Recapping the top blog posts for November 2009, grouped by author and total page views:

Colin Alsheimer

Total views: 861

• 9 Ways Drupal is Like a Fine Wine
• 3 Google Wave Invites, Who Wants Them?
• Spam Be Gone! 10 Spam Blocking Drupal Modules
• Five Benefits of Social Media Marketing

Chris Sloan

Total views: 550

Recapping the top blog posts for October 2009, grouped by author and total pageviews:

Colin Alsheimer

Total views: 1094

• SEO Is More Than Good Design: A Rebuttal To Derek Powazek
• LevelTen Named "Top SEO Web Design Company Website"
• Vote For LevelTen's iSite Essentials!
• Whitehouse.gov Goes Drupal [Drupal News]

Start it with a BANG! If your very first sentence can't capture the attention of your reader, all hope is lost. Besides having an engaging and thought provoking title, the first sentence is one of the most important areas of your post.

Opening doors to opinions and perceptions is the beautiful idea behind blogs. Instead of receiving information from a niche number of journalists, readers have access to millions of ideas from around the world. Blog Action Day supports just that, but on one issue. This year thousands of bloggers will participate on October 15th and write about an issue that affects everyone: Poverty. If we all gathered together and openly exchanged information and ideas, could we inspire change?

Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

As of today, Blog Action Day has 3,775 participating sites and over 7.6Million readers. If you don’t have a blog, don’t worry! There are other ways to help this non-profit cause.

• Donate to The Global Fund thru Change.org
• Help with translation (over 17 languages)
• Promote Blog Action Day with a website banner or through word-of-mouth marketing

A Blog is a nickname for a weblog. A weblog is a frequently updated online journal. It can have a single author or a group of authors. Blog sites are usually focused in topic, but it is certainly not a requirement.

Publishing

When combined with XML feeds, blogging is an easy way for an individual to publish content in a quick and efficient method. Since users can subscribe to a feed, an individual can "push" updates to the user, without any action on the end user's part.

Further Reading

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I think it's pretty well known that Wal-Mart has really struggled to try and control their bad PR on the web, but checking out BNET today I was presently surprised that they've finally taken a step in the right direction.

With the avalanche of bloggers facilitated by ease of sites such as wordpress.com, blogspot, and many more, the key to designing outstanding blogs is in the small details. Not every blog should look like a typical weblog.

A recently popular sales training book called No More Cold Calling™, by Joanne Black, has reopened the idea of sales without cold calling. As eluded by the title, the book offers tips and alternatives to avoid being that no name person calling and asking for someone’s business without some type of connection.

I imagine blog owners feel the same way about receiving new comments with links from strangers as business owners on the receiving end of a cold call. I call them cold comments. Below are some similarities between cold calling & cold commenting.

Hard evidence that blogs can make a difference.

The people over at Elizabeth Arden changed the Ad campaign to slightly less resemble the monodonation's charity branding that Chris Sloan posted about earlier this month.

While still a major rip-off, at least its nice to feel effective as bloggers!