“Writing your blog should be a fun way to stretch your mind and stay connected to trends, friends, and the greater world, not another computer task that takes far too long to get done. But that’s exactly what it can feel like if it takes you more time to find your post ideas, tweak your markup, and make everything look right than to actually get your thoughts down. Being somewhat experienced at this blogging thing, your Lifehacker editors have pinpointed a few tools and tricks that make our posts go faster and smoother. After the jump, we round up 10 of them.”

“There is no way to accurately put a value on blogs and blogging companies. All are privately-held and, as is true with many content businesses, the value of the company is based on what a buyer will pay. The figures we have put together look at advertising revenue and income from related businesses like conferences. We have not included blogs affiliated with larger media companies.”

“At first I wasn’t too sure how to take the post from Slant Six Creative’s blog post stop taking advice. In the post it suggests that reading too many blogs will drive you crazy, and within that context DesignNotes is mentioned along with a couple others. There’s one maxim where no press is bad press, but I also was wondering after reading it if that means that there’s one less person about to read about my observations. So I deferred to a friend to find out what she thought. Thankfully she thought it was actually quite a good post. The thing that surprised me about the original post was the premise that I’m giving advice.”

“Wordpress 2.5’s interface overhaul is getting closer, and now that I’ve been able to play with the release candidate, these are my thoughts.

The official Wordpress blog posted up a nice sneak peek into the Wordpress 2.5 release, and intriguingly enough, most of it seems to be an interface update thanks to the fine folks from Happy Cog. Excitedly, I grabbed the release candidate and installed it on my laptop to play with. While the experience was primarily positive, there were some things that irked me. This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but the ones that I felt most passionate about are here.”

“I recently asked if you were ready for WordPress 2.5, but let’s go through the steps to prepare your blog for upgrading to the new version next week.”

“Last year I decided to put on twist on my annual ‘best blogs’ post by taking a turn toward the obscure. Because blogs now pervade the media landscape, it makes little sense to write a post arguing that Huffington Post is better or worse than DailyKos — or Cute Overload.

It turned out that this change — pointing to lesser-known sites like History of the Button, Buzzfeed, and Indexed — was a rather auspicious. Within 24 hours of releasing the list, seven of the top ten links on Del.icio.us’ typically-tech-centric hotlist were sites on my list. And so in the spirit of celebrating the lesser-known, it’s time again to point toward the best blogs that might have flown under your radar. Here they are, the Best Blogs of 2007 that You Maybe Aren’t Reading…”

Perfunctory public notice: On this day in 1999 xBlog started broadcasting to the world. This is the 6,000th item added to this visual thinking linkblog.

By winter 1999 the idea had been stirring for at least year, inspired by Camworld, Kottke, Rebecca’s Pocket, peterme and a handful of others. I built some prototypes but never put them online. But once I started working full-time at XPLANE I knew had I found the perfect home for these design/web/communication/etc links.

With the help of Jeff Lash, xBlog became a great linkblog. For eight years it’s been filled with almost daily links to what used to be scarce online visual resources. Those online resources aren’t so scarce now — in fact they’re everywhere. So xBlog’s function as a filter is still useful, but we’re going to take it up a few notches in 2008. Lots of notches.

xBlog’s linkblog component will still be here but I’m looking to start sharing much, much more. Good. XPLANE. Stuff. And trust me — we’ve got lots of good stuff to share.

“Blogging is a form of public conversation on the internet, in which BBC people may wish to take part.

When a blogger clearly identifies themselves as a BBC person and/or discusses their work, the BBC expects them to behave well when blogging, and in ways that are consistent with the BBC’s Editorial Values and policies.

Many bloggers, particularly in technical areas, use their personal blogs to discuss their BBC work in ways that benefit the BBC, and add to the “industry conversation”. These guidelines are not intended to restrict this, as long as confidential information is not revealed.”

Jorn Barger, in response to this and this and more.

“as we observe the 10th anniversary of ‘blogging’
and debate the precise definition of that term

i’ll go on record as claiming not only that
rwwl was the 1st proper weblog
but that it’s still the
only
proper weblog”

“Even if you never read a single thing Dave Winer wrote in his 439 years of blogging, it’s worth taking time to study his ideas about comments on blogs (he doesn’t allow them).”

…to the extent that comments interfere with the natural expression of the unedited voice of an individual, comments may act to make something not a blog…. The cool thing about blogs is that while they may be quiet, and it may be hard to find what you’re looking for, at least you can say what you think without being shouted down. This makes it possible for unpopular ideas to be expressed. And if you know history, the most important ideas often are the unpopular ones…. That’s what’s important about blogs, not that people can comment on your ideas. As long as they can start their own blog, there will be no shortage of places to comment.

“Speak Up, the first of the graphic design blogs to make any kind of impact, is not what it used to be. Don’t take my word for it, though. The news comes from the site’s irrepressible founder, Armin Vit, writing in a recent post titled ‘Speak Up: Now What?’ In the past year or more, says Vit, Speak Up has ‘run out of questions and even perhaps out of steam. Some of us (authors) have gone from outsiders to insiders. …We have done it all. We started to get repetitive and, well, sometimes even boring.’”

“You’d think that as a result of open-source development practices, blog architectures would be pretty close to perfection in areas like Web standards and maximum SEO impact.

You’d be wrong.

Unbelievably, nearly every WordPress, MovableType, or TypePad theme that I’ve come across in the past year fails a simple test for truly semantic (and Google-recommended) XHTML markup. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that these failures are by no means fatal flaws. At the same time, though, I find it extremely unsettling that an inferior markup structure is prevailing in the face of an absolutely correct way of doing things.”

“After a friend recently posted about trying to find the time to blog, I got to thinking: How do I find the time to blog? After some thinking, I came up with a few principles. In some ways, I’m the worst person to give advice, because my frequency of posting is terrible compared to any decent blogger. On the other hand, I’m the father of 3 children under the age of 4 (doing attachment parenting no less) and I work full time, so if I can find the time to post, then anyone can.” (Thanks Rebecca’s Pocket!)

A new design weblog: “Covers all design both normal and strange. Plus environmental issues.” (Thanks Design Observer!)

Rex Sorgatz has a short bit in Wired 15.03 on linkblogs, xBlog’s preferred format for 7+ years:

“The link blog was the first Internet organism, built from a collection of the simplest cellular units of the networked society: links. This sprawling ecosystem of social aggregators, page-rank spoofers, and quirky filters compresses ideas down to their inner nucleus. The primary organs - mass aggregators like Digg, Fark.com, and del.icio.us - arrange piles upon piles of user-submitted pages, hoping some wisdom reveals itself in the opinions of dark and formless crowds. Meanwhile, solitary link bloggers like kottke.org, Waxy.org, and your secret favorite link collector ignore the vast universe of the mediocre to reveal undiscovered morsels yet to be appraised by the algorithmic machines.

The link is its own genre: sparsely worded, underlined, a discrete distillation of a new world that lies on the other side of a click. Such a simple form, yet it connects two universes. By filtering and condensing, the link blog turns online chaos into a tidy little stack of clickable potential.”