Cool idea – move attention around the Blogosphere to one blog at a time for two concentrated weeks. Not bad, eh? That’s what Chuck Westbrook suggests in a marvelously grass roots kind of move. Love this! Check it out and join the tribe.

Who’s got kids and is always preaching ‘Don’t text so much?’ (I do.)

Who’s – at the same time – dealing with the tracking function on Twitter that means I can only follow certain niches by tracking … with my cell phone’s texts?

ARGGGGH!

Cool solution … TweetScan.

LOVE this website. You type in the category you want to follow, and you get back all the current Tweeting that’s going on.

Nice way to find your niche, follow folks, jump in.

OK, Twitter usage is really reaching critical mass now … proof is that the 2008 US presidential election is eliciting its own mass of wildly active Twitter feeds. One of them, the Palin Twitter Feed really has the anti-Palin crowd weighing in – but interestingly that got picked up by the UK’s TimesOnline. (See the article for other political feeds.) And the Palin feed is being followed by the L.A. Times and more.

Why? Because you can cover a LOT more ground by Tweeting many short bits on many topics. AND … you still gotta have that blog (as we learned yesterday) to really dig in and established presence.

Note today’s article in Fast Company, ‘is blogging dead?’ – a good example of ‘controversy posting’, i.e. putting up a post to get people linking back to you in outraged protest.

Me? I’m defending the future of the blog.

“No. Blogging isn’t out of style,” says social media expert Chris Brogan. “Twitter and things like it are a moment in a timestream. Blogs are a bit more anchored, and allow us to stay within a context. The other tools are good, but they don’t replace blogging.”

Elisa Camahort Page, cofounder of BlogHer (a network of over 2200 women authored blogs) says she thinks of Twitter more as a mega-chat and adds: “blogs continue to be the place where people introduce, explore and discuss events in their lives, ideas in their minds and the causes they care about.”

Also this, for doubters: “Analysts predict that the major blog networks such as Blogger, TypePad, Moveable Type, etc will rake in $300 million for 2008.”

Yeah, baby!

I was recently surprised to find the latest blog stats – WOW, these things have gotten popular. Thought you might find these juicy stats, made available by BlogWorld.

1. Over 12 million American adults currently maintain a blog
2. More than 147 million Americans use the Internet
3. Over 57 million Americans read blogs
4. 1.7 million American adults list making money as one of the reasons they blog
5. 89% of companies surveyed say they think blogs will be more important in the next five years
6. 9% of internet users say they have created blogs
7. 6% of the entire US adult population has created a blog
8. Technorati is currently tracking over 70 million blogs
9. Over 120 thousand blogs are created every day
10. There are over 1.4 million new blog posts every day
11. 22 of the 100 most popular websites in the world are blogs
12. 37% of blog readers began reading blogs in 2005 or 2006
13. 51% of blog readers shop online
14. Blog readers average 23 hours online each week

OK, I just missed BlogWorld (but Glenda Watson Hyatt made it!). Now I’m feeling really itchy to get to some tech/blogging conferences. Went to a few PodCamps in ‘07 but haven’t been back since. Anyone got some good ideas where I should turn first? Have you been? What have you seen? What good came out of it?

A few I’m considering:

SOBCon09 in Chicago
SXSW (South by Southwest in TX)
BlogHer
BlogWorld

Dr Mani, an Indian heart surgeon and Net marketer extraordinaire, started a minor sensation with his Blogathons to raise money for heart surgery for children in India. In those, he blogged compulsively for 24 hours, made sure his web network of friends were helping him get the word out, and solicited funds for his cause as he went.

Now he’s back with a new event: the Tweetathon. Same deal, different platform. He’s just completed another round and raised $30,000, this time putting up short posts on Twitter for 24 hours. Cool!

My former client, the Left Thumb Blogger, Glenda Watson Hyatt, just used the same with a partner to raise funds for her Library Project. Let the abundance grow, say I!

Want to get more blog traffic – get a Twitterfeed. You simply hook up your RSS feed for your blog to Twitter and it periodically lists your post headers. Wow … that was easy! Get a Twitterfeed account.

I recently dug in with gusto to Blogher – a site that promotes and even helps create blogs for women, by women. Yay! 13,000 women have 10,000+ blogs listed there … and you can list yours as well. How fun is that? Juicy forums too … Dig in and enjoy! And yeah, list your blog.

What’s the real value of a social media visitor?

Here’s an interesting article I read recently on ProBlogger by Skellie…good stuff. Certain characteristics have been noticed about social media visitors vs., say, blog visitors. An extract in my own words:

1. They’re not clicking on ads as much … interesting mix strategy on how to do this successfully
2. They’re good for page views if you’re running ads on your blog – that drives up your ad price
3. Visitors have a surfing, fleeting ‘surface interest’
4. Visitors can be rude from cliquey sites like Digg
5. Really there for the networking

“Their favorite social media platform delivers so much content they enjoy and is so time-consuming to be involved in that many–but certainly not all– don’t have the desire or time to follow blogs that may or may not produce good content in future.”

Had any interesting usage patterns emerge yourself?