BLOG DESIGN JOURNAL

By Sharyce Arciaga, guest blogger

Blog Carnivals help bloggers recognize each other’s efforts, organize important topics, and promote conversation on the blogosphere. They also help solve that isolation problem by creating meta posts that contain links to lots of other bloggers’ posts, thus providing them with much-needed exposure.

Carnivals help you make money on the internet although there are many ways that blog owners can make money online, especially when they are solely focusing on their own site. The carnivals help in creation of this requisite value and at the same time increases traffic to the website.

Blog Carnivals are basically roundups of blog posts hosted at a different blog each week and are something that has slowly become popular amongst those in the blogging world because it is both beneficial to the blogger and the host of the Carnival.

The Carnivals have become a great help to the blogging community and are great resources for readers and can really help you ATTRACT some new readers.

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I just signed up at a new site for blog advertising, social networking and getting paid to post: SocialSpark. Register your blogs there and let advertisers find you.

Meanwhile you can make friends, who can vote your blog up or down in the rankings. You can also add applications to your profile page, just as you can on Facebook. (There are already hundreds.)

You also get a set of tools for tracking traffic and other stats on your blog. To install the tools, so you can view the stats on your SocialSpark dashboard, you paste a code snippet into the theme code of your blog (not into a widget). But you have to add code anyway to claim your blog.

The service is still in beta testing, according to the site. But registration is open now, and there are already over 1000 blogs listed.

To get ads from SocialSpark, your blog must be over 90 days old and have at least 20 posts. So what are you waiting for?

If you are like me, you are always downloading some new widget for your blog or some new toolbar for your browser. Then later, sometimes you find out that it was a vehicle for malware or some other sleazy purpose.

It may not seem like a design issue, but security is a very big deal these days. People are having their blogs hacked (and deleted). And those who rely on advertising or product sales from their blogs stand to lose a lot. So boring as security may seem to some, it is very important to all of us—whether we realize yet it or not.

What if you didn’t have to worry about security, or viruses, or malware anymore? And if you sell products on your blog or offer downloadable information, what if you could guarantee the safety of your downloads to your readers? In a believable way?

A company called Comodo (http://www.comodo.com) offers free antivirus and firewall software. But more important, they are on a mission to make the Web a safe place. Or as they put it, to bring trust back to the Internet. How cool is that? 

And their software is really free, not just a demo.

BlogRush, the pioneering blog traffic exchange site, has shut down. I’m in the process of removing the BlogRush widgets from all my blogs.

The explanation given was that BlogRush was not successful enough to justify the expense of running the site. And traffic levels apparently were declining. People had quite clicking on the widgets after the novelty wore off.

I wonder what that portends for other free widgets. What do you think?