Blogging doesn’t have to be about making money. It can be a purely selfless activity based on sharing your knowledge and building relationships with other people. Here are some ways that you too can give:

1. Inform. Give the gift of information by sharing your knowledge with others.
2. Advocate. Help others by advocating a good cause.
3. Connect. Network with others and build beneficial and lasting relationships.
4. Read. The easiest way to give to another is by being a part of the audience.
5. Comment. Help further the conversation by providing your unique insight.
6. Link. If you find value in someone’s content, helps spread it by linking to it.

Do you have more ways that you would like to share? Please practice #5 and comment below.

For more on these 6 reasons and 5 more, please visit Andrew.

Originally posted on February 9, 2007 @ 3:12 pm

This article links to dymyvtw content.

A recently launched service called Eroticr extracts “soft porn” videos and pictures from YouTube and Flickr and aggregates them on one site. Members of the site can also manually import their files from the two sites or from their computers to Eroticr.

Obviously eroticr is being very careful here with regard to the DMCA and child porn: there are warnings about uploading copyrighted content, making sure that those in the images/videos are adults, and only adding “erotica” to the site, rather than “pornography”.

To sign up, use the code flickr-eroticr.

Mashable has more.

Originally posted on February 9, 2007 @ 3:01 pm

Even though most people have a hard time explaining what Web 2.0 is, more people than ever are launching Web 2.0 companies daily. If you’re not cautious though, things may not turn out as you expect. Here are a few things to keep in mind as you launch that company whose name we probably won’t be able to pronounce.

1. You need to have a viable business model. A great concept doesn’t mean much if it isn’t viable.
2. Don’t just jump on the bandwagon. We have enough me-too companies.
3. Know your audience and pay attention to marketing. Free is good but not always the best option.
4. Make sure the people are ready for your service. If it is too revolutionary, i.e. ahead of its time, it may not succeed.
5. Make sure the need you are addressing is sufficiently large.

Click here for more information on these 5 reasons.

For more tips on launching a successful Web 2.0 company, check out our previous coverage.

Originally posted on February 8, 2007 @ 2:52 pm

PC World did a review of the top 5 blogging platforms. They obviously don’t get it.

Blogging Platforms need to be broken down into hosted platforms vs script based platforms that you host.

They list a mismash of platforms I assume they are only talking hosted platforms but hey what do I know. Here’s my five top ranked hosted platforms and top five non hosted script based blogging software.

5 Best Hosted Platforms
1. WordPress.com
2. Vox.com
3. Typepad.com
4. SquareSpace.com
5. Blogger.com

5 Best Non-Hosted Platforms
1. WordPress
2. MovableType
3. PMachine
4. TextPattern
5. Habari

I wonder if they see the difference now. Probably not.

Originally posted on February 9, 2007 @ 5:14 am

Smackdown!. In case you missed it Jason Calacanis, who I still have a lot of respect for despite of what I’m about to write, hates SEO’s and continually goes out of his way to insult people in the professional, a number of whom I not only know, but also know are very, very good, professional and above board people. Calacanis’ latest post full of unnecessary hate and stereotypes has received the mother of all smackdowns from none other that leading SEO Danny Sullivan with this post, which at a guess probably took him an entire day to write. You’ll never, ever, ever read a better rebuttal online than what Danny has written in his post. Enjoy.

Originally posted on February 8, 2007 @ 6:21 pm