed in the correct fashion. This, I think is the key to useful bookmarking but also true for much of our information management online, from hastags to blog tags – creating, and sticking to a nomenclature helps boost the value of your information.

So if I use a useful nomenclature for my posts then it will be easier for others to follow along. Furthermore, with Delicious I  have the option of adding a description to each bookmark which gives both myself and any other followers, the ability to understand what the links contain. If I stick to the nomenclature and offer a useful description of each link I find, then I have something to share.

Blogging Bookmarks

The ability to blog bookmarks has been around for a while. If you are like me you have probably seen blog posts that just read: ‘links for xx-xx-xx’ and contain a list of urls. That is an example of posting bookmarks but offering little value. However, if I can post my links that include descriptions and include tags that will be relevant, then I feel that is of use to my audience. It also helps me communicate what I am looking at without the need to ‘tell’ you until I have something useful to say on the subject.

The ability to post my bookmarks is also a useful one to note for SEO. If I am posting 30 bookmarks per day, with description and tag, then I am increasing my outbound links daily without much effort. If you took that to the logical conclusion, I could be creating themed content purely through bookmarking, describing and tagging the links I find. For example, I could be posting content just based on wordpress links I have found, so that becomes almost an easy way to create additional content pages for SEO.

Adding Delicious Bookmarks to WordPress

Delicious has its own script you can use to post bookmarks into wordpress here. I personally prefer to use the Posatlicous wordpress plug in which offers less coding [than the Delicious option] and more control over what is published and how.

Features in Posatlicious include the option for white and blacklists, so you can ensure only bookmarks relevant to your blog are displayed, rather than everything including your shopping list (yes, I know you can make bookmarks private on Delicious.) It also offers greater functionality to introduce your post and set the frequency and size of your postings.The ability to use the delicious bookmark tags as the post tags just furthers its use when posting bookmarks standalone.

So, if done right, posting bookmarks as content does have the ability to provide a useful and interesting resource to your audience, taking it away from ‘filler’ content to valuable content.

From tomorrow the blog will post daily with new links and I would welcome feedback if you find them useful or otherwise. You can find my Delicious links at www.delicious.com/jamieriddell – connect with me if you are on there. I am always on the hunt for new and interesting content – if you are posting bookmarks somewhere, let me know, I would love to see them.

Was this useful to you? Please bookmark or retweet if you like it. If you don’t, leave me a comment so I can improve!

The Doodle Delicious Icon

This icon comes from an awesome set at blog.spoongraphics.co.uk which has no shortage of inspiration work and plenty of free images to play with. The doodle is part of his Doodle icon set

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