Finally! Time for part 2 in my series about Blogging, how readers can contribute, and how to make your blog more popular.  Here is Part 1 for those of you who missed it.

This time I want to talk a bit about public bookmarking, blog search engines, and blog directories.

Public or social bookmarking sites generally organize their content using tags (Wikipedia: tags). These sites have become a popular way to locate, classify, rank, and share Internet resources through the practice of tagging and inferences drawn from grouping and analysis of tags.  The sites that I use for this are Del.icio.us and Furl.  These are a great way to bookmark your favorite sites and organize them by topic.  Make sure to always encourage your users to bookmark your posts and site.  One thing to be cautious of is that you must be specific in tagging and submitting specific topics or else the submissions will be ignored.

Technorati: Is one of many (and my favorite) internet search engine and blog directory for blogs.  If you own a blog you should go register and claim your blog.  Also make sure your blog is set to ping Technorati so that whenever you update they are informed, they have very simple instructions on how to do this so its great.  If you don’t own a blog but read them, please go register and add your favorite blogs (like mine) to your favorites there!

Another site bloggers and blogees should be very aware of is Digg.com.  This is basically a social bookmarking and blog tracking site.  News articles and blog entries are submitted by users and then displayed on the homepage based on a user ranking system.  Its a great way for blogees to show appreciation for the things they read on your blog and an eve better way for bloggers to get recognized for their work.

To sum it all up:

• Bloggers should be aware of these services, they are great ways to get read.
• Blogees try to show your appreciation for your favorite blogs by making sure they are represented in these areas.  Also find new blogs to read and explore using these services.  To make things easy on my readers I have added a new bar “Share and Enjoy” so they can submit what they like to these services.

Please feel free to comment if you have any suggestions or questions!

I learned yesterday that AOL will now be free for all broadband users.  Before you had to pay $14.95 if you brought your own connection to be able to still use the AOL service (or keep your precious e-mail address).  This is good news for all the AOL users who signed up for broadband and even those who just want to use an AOL e-mail address to remember to good ol dial up days.

You can read more about it here in an article on newsday.com

Because of the impending doom of my poor, defenseless wisdom teeth (read as: wisdom tooth removal surgery) I found it impossible to sleep last night, so naturally I decided it was time to make some upgrades and improvements to the blog!  Here is what went down:

• Upgraded to Wordpress v. 2.0.4
• Added an incoming links area in the sidebar.  Now if you link to my blog, I will automatically link to yours!  Its pretty awesome, if you have a blog you might want to get it too.
• Created a Sitemap for my google sitemaps account.
• SHARE AND ENJOY! I added links to the bottom so you can add my posts to del.icio.us, digg, and more.

I hope you guys all enjoy the updates, I know I will.