Techmeme is by far one of the most popular news aggregators out there,    especially with almost 30,000 unique visitors a month. Getting a post at the front page of Techmeme would certainly give you the traffic boost you need and the much needed visibility from high profile bloggers.

During a recent interview with Gabe Rivera, founder of Techmeme, revealed some insights into how you could possibly get your blog post in the front page.

»Create posts that will interest other bloggers to link to your post which will allow your items to rise in importance. The more inbound links you can get, the more it appeals to the Techmeme bot.

»Linking to an item on Techmeme will not get you listed as a source. Techmeme has a list of preset sources that are increasing as the blogosphere expands. You should always aim to get blogs that you know are already listed as a source such as GigaOM by Om Malik to link to your entry.

»If a post on your site includes a Techmeme permalink, as opposed to linking to an article that Techmeme links to, with the addition of a moderate amount of traffic through that link would get you a better chance at being listed under the Techmeme Discussion section of an article. Also the Techmeme system must first determine that your site is not spammy and the referral is real.

»Write content that is original and meaningful to new visitors as well as returning visitors of your site.This is a great tip because its important to write original content to increase your blog readership not just to get your blog listed on Techmeme. Just remember that originality is the key to increasing popularity in the blogosphere. Put yourself in the shoes of your readers, would you want to read content that is a repeat of what all of the news sites are writing about?

»Enable others to find your content easily through emails, links, trackbacks, IMs,social networks etc. This will in fact increase the appeal your blog has on potential readers, while increasing traffic to your site. Traffic has a great impact on Techmeme’s ability to find your content and evaluate it’s worth.

Source:Tech Memeorandum |Image Credit:Digital Inspiration

Google Talk is infact one of my favorite google services due to it’s variety of features and intergration to GMail. Even though Google Talk does provide simplicity in every way possible but one small problem still presists.

If you have ever used Google Talk, you should have noticed the lack of an option to choose font style, size or color. There is however a work-around which allows you to send bold or italicized messages in Google Talk.

To send a message in bold, you simply need to add asterisk (*) before and after the text.
For example: *Hello World* would look like Hello World

To send a message in italics, you need to add underscore before and after the text.
For Example: _Hello World_ would look like Hello World

If you prefer to send the message in both Bold and italicized style; add both underscore and asterisk before and after the text.
For Example: _*Hello World*_ would look like Hello World  

[Thanks Thilak]

Just when I thought PayPerPost had made a smart move to gain some positive feedback from the blogging community,they decide to leave behind the deal with Performancing.

Metrics was simply a free blog statistics service that was too costly for an organization of their size to maintain.

According to Nick Wilson,their Metrics service will become open source, allowing the community to further develop it. Permancing blog advertising network will remain intact with full support from the developers. As for their Firefox blog editor,it will get its own domain and be rebranded in the near future as ScribeFire.

You might of wondered how mozilla makes money from providing users like you with open source and free services like the firefox browser.In 2005,the mozilla foundation disclosed figures stating close to 53 million dollars in revenue.

This just proves that profit can be generated by providing open source and free services in this new era of computing.Just imagine a foundation started with only 10 employees and barely any financial backing could grow to compete against a giant like microsoft.I am speaking on behalf of firefox and it’s rapid growth in popularity compared to windows internet explorer which has been the dominant player for years.

Now you may be asking,how could a free browser like firefox provide mozilla foundation with this kind of revenue.The answer lies in the hands of google,the ever powerful search engine boosting the tech industry.If you have been using firefox for a while, you would of noticed those search boxes to the top right[see screenshot below] and the firefox homepage whcih includes the google search box.

Firefox users do not see those search features as being any type of advertisements but rather a tool created to help them conduct searches.When conducting a search with those search boxes,advertisements are displayed along with google search results and so a user may click on them which results in ad revenue for mozilla foundation.There is absolutely nothing wrong with this at all since you will be displayed the same advertisements if you were to visit google directly to conduct a search.

The big question in everyone’s mind is “how much did mozilla make in 2006?”.An accurate amount is not available at the moment but a close estimation can be made by comparing its growth rate throughout the past years.

Mozilla Foundation chairman Mitchell Baker claimed that their revenue for 2003 was 2.4 million and 5.8 million dollars in 2004 .Since the 2005 revenue was 52.9 million dollars, I would think their revenue for 2006 might be close to 90 million or more.

Adbrite has been around for a while alongside it’s giant competitor which is the google adsense program.Google Adsense allows publishers to display advertisements according to content provided by the author,while Adbrite goes about it in a different approach,as to allow publishers to sell ad space for a value according to their site statistics and placement. 

The recent release of google video ads have fueled the competition for smaller competitors such as adbrite to play catch up,as if it is even possible.Currently smaller advertising companies are promoting their own versions of video ad programs which has proven to be somewhat profitable.

Today,Adbrite released their own version of a video ad program for webmasters and bloggers called InVideo Player.This new release has some features that might be interest to video bloggers or even bloggers who may enjoy uploading videos on occasion.

Adbrite provides the video player along with the advertisements that will be placed inside of them.Here are some features of InVideo that will make you think twice about how you choose to monetize your videos:

»Fully customizable video player, easy-to-use, and 100% free
»Brand your videos with your own custom logo “watermark”
»“Split-screen” ads engage users without interrupting viewing experience
»Sharing features promote your site when your videos get “viral”
»Earn money from your videos, even when they’re embedded into other peoples’ Web sites

[Sign Up For InVideo]  [via:Darren]

Information week has a great article highlighting the return of spam in 2007.For the past two years, spam has been on a decline due to advanced filters and anti-spam services.

This coming year we will see a significant rise in the amount of spam sent to your inboxes.Signs of this development can be seen already according to a email filtering vendor known as Postini.They claim spam volumes have grown 73 percent in the last two months.

You can look forward to Spammers who are now embedding their messages in image files to get past spam filters that search for key words and phrases.Since filters are not yet fully capable of OCR(Optical Character Recognition) technology which to put it simple is a process in which digitised images can be scanned to retrieve text used inside of them.The number of emails with images has grown from nearly zero to almost 25 percent.

Spammers are also experimenting with text used inside of spam messages which can be tweaked easily to bypass conventional spam filters.

More spam is being sent from hijacked home PCs, making it harder for spam filters to block so-called blacklisted senders. Spammers are also getting better at identifying vulnerable PCs they can convert to botnets, the hijkacked PCs that are sending all this new spam.

You can definitely expect to find more spam in your mobile devices in the coming year.Spammers are turning to SMS, or text messages, as a way to target both mobile devices and PCs.There is little in terms of security for most cell phones, making them an easy target for spam and phishing attacks.Also most desktop email spam filters are not designed to handle spam or phishing attacks from SMS servers.

Newsgator brings us another breakthrough in designing websites.TopStyle is a multiple script language editor packed with some serious features that will make your hair stand up.Here we have taken the time to review the latest edition of this software written by the creator of HomeSite.

Are you a web designer who spends hours trying to create websites and make them compatible with multiple browsers using a variety of tools?Well, there is some positive news for those of you spending hours of pains taking work to design sites.Using TopStyle is both fast and easy when you are looking at a large web project at hand.

Newsgator TopStyle is a program capable of handling multiple script languages in only a 3mb download.You can edit CSS,HTML,and xHTML in a single program and can even convert your age old markup to an equivalent style of the new version.Haven’t taken the time learn xHTML?No problem,newsgator can even convert HTML to xHTML.To make it even better, the style checker can validate style sheets in multiple browsers.

Web developers have been wishing for some time to have the ability to preview markup in multiple browsers integrated in to a single program.TopStyle does just that and one better with a feature to actually preview your markup side by side.A built-in color schemer makes the daunting task of finding appropriate color schemes quick and easy.

TopStyle is also Integrated with W3C HTML Validation which means results of the validation are displayed within TopStyle, with hyperlinked line numbers that synchronize with TopStyle’s editor.

Newsgator has priced it at $79.99 which is reasonable for all the added features and the ease of use.This editor is a must have for those planing to design websites or just want to create a suitable layout for their blog.