I have nothing to say…it’s Wordless Wednesday…I do it weekly…check out my previous posts…leave your comments……and… thank you 🙂

Explorer noticed that some websites or blogs’ Google PageRank has been changing up and down today. It seems like Google is doing its first update this year. Exploring Blogospher is still 2 so far. Hopefully it will for the better 🙂 How about you? Did your blog’s ranking changed?

Today when I logined, there is a notice on the dashboard reminding me to upgrade to WordPress 2.5.1. I did the upgrade right away since my host company has one-click installation which allows me to do upgrade easily. The upgrade was smooth and fast. After that I started to wrote this post and I didn’t notice any difference.  WordPress 2.5.1 fixed some annoying bugs and improved performance. Here are some highlights from WordPress official site:

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

Regardless, it’s always good to upgrade to the newest version. Try Wordress 2.5.1 out and tell your readers if there are any new bugs.

Josh Catone at ReadWriteWeb had a post about Web 3.0 Through The Ages. I’ve posted What’s Web 3.0a few days ago and am still very interested in this topic. I made a comment on Josh Catone’s post about what’s Web 3.0 experience for a regular Internet user. Here I would like to share with my readers too:

Marketers, developers, tech geeks have different definition/mind map/mission statement/…about Web 1.0-2.0-3.0

Here is from a regular Internet user’s experience point of view:

• Web 1.0 – Surfing websites looking for info
• Web 2.0 – Participating in different Social networking websites such as blogs, Facebook, Myspace….etc
• Web 3.0 – No big difference between professional programmer, geeks, regular consumers… in terms of their web experience. More freedom, personalization…whatsoever they want to do on the net for their personal or business needs…..

What’s your expectation for Web 3.0 ?

With Google Search’s dominance, almost every company is using Google Adwords to expand their marketing presence to reach more customers. Today I set up a Google Adwords to experiment the power of digital advertising. Here I would like to share my experience on how to open a Google Adwords account.

First of all you need to select Starter Edition or Standard Edition. I highly recommend that you select Standard Edition even though you have no experience with Google Adwords, since with Starter Edition you can only target one specific region for one single product, while with Standard Edition you can have more functions with an advanced report.

Currently Google Adwords doesn’t accept Paypal. You need to select a payment method – Postpay or Prepay. I will recomend you select Prepay Credit Card Payment, because with Postpay Credit Card Payment, your billing threshold ( initially $50 ) is automatically raised in increments each time your account hits its billing threshold before 30 days have ended, which means that you have to closely monitor your money. With Prepay, you pay in advance based on your advertising budget, Google will stop running your ads if you run out of funds, which is safer for first time Adwords users.

There are so many tools and tips to help you get more out of Google Adwords. I am still new to this area and will post more related topics when I have more experience. Would you like to share your experience with Google Adwords?

I’ve seen many discussions about Semantic Web on the blogosphere this year and didn’t really understand what is Semantic Web. As usually, I did a Google search and the first link showed up was from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

” The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. It derives from W3C director Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.”

On the left is a logo owned by W3C for Semantic Web. ” The three sides of the cube dig at the triplet in RDF. The peeled lid is meant to invite people to open their data to the Semantic Web.”

How wonderful it is to be able to witness the rapid development of the Internet technologies?

Here is another Photoshop tutorial video that I found on YouTube. The difference of this one from the previous two video is that the author provided the audio instruction, which is a little bit easier to understand. You can try to create a Web 2.0 sytle logo for your own blog now 🙂

Reading blogs is part of my daily routine. I’ve stumbled upon many nice blogs with plenty of helpful information. I discussed blog reader-friendliness in my Sunflower blog last year. Here I would like to share my points with you again.

Template
It’s the first impression for the visitors; therefore, it is critical to have a nice & simple template which matches the theme of your blog. The main colors should be selected very carefully as well.
Word Verification
Not many people like this because it wastes the readers’ time, although it can be used to avoid annoying comments spams and it is a personal preference.
Sidebar
A well-organized sidebar will definitely attract readers’ attention.
Interactivity
The Auto-linky and Chat-box are good examples to entertain and interact with the readers. Since not so many bloggers have these two features, make sure your commenting interface is easy to find and quick to load.
Post
Ideal posts are are not too long and don’t have distracting spelling or grammar errors (I especially need to improve my grammar). In addition, don’t display more than ten posts on your homepage because the readers have to spend more time loading your blog.
Content is King
Without interesting content, it is hard to maintain regular readership. The question is how to make your posts interesting enough to attract your readers. I always find I am lack of inspiration 🙁

In summary, your blog is just like any other service or product in the market place. If you want to promote you blog and establish reader-loyalty, you have to please your readers (your customers) by making their reading easier, saving their time and providing more value-added information.

BTW, I don’t mean that my Exploring Blogosphere is reader-friendly enough. I am still learning and experimenting……

What are your criteria for a reader-friendly blog?

Some fellow blogger friends asked me why I like blogging. I wrote a similar post in my Blogger blog a while back. I won’t mind repeating it here since Exploring Bloggosphere has different readers. Here goes the reasons why I liking blogging:

• Blogging is a new experience which can bring me more
• Blogging is free thanks to many Internet talents
• Blogging is creative: internet is all about ideas and innovation
• Blogging is a lot of fun & laugh
• Blogging helps me make wonderful blogging friends and reach large audiences
• Blogging helps me learn how to write better
• Blogging provides me chance to experiment and promote my own ideas
• Blogging can be an outlet when needed
• Blogging practises my skills in difference ways
• Blogging is freedom, just like my own backyard
• Blogging has great potential
• Blogging feedbacks and comments make me happy and healthy
• Exploring Blogosphere is a great place to share thoughts, experience & fun 🙂

Now it’s your turn – why do you like blogging?

Today I checked my pending comments – 4689 spams waiting for me to delete! Wordpress only allow me to delete 25 spams/time. Let’s say 10seconds/25 spam, I have to spend 32 minutes (4689/20*10 = 32) to delete all these spams!! What a pain!!

Here is what I did to deal with commenting spams:
1. Turned off some popular post commenting function
2. Created a Comment Blacklist including those popular key words in spams
3. Created a Comment Blacklist including those IP of current spams

There are some drawbacks of the comment blacklist since readers might use same key words as those on the list. In that case, their comments will be marked as spam 🙁

Anyone knows any idea to deal with spam? Thanks!