widgenie.com

Pic Color

Chartpart

Geek247

Maptool

NCES Kids Zone

Yellowpipe

Chartgizmo

Mathcracker.com

Google

http://delicious.com/popular/photo

This is very handy when you want to do some research for your blog or when you are looking for a topic you want to blog upon.

Then I recently found popacular.com. Based on delicious bookmarks. This site delivers what has been most bookmarked in the latest hour, 8 hours, a day, a week, a month, and since the dawn of time!

I discovered that flickr is the most bookmarked site with 58,132 bookmarks behind youtube 54,629 bookmarks then comes Pandora and Google is only at the 19th place.

Regarding the last hour we can the Google Trends Flu in third position, which I recently quote in my French blog. I dit get the information from popacular in fact. At the time you are reading this post, the google flu trends bookmark should have disappeared.

There is also the same for the last twitts, but at the time I tried  it did not work.

Popacular.com/

You can also subscribe to RSS feeds

Popacular.com/index.rss

You have the right to blog about all thes subjects and even those you do not know. At the beginning you obviously will not get lots of  visitors or earn a fortune, since those who will read you, will see that you do not know much about your topic. In this post I give you 14 good reason to blog on a topic you do not know.

1. You find a new passion, you want to do some research on a subject then make part of this new passion through a blog. In addition to your new research, you will also develop a research approach, new technical skills to find information, so you can also blog about it.
2. You are self made man, you have already learned many things in life and you know that if you put all your passion you will the level of other blogs talking about the same topic.
3. You have good diplomas so this is the proof that  you’ve learned how to learn, this should help you to write an interesting blog.
4. Blogging helps you  to structure your thoughts in writing. You become a blogger when you blog. (c’est en forgeant qu’on devient forgeron = it makes perfect)
5. Be humble, say you are not an expert in your new area, you’ll be the laughing stock of specialists and you will lose your credibility for later. Say that you are a newbie, but you learn quickly. The tetra experts were also newbies like you  and if some experts begins to criticize your blog this will be the first signs that your blog is a new voice, that you start catching the interest of others. This will encourage you to write more about your topic.  You will see that they will even plagiarize you at some point and this is a victory for your blog. One does not copy the crap
6. It is a great way to make new friends, bloggers are friendly people and blogging is made to share, help others and are not miserly advice.
7. The eye of a beginner is a fresh eye. You can attract few readers and even some experts because you bring a new perspective, new blood. This is also very useful nowadays, especially in new technologies. I sometimes want to build a green eco blog, I do not know anything, it is only something that I like.
8. Are you really a beginner in the field? If you start blogging on a topic, it is that you already have your say. You have not lifted one morning and say, I would like blogging about the reproduction of locusts in the Amazon! Unless you’re a little crazy!
9. Measure Yourself. Make a flash back on your progress. Review your first posts and it will do you good to see the tremendous progress you have achieved in so short a time. Knowledge is for me as important as good health.
10. Laugh at your first posts which are completely void and make fun of yourself on the subject and make mea culpa, it will make you credible. Rewrite them in case.
11. After all, you can even blog for your pleasure and you may not want to to have an audience. It is the democratic principle of the blog. You do what you want, you are in the purest democracy, you have the right to correct spelling, you have the right to shout, to declare your are lazy, you are entitled to almost everything apart from the things forbidden by law.
12. If you realize after a certain time that your blog topic is not your cup of tea anymore then kill your blog! You’re the only master in the world, you can decide to kill your blog whenever you want. You’ll just frustrate a few readers who began to love your writing.
13. Blogging can be a good therapy, even a way to get out of a large problem in life, blogging on death, illness, blogging about your child who is on drugs,  blogging about your nervous breakdown, blogging about you silly boss is a very good therapy. At first it is not necessarily a specialist  of problems that happens in your live (almost)  but you can put all the chances on your side to get away with your problems. Blogging can cure.
14. Blogging on a topic you do not know, will  make you discover another world. You will have to be a webmaster, a statisticians, in diplomat to manage your comments, a business man to get a little money out of your blog, be a marketer…

Having writtern that I think you are convinced to start a blog on any topic. Anyway make sure that your blog is written with passion. Without passion, writing a blog is just painful.

Passion is the engine on any entrepreneurship, knwoledge comes after.

]]> http://en.roget.biz/14-reasons-for-blogging-about-a-topic-you-do-not-know/feed 0 http://en.roget.biz/where-to-find-good-blogger-templates-like-3-columns-templates http://en.roget.biz/where-to-find-good-blogger-templates-like-3-columns-templates#comments Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:34:30 +0000 marothro http://en.roget.biz/?p=13 Continue reading →]]> Although this blog is based on the wordpress platform, I still use blogger for simple blogs like my family blog,  If you are using blogger, I’m sure you noticed that the template offer is very scarce and poor.

This is a selection of five sites where you can find free templates for your blogger blog like 3 columns template.

Templates-blogger.com

This site offers around 200 templates where you can find for example 3 columns templates and other variations.

Btemplates.com

This site is as good as the first one, you can surely find what you really want for your blog

Ourblogtemplates.com

Another good site to find very good templates among other tips for blogger

bloggerbuster.com

In addition to templates, blogerbuster offers a host of tutorials to improve your blog

Mashable.com

Mashable presents a selection of 70 templates in this post.

I’m sure that with this selection of site you have more than enough, if you have other good site for blogger templates, please drop me a line.

original text in French : Roget.biz

search.twitter.com engine

First you can start searching for twitts search.twitter.com engine

twemes.com

Twemes makes you find twitts with hastags. What is a hashtag? It is just a convention between twitting people who wants to enhance on particular word in their twitt, hence putting the # before each word they want to insist upon. Like #obama. Check the site http://www.hashtags.org/ which gives you the real time trends for words. This is very clever.

tweetscan.com

Tweetscan is the same as search.twitter but getting the twitts from another microblogging  plateform  http://identi.ca une

With these 3 search engines you will get the most of the world twitts. But the best would be to bundle them up in a single RSS feed and make sure that you filter any type of word you want without the need to do it thrice!

So I created for my own use an RSS feed from pipe.yahoo to do the job.  You only have to type the word you want to scan and that’s it. It is called twittermonitor?.  You can clone it and change it according to your needs and communicate it to your friends. You can also add other twits platform to be sure you don’t miss your keyword.

In this article, I give you a way to perform technological scanning through the tags you can fin on blogs and then get them bundled together through a real time RSS flow.

Let us check the RSS structure of a few diggs and portals offering RSS feed on tags. (you may change microblogging to you favorite tag)

1. delicious: http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/microblogging
2. technorati (français) : http://feeds.technorati.com/tag/microblogging?authority=a4&language=fr
3. technorati anglais : http://feeds.technorati.com/tag/microblogging?authority=a4&language=en
4. Digg : http://digg.com/rss_search?search=microblogging&area=&type=&age=
5. Google : http://news.google.com/news?q=microblogging&ie=UTF-8&output=rss
6. Mybloglog : http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/topics/microblogging/rss.xml
7. wikio: http://rss.wikio.fr/blogs/rss/a_la_une/search/microblogging
8. blogsearch.google : http://blogsearch.google.fr/blogsearch_feeds?hl=fr&q=microblogging&lr=&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=atom
9. Yahoo : http://api.search.yahoo.com/WebSearchService/rss/webSearch.xml?appid=yahoosearchwebrss&query=microblogging&adult_ok=1
10. Furl : http://rss.furl.net/items.rss?topic=microblogging

Ok, you can look for other RSS feeds of your choice and proceed the same way. I’ve already listed 10 of them this would be just enough for the time being.

You could past those feed into you RSS reader, but it is the awkward way to do it. Why not make it automatic! To that purpose you ave to go to pipes.yahoo.com create an account and then select  the create a pipe function

First you have to create a  form. On the left you have a menu with different options choose  “User input”, then “Url input“.  drag and drop it on the main board.

Let us continue with our example.  Put “microblogging” in the text input window. Check the figure below. In the prompt you may type “tag to search” or what ever phrase you can think of.

Let us check the first RSS structure with delicious.com

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/microblogging

the common structure  http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/ and then our search tag microblogging

This time you shall add the “url builder” into the main board (figure below)

In the  base copy paste  http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/ “text” just below the path element must be linked to the above module.

Just after this second module (url builder) drag and drop the third module (fetch feed) and link it to the url builder as it is described in the figure below. Then link the “output” module to the “fetch feed” module.

At this stage of this tutorial we have just created a tag informaton structure for delicious.com. Just to better understand what has been said the result is available here  http://pipes.yahoo.com/thierryroget/veilletechno01

You may repeat the same process with other RSS found on the net, but sometimes the RSS structure is different. let us have a look at  the next example.

let’s have a look at the Technorati RSS structure

http://feeds.technorati.com/tag/microblogging?authority=a4&language=fr

This time microblogging is right inside the RSS feed. You will have to change the “url builder” structure to fit this new rss feed. adding  “authority=A4” puis  ”language=fr” in the query parameters. In the example “fr” is the language (french) you may change it in any other language like “en” for english.

Now you are able to understand the main principle of this tutorial, so you may repeat this process to all you rss tags and then aggregate them into a single RSS feed. To be short, the result is already available here http://pipes.yahoo.com/thierryroget/veilletechno2

You can play with other words and forget about miccroblogging and put you favorite tag. You can duplicate this pipe for your own purpose change whatever you like and start being the big shot in what ever you enjoy in life.

You may find this tutorial a little bit complicated, but I assure you that once you get used to Pipe.Yahoo you’ll be able to get the right information you need. I advise you to digg into this tutorial and make your own findings.

Pixlr.com

Pixlr look like photoshop off-line so one will feel at home if already familiar with photoshop.  Most of the useful tools are available. 

Photoshop

Photoshop on line is off cource  less comprehensive than the traditionnal photoshop, but is is free. You have to create an account to use the service.  Once the account is created, you have access to other services such as the photo albums and you can import photos from  our favorite accounts ( Flickr, Picassa …) among other interesting goodies

Picnik.com

Fotoflexer.com

Pixenate.com

Pixenate  is a basic photo editing service for a quick and dirty job (red eyes …) it also allows you to add some custom effects (Warhol, adding component: hat, mustache, teeth bleaching provided that the portrait is well in the axis. In addition we can save your work on flick.

Pixer.us

Splashup.

Sumo Paint

The software offer all the  elements of a classic drawing software with the management layer, the color palette, special effects … For those familiar with other similar tools, dealing with Sumo will be therefore ultra easy. That is my achievement made in seconds.

A.viary.com

May be the best of the tool, the photo editing section is called  Phoenix. You also have some very interesting tutorial available t here.

Fanstudio.ru

This site is made in Russia, if you want to edit a picture, you can only do it on the whole picture. If you want to do a quick job this site will really give you all what you need. It is very simple to use it and you don’t need to know a lot about photo editing.

If you have other free online photo editing services, please leave a comment.

It is also possible to throw ideas and this seems to be the main point of the site. I rushed to the blogger aeraa just to cheks what topics are debated :

• Life in the blogopshere
• Are blogs competition
• Are bloggers dangerous
• Are bloggers journalists
• What makes a goog blog
• Starting a blog

Subjects that we love in the blogosphere. Ididn’t check

I dont’ knwow how one can be selected to appear on the videos, I think one need to be as good as Bernard-Henri Levy. So that would be a good challenge!

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