To combat writing stale content, we often check the trends to find out what’s hot. Research is a pain in the ass, by the time I figure out what to write about the trend is already dead. Perhaps I should have written about Michael Jackson or the recession, these topics seem to be hanging around, at least for now.

Since I have not put much into this blog lately I figured it was time to start writing some new content for my loyal readers. You can expect more updates more often, even if I don’t feel like it. Even if I am tired, broke and have a headache, yes…you can expect more of my quality content which you’ve grown to love so much. I promise no more copy and paste articles either, the shit is all from me from now on.

1. The Huffington Post
The history of political blogging might usefully be divided into the periods pre- and post-Huffington. Before the millionaire socialite Arianna Huffington decided to get in on the act, bloggers operated in a spirit of underdog solidarity. They hated the mainstream media – and the feeling was mutual.

Bloggers saw themselves as gadflies, pricking the arrogance of established elites from their home computers, in their pyjamas, late into the night. So when, in 2005, Huffington decided to mobilise her fortune and media connections to create, from scratch, a flagship liberal blog she was roundly derided. Who, spluttered the original bloggerati, did she think she was?

But the pyjama purists were confounded. Arianna’s money talked just as loudly online as off, and the Huffington Post quickly became one of the most influential and popular journals on the web. It recruited professional columnists and celebrity bloggers. It hoovered up traffic. Its launch was a landmark moment in the evolution of the web because it showed that many of the old rules still applied to the new medium: a bit of marketing savvy and deep pockets could go just as far as geek credibility, and get there faster.

To borrow the gold-rush simile beloved of web pioneers, Huffington’s success made the first generation of bloggers look like two-bit prospectors panning for nuggets in shallow creeks before the big mining operations moved in. In the era pre-Huffington, big media companies ignored the web, or feared it; post-Huffington they started to treat it as just another marketplace, open to exploitation. Three years on, Rupert Murdoch owns MySpace, while newbie amateur bloggers have to gather traffic crumbs from under the table of the big-time publishers.

huffingtonpost.com

2. Boing Boing
Lego reconstructions of pop videos and cakes baked in the shape of iPods are not generally considered relevant to serious political debate. But even the most earnest bloggers will often take time out of their busy schedule to pass on some titbit of mildly entertaining geek ephemera. No one has done more to promote pointless, yet strangely cool, time-wasting stuff on the net than the editors of Boing Boing (subtitle: A Directory of Wonderful Things). It launched in January 2000 and has had an immeasurable influence on the style and idiom of blogging. But hidden among the pictures of steam-powered CD players and Darth Vader tea towels there is a steely, ultra-liberal political agenda: championing the web as a global medium free of state and corporate control.

Boing Boing chronicles cases where despotic regimes have silenced or imprisoned bloggers. It helped channel blogger scorn on to Yahoo and Google when they kowtowed to China’s censors in order to win investment opportunities. It was instrumental in exposing the creeping erosion of civil liberties in the US under post-9/11 ‘Homeland Security’ legislation. And it routinely ridicules attempts by the music and film industries to persecute small-time file sharers and bedroom pirates instead of getting their own web strategies in order. It does it all with gentle, irreverent charm, polluted only occasionally with gratuitous smut.

boingboing.net

3. Techcrunch
Techcrunch began in 2005 as a blog about dotcom start-ups in Silicon Valley, but has quickly become one of the most influential news websites across the entire technology industry. Founder Michael Arrington had lived through the internet goldrush as a lawyer and entrepreneur before deciding that writing about new companies was more of an opportunity than starting them himself. His site is now ranked the third-most popular blog in the world by search engine Technorati, spawning a mini-empire of websites and conferences as a result. Business Week named Arrington one of the 25 most influential people on the web, and Techcrunch has even scored interviews with Barack Obama and John McCain.

With a horde of hungry geeks and big money investors online, Techcrunch is the largest of a wave of technology-focused blog publishers to tap into the market – GigaOm, PaidContent and Mashable among them – but often proves more contentious than its rivals, thanks to Arrington’s aggressive relationships with traditional media and his conflicts of interest as an investor himself.

techcrunch.com

4. Kottke
One of the early wave of blogging pioneers, web designer Jason Kottke started keeping track of interesting things on the internet as far back as 1998. The site took off, boosted partly through close links to popular blog-building website Blogger (he later married one of the founders). And as the phenomenon grew quickly, Kottke became a well-known filter for surfers on the lookout for interesting reading.

Kottke remains one of the purest old-skool bloggers on the block – it’s a selection of links to websites and articles rather than a repository for detailed personal opinion – and although it remains fairly esoteric, his favourite topics include film, science, graphic design and sport. He often picks up trends and happenings before friends start forwarding them to your inbox. Kottke’s decision to consciously avoid politics could be part of his appeal (he declares himself ‘not a fan’), particularly since the blog’s voice is literate, sober and inquiring, unlike much of the red-faced ranting found elsewhere online.

A couple of key moments boosted Kottke’s fame: first, being threatened with legal action by Sony for breaking news about a TV show, but most notably quitting his web-design job and going solo three years ago. A host of ‘micropatrons’ and readers donated cash to cover his salary, but these days he gets enough advertising to pay the bills. He continues to plug away at the site as it enters its 10th year.

kottke.org

5. Dooce
One of the best-known personal bloggers (those who provide more of a diary than a soapbox or reporting service), Heather Armstrong has been writing online since 2001. Though there were personal websites that came before hers, certain elements conspired to make Dooce one of the biggest public diaries since Samuel Pepys’s (whose diary is itself available, transcribed in blog form, at Pepysdiary.com). Primarily, Armstrong became one of the first high-profile cases of somebody being fired for writing about her job. After describing events that her employer – a dotcom start-up – thought reflected badly on them, Armstrong was sacked. The incident caused such fierce debate that Dooce found itself turned into a verb that is used in popular parlance (often without users realising its evolution): ‘dooced – to be fired from one’s job as a direct result of one’s personal website’.

Behind Dooce stands an army of personal bloggers perhaps not directly influenced by, or even aware of, her work – she represents the hundreds of thousands who decide to share part of their life with strangers.

Armstrong’s honesty has added to her popularity, and she has written about work, family life, postnatal depression, motherhood, puppies and her Mormon upbringing with the same candid and engaging voice. Readers feel that they have been brought into her life, and reward her with their loyalty. Since 2005 the advertising revenue on her blog alone has been enough to support her family.

dooce.com

6. Perezhilton
Once dubbed ‘Hollywood’s most hated website’, Perezhilton (authored by Mario Lavandeira since 2005) is the gossip site celebrities fear most. Mario, 29, is famous for scrawling rude things (typically doodles about drug use) over pap photos and outing closeted stars. On the day of Lindsay Lohan’s arrest for drink-driving, he posted 60 updates, and 8m readers logged on.

He’s a shameless publicity whore, too. His reality show premiered on VH1 last year, and his blogsite is peppered with snaps of him cuddling Paris Hilton at premieres. Fergie from Black Eyed Peas alluded to him in a song, and Avril Lavigne phoned, asking him to stop writing about her after he repeatedly blogged about her lack of talent and her ‘freakishly long arm’.

perezhilton.com

7. Talking points memo
At some point during the disputed US election of 2000 – when Al Gore was famously defeated by a few hanging chads – Joshua Micah Marshall lost patience. Despite working as a magazine editor, Marshall chose to vent on the web. Eight years later Talking Points Memo and its three siblings draw in more than 400,000 viewers a day from their base in New York.

Marshall has forged a reputation, and now makes enough money to run a small team of reporters who have made an impact by sniffing out political scandal and conspiracy. ‘I think in many cases the reporting we do is more honest, more straight than a lot of things you see even on the front pages of great papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post,’ he said in an interview last year. ‘But I think both kinds of journalism should exist, should co-exist.’

Although his unabashed partisan approach is admonished by many old-fashioned American reporters, Marshall’s skills at pulling together the threads of a story have paid dividends. Last year he helped set the agenda after George Bush covertly fired a string of US attorneys deemed disloyal to the White House. While respected mainstream media figures accused Marshall of seeing conspiracy, he kept digging: the result was the resignation of attorney general Alberto Gonzales, and a prestigious George Polk journalism award for Marshall, the first ever for a blogger.

talkingpointsmemo.com

8. Icanhascheezburger
Amused by a photo of a smiling cat, idiosyncratically captioned with the query ‘I Can Has A Cheezburger?’, which he found on the internet while between jobs in early 2007, Eric Nakagawa of Hawaii emailed a copy of it to a friend (known now only as Tofuburger). Then, on a whim, they began a website, first comprising only that one captioned photo but which has since grown into one of the most popular blogs in the world.

Millions of visitors visit Icanhascheezburger.com to see, create, submit and vote on Lolcats (captioned photos of characterful cats in different settings). The ‘language’ used in the captions, which this blog has helped to spread globally, is known as Lolspeak, aka Kitty Pidgin. In Lolspeak, human becomes ‘hooman’, Sunday ‘bunday’, exactly ‘xackly’ and asthma ‘azma’. There is now an effort to develop a LOLCode computer-programming language and another to translate the Bible into Lolspeak.

icanhascheezburger.com

9. Beppe Grillo
Among the most visited blogs in the world is that of Beppe Grillo, a popular Italian comedian and political commentator, long persona non grata on state TV, who is infuriated daily – especially by corruption and financial scandal in his country.

A typical blog by Grillo calls, satirically or otherwise, for the people of Naples and Campania to declare independence, requests that Germany declare war on Italy to help its people (‘We will throw violets and mimosa to your Franz and Gunther as they march through’) or reports on Grillo’s ongoing campaign to introduce a Bill of Popular Initiative to remove from office all members of the Italian parliament who’ve ever had a criminal conviction. Grillo’s name for Mario Mastella, leader of the Popular-UDEUR centre-right party, is Psychodwarf. ‘In another country, he would have been the dishwasher in a pizzeria,’ says Grillo. Through his blog, he rallied many marchers in 280 Italian towns and cities for his ‘Fuck You’ Day last September.

beppegrillo.it

10. Gawker
A New York blog of ‘snarky’ gossip and commentary about the media industry, Gawker was founded in 2002 by journalist Nick Denton, who had previously helped set up a networking site called First Tuesday for web and media entrepreneurs. Gawker’s earliest fascination was gossip about Vogue editor Anna Wintour, garnered from underlings at Conde Nast. This set the tone for amassing a readership of movers and shakers on the Upper East Side, as well as ‘the angry creative underclass’ wishing either to be, or not be, like them, or both (‘the charmingly incompetent X… the wildly successful blowhard’). Within a year Gawker’s readers were making 500,000 page views per month. Nowadays the figure is 11m, recovering from a recent dip to 8m thanks to the showing of a Tom Cruise ‘Indoctrination Video’ which Scientologists had legally persuaded YouTube to take down. Gawker remains the flagship of Gawker Media, which now comprises 14 blogs, although gossiping by ex-Gawker insiders, a fixation on clicks (which its bloggers are now paid on the basis of) and fresh anxiety over defining itself have led some to claim Gawker has become more ‘tabloidy’ and celeb- and It-girl-orientated, and less New York-centric. But its core value – ‘media criticism’ – appears to be intact.

gawker.com

11. The Drudge Report
The Report started life as an email gossip sheet, and then became a trashy webzine with negligible traffic. But thanks to the decision in 1998 to run a scurrilous rumour – untouched by mainstream media – about Bill Clinton and a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky, it became a national phenomenon. Recent scoops include Barack Obama dressed in tribal garb and the fact Prince Harry was serving in Afghanistan. Drudge is scorned by journalists and serious bloggers for his tabloid sensibilities, but his place in the media history books is guaranteed. And much though they hate him, the hacks all still check his front page – just in case he gets another president-nobbling scoop.

drudgereport.com

12. Xu Jinglei
Jinglei is a popular actress (and director of Letter From An Unknown Woman) in China, who in 2005 began a blog (‘I got the joy of expressing myself’) which within a few months had garnered 11.5m visits and spurred thousands of other Chinese to blog. In 2006 statisticians at Technorati, having previously not factored China into their calculations, realised Jinglei’s blog was the most popular in the world. In it she reports on her day-to-day moods, reflections, travels, social life and cats (‘Finally the first kitten’s been born!!! Just waiting for the second, in the middle of the third one now!!!!!!!! It’s midnight, she gave birth to another one!!!!!!’). She blogs in an uncontroversial but quite reflective manner, aiming to show a ‘real person’ behind the celebrity. Each posting, usually ending with ‘I have to be up early’ or a promise to report tomorrow on a DVD she is watching, is followed by many hundreds of comments from readers – affirming their love, offering advice, insisting she take care. Last year her blog passed the 1bn clicks mark.

blog.sina.com.cn/xujinglei

13. Treehugger
Treehugger is a green consumer blog with a mission to bring a sustainable lifestyle to the masses. Its ethos, that a green lifestyle does not have to mean sacrifice, and its positive, upbeat feel have attracted over 1.8m unique users a month. Consistently ranked among the top 20 blogs on Technorati, Treehugger has 10 staff but also boasts 40 writers from a wide variety of backgrounds in more than 10 countries around the world, who generate more than 30 new posts a day across eight categories, ranging from fashion and beauty, travel and nature, to science and technology. Treehugger began as an MBA class project four years ago and says it now generates enough revenue from sponsorship and advertising to pay all its staffers and writers. It has developed a highly engaged community and has added popular services like TreeHugger.tv, and a user-generated blog, Hugg. It was bought by the Discovery Channel last year for a rumoured $10m.

treehugger.com

14. Microsiervos
Microsiervos, which began in 2001, took its name from Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs, a diary entry-style novel about internet pioneers. It is run by Alvy, Nacho and Wicho, three friends in Madrid, who blog in Spanish. The second most popular blog in Europe and the 13th most popular in the world (according to eBizMBA), Microsiervos concerns itself with science, curiosities, strange reality, chance, games, puzzles, quotations, conspiracies, computers, hacking, graffiti and design. It is informal, friendly and humorous, moving from news of an eccentric new letter font to reflections on the discovery of the Milky Way having double the thickness it was previously thought to have.

microsiervos.com

15. TMZ
You want relentless celebrity gossip on tap? TMZ will provide it, and when we say relentless, we mean relentless. The US site is dripping with ‘breaking news’ stories, pictures and videos, and deems celeb activity as mundane as stars walking to their cars worthy of a video post. TMZ was launched in 2005 by AOL and reportedly employs around 20 writers to keep the celeb juice flowing. It pulls in 1.6m readers a month and is endlessly cited as the source for red-top celeb stories. It was the first to break Alec Baldwin’s now infamous ‘rude little pig’ voicemail last April, for instance. TMZ prides itself on being close to the action, so close, in fact, a TMZ photographer had his foot run over by Britney Spears mid-meltdown. They auctioned the tyre-tracked sock on eBay in aid of US charity the Children’s Defense Fund last autumn.

TMZ.com

16. Engadget
Engadget provides breaking news, rumours and commentary on, for instance, a camera able to track a head automatically, the very latest HD screen or ‘visual pollution’ concerns prompted by hand-held pico laser-projectors. The world’s most popular blog on gadgets and consumer electronics, Engadget was founded by Peter Rojas in 2004 and won the Web Blogs Awards that year and each year since. Now part of Weblogs Inc (owned by AOL), it is offered on many other sites (including GoogleMail) as a default RSS feed, and is published in English, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. Last year, a mistake confirmed Engadget’s power – upon reporting a supposed email (which turned out to be a hoax) from Apple, informing Apple employees of a delay in the launch of iPhone, Apple’s share price fell by 3 per cent within minutes. Rojas also co-founded rival gadget blog Gizmodo.

engadget.com

17. Marbury
No matter what happens between now and 4 November, you can be certain the US presidential election of 2008 will be among the most historically important and dramatic of any fought. Having an informed opinion will be a must, but if you are as yet unable to tell your Iowa Caucus from your Feiler Faster Thesis, Marbury – a British blog on American politics – is the place to start. The site’s creator, Ian Leslie, is an ex-expat who fell for American politics during a four-year stint living in New York. The site signposts important events and interesting analyses, gives context and witty commentary on everything from the most serious speeches to the silliest election-themed YouTube clips. And West Wing fans will be pleased to note that the blog’s name is a reference to the show’s British ambassador to the United States, Lord John Marbury, who, appropriately enough, provided an eccentrically British but reliably insightful appraisal of American politics.

marbury.typepad.com

18. Chez Pim
Attracting around 10,000 people from all over the globe to her site every week, Pim Techamuanvivit has tried and tested an awful lot of food. From Michelin-starred restaurants to street food and diners, she samples it all, and posts her thoughts and pictures to share with other foodie fans. She advises her readers on what cooking equipment to go for, posts recipe suggestions for them to try, and gives them a nudge in the direction of which food shows are worth a watch. She’s not just famous on the net, she’s attracted global coverage in the media with her writing, recipes and interviews appearing in such diverse publications as the New York Times, Le Monde and the Sydney Morning Herald.

chezpim.typepad.com

19. Get More Reviews
Recently rated the 18th most influential blog in the world by Wikio, Get More Reviews, which has the tag line ‘product reviews, service review and website reviews’, is website from Canada, which aims ‘to boldly blog what no one has blogged before’, and recently posted its 10,000th entry. Get More Reviews reports on technology and odds and ends, encouraging readers to rummage through an 1851 edition of the New York Times one minute and to contemplate the differences between mooses and elks the next.

getmorereviews.com

20. The Sartorialist
As ideas go, this one is pretty simple. Man wanders around Manhattan with a camera. Spots someone whose outfit he likes. Asks if he can take a picture. Goes home and posts it on his blog. But the man in question is Scott Schuman, who had 15 years’ experience working at the high-fashion end of the clothing industry before starting The Sartorialist. He’s got a sharp eye for a good look, a gift for grabbing an on-the-hoof pic and an unwavering enthusiasm for people going the extra mile in the name of style. Minimalist it might be, but his site – a basic scroll of full-length street portraits, occasionally annotated with a brief note – is mesmeric and oddly beautiful. The site attracts more than 70,000 readers a day and has been named one of Time’s Top 100 Design Influences. So if you’re out and about and a guy called Scott asks to take your picture, just smile. You’re about to become a style icon.

thesartorialist.blogspot.com

21. Students for a free Tibet
Taking the protest online, Students for a Free Tibet (SFT) is a global, grassroots network of students campaigning to free Tibet, which has been occupied by China since 1950. Students in Tibet face arrest for posting on the site, but many escape to blog about their experiences in exile. With a history of direct action, the group is now uniting worldwide members through the web, blogging to spread word of news and protests, and using sites like Facebook to raise funds. The organisation, which was founded in 1994 in New York, spans more than 35 countries and gets up to 100,000 hits a month. In 2006, SFT used a satellite link at Mount Everest base camp to stream live footage on to YouTube of a demonstration against Chinese Olympic athletes practising carrying the torch there. Later this year the web will be a critical tool in organising and reporting protests during the games. ‘SFT plans to stage protests in Beijing during the games and post blogs as events unfold,’ says Iain Thom, the SFT UK national co-ordinator. ‘But for security reasons we can’t reveal details of how or where yet.’ Similarly, a massive protest in London on 10 March will be the subject of intense cyber comment. In response, the site has fallen victim to increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks. Investigations have traced the sources back to China, leading to speculation that the Chinese authorities are trying to sabotage the site to stop online critics.

studentsforafreetibet.org

22. Jezebel
Last year Gawker Media launched Jezebel – a blog which aimed to become a brilliant version of a women’s magazine. It succeeded quickly, in part by acknowledging the five big lies perpetuated by the women’s media: The Cover Lie (female forgeries of computer-aided artistry); The Celebrity-Profile Lie (flattery, more nakedly consumerist and less imaginative than the movies they’re shilling for); The Must-Have Lie (magazine editors are buried in free shit); The Affirmation Crap Lie (you are insecure about things you didn’t know it was possible to be insecure about); and The Big Meta Lie (we’re devastatingly affected by the celebrity media). Their regular ‘Crap Email From a Dude’ feature is especially fantastic, as is their coverage of current stories (opinionated and consistently hilarious) and politics. It offers the best lady-aimed writing on the web, along with lots of nice pictures of Amy Winehouse getting out of cars.

jezebel.com

23. Gigazine
Created by Satoshi Yamasaki and Mazaki Keito of Osaka, Gigazine is the most popular blog in Japan, covering the latest in junk foods and beverages, games, toys and other ingredients of colourful pop product culture. Visitors first witness ‘eye candy’ such as David Beckham condoms (from China), 75 turtles in a fridge, the packaging for Mega Frankfurters or a life-size Ferrari knitted from wool, learn of a second X-Files movie moving into pre-pre-production, watch a vacuum-cleaning robot being tested and compare taste reports of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s new Shrimp Tsuisuta Chilli.

gigazine.net

24. Girl with a one-track mind
Following in the footsteps of Belle de Jour – the anonymous blogger claiming to be a sex worker – the girl with a one track mind started writing in open, explicit terms about her lively sex life in 2004. By 2006, the blog was bookified and published by Ebury, and spent much time on bestseller lists, beach towels and hidden behind the newspapers of serious-looking commuters. Though she was keen to retain her anonymity and continue her career in the film industry, author ‘Abby Lee’ was soon outed as north Londoner Zoe Margolis by a Sunday newspaper.

girlwithaonetrackmind.blogspot.com

25. Mashable
Founded by Peter Cashmore in 2005, Mashable is a social-networking news blog, reporting on and reviewing the latest developments, applications and features available in or for MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and countless lesser-known social-networking sites and services, with a special emphasis on functionality. The blog’s name Mashable is derived from Mashup, a term for the fusing of multiple web services. Readers range from top web 2.0 developers to savvy 13-year-olds wishing for the latest plug-ins to pimp up their MySpace pages.

mashable.com

26. Greek tragedy
Stephanie Klein’s blog allows her to ‘create an online scrapbook of my life, complete with drawings, photos and my daily musings’ or, rather, tell tawdry tales of dating nightmares, sexual encounters and bodily dysfunctions. Thousands of women tune in for daily accounts of her narcissistic husband and nightmarish mother-in-law and leave equally self-revealing comments transforming the pages into something of a group confessional. The blog has been so successful that Klein has penned a book, Straight Up and Dirty, and has featured in countless magazine and newspaper articles around the globe. Not bad for what Klein describes as ‘angst online’.

stephanieklein.blogs.com

27. Holy Moly
If a weekly flick through Heat just isn’t enough, then a daily intake of Holy Moly will certainly top up those celeb gossip levels. The UK blog attracts 750,000 visitors a month and 240,000 celeb-obsessees subscribe to the accompanying weekly mail-out. It’s an established resource for newspaper columnists – both tabloid and broadsheet – and there’s a daily ‘News from the Molehill’ slot in the free London paper The Metro. Last month Holy Moly created headlines in its own right by announcing a rethink on publishing paparazzi shots. The blog will no longer publish pics obtained when ‘pursuing people in cars and on bikes’, as well as ‘celebrities with their kids’, ‘people in distress at being photographed’ and off-duty celebs. But don’t think that means the omnipresent celeb blog that sends shivers round offices up and down the country on ‘mail-out day’ is slowing down – there has been talk of Holy Moly expanding into TV.

holymoly.co.uk

28. Michelle Malkin
Most surveys of web use show a fairly even gender balance online, but political blogging is dominated by men. One exception is Michelle Malkin, a conservative newspaper columnist and author with one of the most widely read conservative blogs in the US. That makes her one of the most influential women online. Her main theme is how liberals betray America by being soft on terrorism, peddling lies about global warming and generally lacking patriotism and moral fibre.

www.michellemalkin.com

29. Cranky flier
There’s nowhere to hide for airlines these days. Not with self-confessed ‘airline dork’ Brett Snyder, aka Cranky Flier, keeping tabs on their progress. He’s moved on from spending his childhood birthdays in airport hotels, face pressed against the window watching the planes come in, and turned his attention to reporting on the state of airlines. His CV is crammed with various US airline jobs, which gives him the insider knowledge to cast his expert eye over everything from the recent 777 emergency landing at Heathrow to spiralling baggage handling costs and the distribution of air miles to ‘virtual assistants’.

crankyflier.com

30. Bloggerbible.com
It’s a neat word bloggerbible is just a simple contraction of  its preceding expletive but from those three letters an entire fugging industry has grown. At BloggerBible.com, celebrity offenders against style, elegance and the basic concept of making sure you’re covering your reproductive organs with some form of clothing before you leave the house are ‘fugged’ by the site’s writers, Jessica Morgan and Heather Cocks. In their hands, the simple pleasure of yelping ‘Does she even OWN a mirror?’ at a paparazzi shot of some B-list headcase in fuchsia becomes an epic battle against dull Oscar gowns, ill-fitting formalwear and Lindsay Lohan’s leggings. The site stays on the right side of gratuitous nastiness by dishing out generous praise when due (the coveted ‘Well Played’), being genuinely thoughtful on questions of taste and funnier on the subject of random starlets in sequined sweatpants than you could possibly even imagine.

bloggerbible.com

31. Gaping void
In the middle of a career as an adman in New York, Hugh MacLeod found himself doodling acerbic and almost surreal cartoons on the back of people’s business cards to pass the time in bars. Everyone seemed to like the idea, so he kept going. Things started going gangbusters when he pimped his cartoons on the internet, and as he built an audience through his blog, he started writing about his other passion – the new world of understanding how to adapt marketing to the new world of the net. Remember when everybody was madly printing off vouchers from the web that saved you 40 per cent? That was one of his: aimed at helping shift more bottles from Stormhoek, the South African vintner he works with.

gapingvoid.com

32. Dirtydirty dancing
If someone stole your camera, took it out for the night to parties you yourself aren’t cool enough to go to and returned it in the morning, you would probably find it loaded up with pictures like those posted on DirtyDirtyDancing. The site seems pretty lo-fi – just entries called things like ‘Robin’s birthday’ and ‘FEB16′ featuring pages of images of hip young things getting their party on. And that’s it. The original delight was in logging on to see if you’d made it on to the site – your chances increase exponentially if you’re beautiful, avant-garde and hang out at clubs and parties in the edgier parts of London – but now the site can get up to 900,000 hits a month from all over the world.

dirtydirtydancing.com

33. Crooked timber
With a title pulled from Immanuel Kant’s famous statement that ‘out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made’, it’s an amalgam of academic and political writing that has muscled its way into the epicentre of intelligent discussion since its conception in 2003. Formed as an internet supergroup, pulling several popular intellectual blogs together, Crooked Timber now has 16 members – largely academics – across the US, Europe, Australia and Asia. The site has built itself a reputation as something of an intellectual powerhouse; a sort of global philosophical thinktank conducted via blog.

crookedtimber.org

34. Beansprouts
Combining diary, opinion and green lifestyle tips, Beansprouts is a blog that covers one family’s ‘search for the good life’. Melanie Rimmer and her family of five live in a ‘small ex-council house’ with a garden on the edge of farmland in Poynton, Cheshire. They grow food on an allotment nearby, keep chickens and bees and ‘try to be green, whatever that means’. Rimmer set up the blog nearly two years ago when she first got the allotment and says she felt it was something worth writing about. With one post a day, often more, topics for discussion can range from top 10 uses for apples to making scrap quilts.

bean-sprouts.blogspot.com

35. The offside
Launched by ‘Bob’ after the success of his WorldCupBlog in 2006, Offside is a UK-based blog covering football leagues globally, gathering news and visuals on all of it, inviting countless match reports and promoting discussion on all things soccer, from the attack by a colony of red ants on a player in the Sao Paulo state championship third division, to the particular qualities of every one of Cristiano Ronaldo’s goals so far this season. Considered by many to be the best ‘serious’ blog in the game, it nevertheless promises irreverently, ‘If there is a sex scandal in England, we’ll be stuck in the middle of it. If a player is traded for 1,000lb of beef in Romania, we’ll cook the steak. And if something interesting happens in Major League Soccer, we’ll be just as surprised as you.’

theoffside.com

36. Peteite Anglaise
The tagline of a new book hitting British shelves reads ‘In Paris, in love, in trouble’, but if it were telling the whole story, perhaps it should read ‘In public’ too. Bored at work one day in 2004, expat secretary Catherine Sanderson happened upon the concept of blogging. With a few clicks and an impulse she created her own blog, and quickly gathered fans who followed her life in Paris, the strained relationship with her partner and adventures with her toddler. And there was plenty of drama to watch: within a year her relationship had broken up, and she’d met a new man who wooed her online. Readers were mesmerised by her unflinching dedication to telling the whole story, no matter how she would be judged. Soon afterwards, however, Sanderson’s employers found out about the blog and promptly fired her. Defeat turned into victory, however, with the press attention she gathered from the dismissal not only securing victory in an industrial tribunal, but also helping her score a lucrative two-book deal with Penguin.

petiteanglaise.com

37. Crooks and liars
Founded in 2004 by John Amato (a professional saxophonist and flautist), Crooks and Liars is a progressive/liberal-leaning political blog, with over 200m visitors to date, which is illustrated by video and audio clips of politicians and commentators on podiums, radio and TV. Readers post a variety of comments on political talking points of the day, although 9/11 conspiracy theories are often deleted, and there is a daily round-up of notable stories on other political blogs.

crooksandliars.com

38. Blogger Bible
For Clothilde Dusoulier, a young woman working in computing and living in the Paris district of Montmartre, starting a blog was a way of venting her boundless enthusiasm for food without worrying she might be boring her friends with it. Five years later Chocolate and Zucchini, one of the most popular cooking blogs, has moved from being a hobby to a full-time career. The mixture of an insider’s view on gastronomic Paris, conversational, bilingual writing and the sheer irresistibility of her recipes pull in thousands of readers every day. This, in turn, has led to multiple books and the ability to forge a dream career as a food writer.The name of the blog is, she says, a good metaphor for her cooking style: ‘The zucchini illustrates my focus on healthy and natural eating… and the chocolate represents my decidedly marked taste for anything sweet.’

bloggerbible.com

39. Samizdata
Samizdata is one of Britain’s oldest blogs. Written by a bunch of anarcho-libertarians, tax rebels, Eurosceptics and Wildean individualists, it has a special niche in the political blogosphere: like a dive bar, on the rational side of the border between fringe opinion and foam-flecked paranoid ranting. Samizdata serves its opinions up strong and neat, but still recognisable as politics. On the other side of the border, in the wilderness, the real nutters start.

samizdata.net

40. The daily dish
Andrew Sullivan is an expat Brit, blogging pioneer and defier-in-chief of American political stereotypes. He is an economic conservative (anti-tax), a social liberal (soft on drugs) and a foreign policy hawk (pro-war). He endorsed George Bush in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. Barack Obama is his preferred Democrat candidate in 2008. So he is either confused, a hypocrite or a champion of honest non-partisanship – depending on your point of view. He is also gay, a practising Roman Catholic and HIV-positive, a set of credentials he routinely deploys in arguments to confuse atheist liberals and evangelical conservatives.

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com

41. The F word
Founded in 2001, the UK’s first feminist webzine is responsible for reviving debates around feminism in Britain. Edited by Jess McCabe, the site, which receives around 3,000 hits a day, is dedicated to providing a forum for contemporary feminist voices, with a daily news blog, features on stereotypes and censorship, podcasts on pornography and regular feminist film reviews.

thefword.org.uk

42. Jonny B’s private secret diary
Growing in popularity since its debut in 2003, Jonny B’s diary – which is clearly neither private nor terribly secret – catalogues the rock and bowls lifestyle of one man in the depths of rural Norfolk. With the mocking self-awareness of a modern Diary of a Nobody, the author tells tales of wild nights at the village pub and the fortunes of the local bowls team. As a slow, gentle satire on modern village life, it is often held up as an example of blog as sitcom, and has not only attracted a loyal band of readers, but a dedicated fan club on Facebook desperate to work out the real identity of the wit behind the site. Previous guesses have included Chris Evans and Johnny Vaughan, though both have been strenuously denied.

privatesecretdiary.com

43. Popjustice
When Smash Hits! died, Popjustice became the new home of pop music. Founded in 2000 by Peter Robinson, it combines fandom with music news and raw critique, all hilarious, and all blindingly correct. Recent features include a review of Eurovision failure Daz Sampson’s new single ‘Do A Little Dance’ (‘The listener is invited to muse on the sad inevitability of their own death’) and a furious debate about the future of Girls Aloud.

popjustice.com

44. Waiter rant
Rant isn’t quite the right word for this collection of carefully crafted stories from the sharp end of the service industry in a busy New York restaurant. ‘The Waiter’, as the author is known, has been blogging his experiences with fussy customers and bad tippers since 2004, winning a gong at blogging’s biggest awards, the Bloggies, in 2007. It’s representative – but by no means the first – of the so-called ‘job-blogs’, with people from all walks of life, from ambulance drivers (randomactsofreality.net) and policemen (coppersblog.blogspot.com) to the greatly loved but now defunct Call Centre Confidential. Between them they chronicle life in their trade, and usually from behind a veil of anonymity. Something about the everyday nature of The Waiter – a person we like to pretend is invisible or treat with servile disdain – deconstructing the event later with a subtle, erudite typestroke, has captured the public imagination and (hopefully) made some people behave better in restaurants than they otherwise might.

waiterrant.net

45. Hecklerspray
The internet’s not exactly short of gossip websites providing scurrilous rumours of who did what to whom, but some stand out from the rest. Sharply written and often laugh-out-loud funny, Hecklerspray has been called the British alternative to Perez Hilton, but it’s different in important ways: the emphasis here is on style and wit, with a stated aim to ‘chronicle the ups and downs of all that is populist and niche within the murky world of entertainment’. Basically, it’s gossip for grown-ups.

hecklerspray.com

46. WoWinsider
WoWinsider is a blog about the World of Warcraft, which is the most popular online role-playing game in the world, one for which over 10m pay subscriptions each month in order to control an avatar (a character, chosen from 10 races) and have it explore landscapes, perform quests, build skills, fight monsters to the death and interact with others’ avatars. WoWinsider reports on what’s happening within WoW (‘Sun’s Reach Harbor has been captured’). It also reports on outside developments and rumours (‘A future patch will bring a new feature: threat meters’). Supporters of US presidential candidate Ron Paul promoted on WoWInsider their recent virtual mass march through the WoW. And the blog recently reported that America’s Homeland Security are – seriously – looking for a terrorist operating within WoW.

WoWinsider.com

47. Angry black bitch
Angry Black Bitch, which has the tagline, ‘Practising the Fine Art of Bitchitude’, is the four-year-old blog of Shark Fu of St Louis, Missouri. She has never posted a photo of herself and this ‘anonymity’ has led recently to her having to fend off claims she’s really a white man, even a drag queen. But taken as read, Shark Fu is a much-discussed, 35-year-old black woman, tired of the ‘brutal weight’ of her ‘invisibility’.

angryblackbitch.blogspot.com

48. Stylebubble
Fashion blogger Susie Lau says Stylebubble is just a diary of what she wears and why. But few diaries are read by 10,000 people a day. Lau, 23, admits to spending up to 60 per cent of her pay from her day job in advertising on clothes, but now she’s viewed as a fashion opinion former, she’s being paid in kind. Her influence is such that fashion editors namecheck her blog, Chanel invites her to product launches and advertisers have come calling.

stylebubble.typepad.com

49. AfterEllen
Afterellen takes an irreverent look at how the lesbian community is represented in the media. Started by lesbian pop-culture guru Sarah Warn in 2002, the name of the site gives a nod to the groundbreaking moment Ellen DeGeneres came out on her hit TV show, Ellen, in 1997. Since then, lesbian and bisexual women have moved from the margins on to primetime TV, and this blog analyses the good, the bad and the ugly of how they’re portrayed. It’s now the biggest website for LGBT women, with half a million hits a month.

afterellen.com

50. Copyblogger
It’s dry, real, and deafeningly practical, but for an online writing-for-the-internet blog, Copyblogger, founded in 2006, is remarkably interesting. Swelling with advice on online writing, it’s an essential tool for anyone trying to make themselves heard online, whether commenting on a discussion board or putting together a corporate website.

copyblogger.com

Since I earn part of my income online, I require an easy and reliable way to ensure that there will be money coming in every month.  Sure I dabble in Adsense and sell private ads, but that has only brought me part of the way of where I need to be.  To supplement my income I diversify as much as I can and nurture each income stream until they are producing a reasonable profit.  What is considered a reasonable profit you ask? . First off its getting more out of it than what you put in, this means for every hour I spend working on a project, I expect to get paid at least for the time spent.  In most cases this realized profit does not happen immediately, instead my financial rewards come months later or within a year.  Sounds like a long to wait doesn’t it?  Once you have enough projects under your belt that are making money, your income will be perpetual and this post is dedicated to showing you how to do it.

In order to build an income online its going to take some serious work on your part.  If you believe making money online is easy and that anyone can do it, then you are in a fantasy land.  Now that we got that out of the way we can begin.  Making money online begins with a self assessment, determining which skills you have.  I’ve put a list of things that I consider to be very valuable for those looking to make money online.

Which Skills Do You Have?

• Web Design
• Graphic Design
• Programming
• Writing

Which Traits Do You Have?

• Resoucefulness
• Intelligence
• Hard Working
• Willing To Learn
• Relentlessness

Yes, these things appear to be generic but they are essential to get the job done.  So you think you have the majority of these things or perhaps you have them all, does that mean you are going to make money?  Hell no, that’s just the beginning, you also need to have reliable knowledge to apply these things to.  Without reliable knowledge, you will be like the vast majority of wannabe online income earners. 

Reliable Knowledge Is Essential

Let’s talk about what constitutes reliable knowledge for a few moments so we are all on the same page.  “Reliable Knowledge” refers to knowing the information that you are using to get to where you want to be is absolutely sound and solid.  I bring the topic up about “Reliable Knowledge” because there is so much misinformation on the Internet that it has created a laberynth of dead ends for the majority who try to make an income online.  Imagine that, there are hundreds of thousands of people who want to make money online and the majority are going about it blindly while those in the ”know” just sit back and rake in the cash.  The message here is don’t put your time, effort and skills into anything online unless you know it will work.

So how do we distinguish what is reliable knowledge and what is not?  Yes, that’s the million dollar question…I like to think that the successful folks develop a sixth sense for it.  Picture someone wakes up and says, hey making money online sounds like a great way to make a living….and so their journey begins.  They start visiting money making forums and blogs to find out the most lucrative ways as they start to build their arsenal of tactics.  They do extensive “make money online” searches in their favourite search engine and take notes diligently.  Then finally they put together a game plan and start executing what they think is the way to make money.

Global Domination Shortfall

Their Adsense pennies start to flow in and they are overjoyed as they continue their quest for complete global domination.  Several months later they take a step back and look at all the work they have done and say “gee, I’ve barely made enough to fill my car up with gas, what am I doing wrong?” At this point they feel wiser and more focused and change their strategy only to end up in the same place time and time again.  By this time, they believe making money online is either a myth or requires magical powers that only “John Chow” and a few other extremely blessed individuals have.  Unfortunitely for these people, they have wasted a large amount of time and resources using an uncomplete plan that lacked reliable knowledge.

You may also enjoy reading: Blogging For Profit |  Make Money On Your Blog

Ok, all that sounds depressing and by now you think I’m an asshole for painting such a truthful picture of the majority of people who try to make money online, possibly even including yourself.  Let’s change things up and talk about how I am making money to brighen things up a little.

How I Make Money

I make money online by providing something original to world, including this hybrid blog that features product, service and website reviews.  Is getmorereviews.com the most original concept ever to hit the Internet, well not exactly, but since I believe in it and its making money….I think I will stick with it for now.  So this website is just one of many that I have that are currently making money.  How does it make money you ask?  It makes money because of monetization and content synergy.  What are these big words that I speak of?  Monetization refers to how I make this website make money and content synergy refers to how everything I write here complements everything else on the website. Let’s take a closer look at the details so you understand and recognize the true diabolical nature of how I do business online.

For every article I write on this website, I already know its going to attract readers because of the content.  Review websites tend to bring in new and repeat traffic, I know because I check my stats regularily.  Did I know this before starting this website, not really, but I went with my hunch.  OK, so I’ve chosen a website content theme that gravitates well with the masses and apparently search engines adore, so I’m off to a good start.  Secondly, I ensured that this website is well monetized by adding in those pesky Adsense ads.  Every page of this website displays ads in a tasteful, unobstructed way as to not overshadow the content.  Since I get new and repeat visitors here daily, even if I did nothing else, this website would more than pay for itself through my Adsense ads which by the way…are clicked on by most visitors who come here.  I’m not sure why my clickthrough is so high, I guess Google is really doing their job with these ads for content because they appear to be irrestible to visitors, they just keep clicking, clicking clicking.  All those clicks put money in my account which encourages me to keep writing. 

Paid Product, Service and Website Reviews

The second income stream here is paid reviews.  People who have a product, service or website that want additional exposure for visit this website, they click on my Get Reviewed page, then they contact me to do a paid review for them. My prices vary for reviews, depending on the length, etc. My clients who choose to purchase a review get additional exposure and increased sales, I get paid and everyone is happy.  Now that’s a fine piece of work if I do say so myself.  The third income stream here involves affiliate programs, basically I write reviews about products that I like (but not until I’ve joined their affiliate program).  Once again, folks looking to learn more about a product or service that I have written about visit my review article then click the affiliate link and make a purchase.  I get my cut of 20% or more of the purchase price, customer gets their product and everyone is happy once again.

Don’t Forget To Read: Top 50 Article Directories Revealed  |  Bloggers Don’t Quit Your Day Job 

So I’ve just shared how I have 3 distinct methods of making money off of this website that are as clear as day.  Each one is reliable, profitable and completely do-able.  As you can see, my methods are well thought out and are competely above board. Take my knowledge and use it for yourself if you feel inspired to do so….But remember, the teacher doesn’t tell everything….

So you are still determined?  You’ve diversified your online income?  You have multiple streams of income?  In my opinion, anyone who can run an online business that is creating positive cash flow from diversified sources successfully, can probably make a much better living in the real world.  If blogging was to die tomorrow, bloggers making a $100 per day could easily get a job that pays triple that because of their unique skill set, is this you?  Or are you another dreamer?  If you cannot make a generous amount of money in the real world, then chances are you are not going to do any better on the Internet.

I’m not writing this to hurt your feelings either, instead its a wakeup call to the legions of losers who think they are going to make a living online.  If you are serious at all about making a living online, pleeeease make sure that you know how to produce a sustainable income that will replace the benefits from your current job.

My final tip for today is for those who still insist on trying to make a living online.  If you know how to make a website that can produce $1 per day, each and every day, you should make 100 of those websites to make at least $100 per day.  This method does work if you do it correctly.  Now imagine if you could only build sites that could make $2 per day!

This post is dedicated to why John Chow is failing to connect with regular people.  I mentioned John’s blog to several people over the past few months and encouraged them to check out his blog.  Most people I referred to his website went there on their own to explore what made him so popular.  The majority of feedback I recieved was as expected, they didn’t get why he was attracting a loyal following.  They could not relate to the majority of topics that John talked about and felt he abandoned them all together when he talked about how to make money.  For those of you who don’t know the theme of John’s website, it is based on “how to make money online”. 

You would think with “how to make money online” as your main theme that you would write compelling articles that communicate to both entry level and experienced visitors alike.  That certainly was not the feedback that I received, and after exploring his blog over the past 6 months, I agree, he is catering to a mostly advanced crowd of bloggers.  While this has earned him a sizable audience, he is neglecting a larger part of the population. 

Another oddity about his blog is the overall lack of actual meaningful “make money tips” that he offers.  For every one good money making tip he offers, he puts his visitors through about ten of his useless articles.  For me, this is a waste of time since my time can be spent more valuable elsewhere.  To top off wasting a lot of his visitor’s time, John also insults our intelligence by embedding his affiliate link into everything he touches.  I’m not against making money, and I think John does of fine job of making money, but frankly the only money being made is by John himself.

So if the paid reviews were not enough, he also litters his blog with more than its fair share of advertisements.  The main lesson his visitors can learn is to ignore his writing (if you can call it that) and pay attention to how he has monetized his blog.  John will never provide you his behind the scenes techniques for gaining hoards of traffic, instead you will get phrases like “don’t put your eggs all in one basket” and encouragement from him to click his affiliate links that he embeds into all of his posts.  Pigeons I say, haven’t you had enough?  For those of you who read his blog regularily, and are waiting for the answers of how to make money online to be revealed, I’m sorry to say that you only continue to line John’s pockets with more money.

If you really want to learn about making some money, start pissing with the bloggers who choose to tell it like it is.  I only read a few blogs on a regular basis, because the majority of make money blogs are complete crap, including www.johnchow.com.  My only recommendation today is to read a blogger who I think tells it like it is and provides meaningful information is ????????, visit and learn, then come back to thank me.

Learning the who, what, where, why and how of blogging is a pretty big task if you dig as deep as I do.  Frankly, until 6 months ago I didn’t even really know what a blog was.  What I did know is that they were creating a buzz and those who knew how to make it to the top were making tons of cash if they knew how to monetize their blog.While many would be bloggers have done the same as I have, what separates the bloggers who are making money from those who aren’t still boils down to how much homework you did.  I studied the blog model for approximately 20 hours a week for 6 months before I really knew what was going on.  Sounds rediculus to some that I would spend that amount of time over a 6 month period, but the fact of it is I’ve still only scratched the surface.  My theory is learn as much as you can, put a plan together that utilizes the most valuable information and be persistant.  Those are my core key factors for almost every project I take on.  By breaking down your way of getting things done will provide you a solid blue-print to use over and over again.

Researching blogs took me so long mainly because there is alot of inaccurate information floating around.  For ever 1 truth I learned, I had to comb through 10 half-truths or lies.  How do you find out what is true and what’s not?  After enough time spent analyzing successful blogs, you develop a 6th sense for credibility. Every blog you visit, you should ask yourself a handful of questions to understand the motivation behind it.  I’ve put a quick list of things I instinctually ask myself while visiting any blog.

• Is this a money driven blog or a hobby blog?
• How much traffic is this blog receiving?
• How much time and effort went into this blog?
• Is this blog up-to-date?
• What level of professionalism is used on this blog?
• Is this blog SEO optimized, and to what level?
• What marketing methods does this blog use?
• How much money is this blog making?
• How much money could this blog be making?
• Where is the blogger is located?
• Does this blog belong to a blog network?
• Does this blogger have other blogs?
• What platform (wordpress, etc.) is being used?
• Text to graphics ratio?
• Keyword density?
• How is the blog monetized?
• How much is advertising on this blog?
• How many outbound links per page average?
• Does this blog have multiple authors?
• How original is this blog?
• Does this blog use original content?
• Do I feel compelled to return to this blog?
• What are the core topics?
• How wide is the niche for this blog?
• Does this blogger have other online businesses?
• Who are the linking partners?
• Does the domain name match the theme of the blog?
• Are there any errors on the page?
• What is the color scheme of the blog?
• Page loadtime?

And the list goes on, to understand where a blog stands on the Internet stage, all of these questions are relevant.  I left many other factors I analyse off the list because they are very advanced and will be saved to publish in another post.  Nonetheless, if you learn to analyse the factors in this list in a blink of an eye every time you visit someones blog, you will soon start to understand where they stand.

Knowing who you are in a crowd with makes it much easier to know how to stand out.  If everyone is wearing “red” and you want to stand out, then perhaps you should consider wearing “blue”.  This simple example illustrates the concept of being distinguished, an absolute must if you are going to succeed.  The bigger the crowd, the more creative you need to be in order to stand out. 

So what’s unique about GetMoreReviews?  It looks like many other blogs or news post sites out there and does not appear to offer anything substantially unique on the surface.  Sure it looks organized, professional and well monetized, but does it actually make money?  Sure it makes money, in fact profits are growing everyday.  It makes money because every aspect of GetMoreReviews is geared to drive profit.

First off, the concept of GetMoreReviews is to provide an additional resource to folks browsing the Internet looking for more information about a product or service that they were considering buying.  Typically, users will head to the major review sites to get the “review benchmark”, which is essentially a review that they will compare to all others they read. 

Secondly, once they read a few high profile reviews, they will continue to search for another authoritive opinion.  That’s where I come in, by providing a fresh look at the product.  Once they read my review, they are further prepared to make the purchase.  A few strategically placed price comparison charts and embedded affiliate link to each each vendor who carries the product or service and you can soon see how GetMoreReviews makes money. 

If the reader is not prepared to buy, perhaps they will stay and read other product reviews here or click one of my ads.  This is often the case, thanks to Google Adsense.  In any case, I’m making money!  While this whole process seems straight forward, it does have its pitfalls, but continues to work great for me.

The main lesson here is that GetMoreReviews is not really a blog at all, although it uses a blog platform.  I’ve taken some of the virtues of blogging and combined them with affiliate marketing.  This hybrid approach is what makes this website unique and effective. 

I will continue to pepper this site with insightful articles like this one amongst the reviews I will publish here.  This will attract bloggers who really want to know how to make money online and regular folks looking for more information on products and services.  A happy and profitable co-existance.

A blog that makes money is likely to survive longer than one that does not. Knowing how to make money from your blog is a key factor in determining its survivability.  Blogs that make money are by nature closer to the front of the pack and benefit from the inherent traffic that comes from their natural position in the search engines.  A high natural search engine position produces new traffic for a blog, which creates an environment for making money.

A blogger needs to view their blog not only as a publicity medium for their message, but also how to direct the traffic the blog receives.  Controlling the traffic of a blog gives the blog owner the ability to profit and grow.  Tailoring every element of a blog to make money and directing the profits to the blog owner can make the difference between success and failure of the blog.

Controlling traffic is an art and skill that comes with experience.  Utilizing tools like Google Analytics can enhance your understanding of how to control your traffic.  Study how and where your traffic comes from to discover your blogs impact on the Internet.  Once you have an idea where the majority of your traffic is coming from, put in place a strategy to increase the top 3 sources.  Increasing your top 3 traffic sources can be easy once you know what they are.  If your blog receives natural search engine placement for certain keywords that are producing traffic, then consider adjusting your blog to be tailored more around those keyword topics.  This provides a great head start in the traffic game if executed properly.  If your blog is receiving traffic from a particular directory that you submitted to, visit the directory and learn everything you can about it.  If they have link commenting or tagging available, ensure your link is properly outfitted to gain even more valuable traffic. 

Making money on every aspect of your blog is not as simple as some bloggers would have you believe.  To make a sustainable income, a blogger’s skills must be diversified and calculated.  That doesn’t mean that the less intelligent folks don’t have a chance either, it just means that you need to be prepared and have good timing.

For the blogger

AjaxWP – Adds AJAX to all aspects of your WordPress site, which speeds up the load times.

Alexa Rank – Display your Alexa rank with pride.

Ajax Comment Preview – Allows readers to preview their comment before submitting.

asTunes – Retrieves data from your Audioscrobbler/last.fm profile and posts it as a list on your blog.

Codebox – Creates a side scrolling box for displaying code snippets.

Crossroads – Adds thumbnails and comments from your Flickr account.

FireStats – Full featured statistics including referrers and popular pages.

Google PageRank – Allows you to display your Google Page Rank on your blog.

Hardened-Trackback – Generates a single-use trackback to help fight trackback spam.

imgViewJX – Refreshes an image on your main page from a selected directory.

Live Spell Checker – Adds a spell checker to your posts in the admin area.

Plug ‘n’ Play Google Map – If you include longitude and latitude in your post, this will automatically add it to a Google Map on a separate page. Very useful for blogs writing restaurant reviews or about events.

WordPress Mailing List – Have a mailing list? Let readers subscribe and unsubscribe from the front page of your site.

WP e-Commerce – Adds a shopping cart to your WordPress powered site.

WP-Polls – Adds fully customizable polls to your blog.

WP-Post Ratings – Allows readers to rate your posts.

Zorpia That’s Hot Box – Allows visitors to send posts they like to Zorpia.com and vote on their favorites.

For your readers

AJAX Comments 2.0 – Auto updates the comments page with no full reload, enabling much smoother commenting than the older full reload system.

AJAX Google Video Search – Search Google Video without leaving your favorite blog.

AJAX Shoutbox – Real time conversation with sound to alert you to new messages.

Cool Weather – Allows visitors to see the weather forecast for any location they choose.

Currency Converter – Adds a real time currency converter to the page with data from Yahoo Finance.

Google AJAX Search – Allows you to setup search for your site, the web, and another site such as your Flickr account.

Google MapSearch Widget – Allows readers to search Google Maps without ever leaving the page.

Gregarious – Social bookmarking plugin that adds Digg, Reddit, Feedburner FeedFlare buttons and more.

Hottaimoijiruna – Adds a self-updating clock to the site for a timezone defined by the blogger.

Inline Ajax Comments – Hides comments until the user clicks on them.

Inline Ajax Page – Displays a snippet of a post and then allows the reader to click a button to load the full entry without going to another page.

Tagboard Widget – Adds an auto-updating tagboard to your site that displays new messages as they are posted.

Units Converter – Converts hundreds of different units of length, area, volume, weight / mass, and speed without reloading the page.

WP Movie Ratings – Combines data from IMDB with the bloggers movie review and allows the readers to add their own ratings.

XDTalk – Allows real-time conversation between registered users.

Fight Spam

Akismet – Anti-spam plugin from the creators of WordPress that uses a central database of spam comments to identify spam. Requires a free API key from WordPress.com

Spam Karma – Analyzes comments for spam based on a karma system.

Bad Behavior – Prevents spam bots from accessing your site by analyzing their HTTP requests.

Did You Pass Math? – Asks users a simple math question before their comments are posted.

Comment Timeout – Closes comments on old posts.

Encourage Commenting

BlogFollow – Shows a snippet of the users blog beneath their comment.

DoFollow – Removes nofollow attributes from links in comments so search engines can follow them.

DoFollow Trackbacks – Removes nofollow attributes from trackbacks.

Improve Appearance

Nicer Trackbacks – Improves the appearance of trackbacks from other blogs.

WP-NoSh*t – Filters bad words from comments.

Numbered Comments Adds numbers to comments.

AuthorHighlight – Highlights comments by the blogs author.

Comment Highlighter – Styles comments based on the author’s name, email, or URL.

wp-chunk – Truncates long URLs in comments to prevent them from stretching the page.

Enable Rich Comments

Custom Smileys – Adds clickable smiley emoticons to comments.

TinyMCEComments – Turns the comment box into a full-featured rich text editor.

Live Comment Preview – Allows readers to preview their comment before posting.

Edit Comments XT – Allows users to edit their own comments.

Enable Avatars

Gravatar – Displays user-selected avatars next to comments.

Favatars – Pulls the favicon from a commenter blog or website and uses it for their avatar.

MBLA – Adds user images from MyBlogLog to comments.

OpenID Comments – Lets readers comment with their OpenID identity.

Show Off Comments

WP-Most Commented Posts – Displays the posts with the most comments in the sidebar.

Latest Comments with Avatars Reloaded – Shows the latest comments along with the MyBlogLog avatars of the commenters.

Allow Better Conversation

Simple CoComments – Tracks the conversation across blogs.

Comment Karma – Digg-style voting on comments.

Quoter – Allows users to quote a previous comment in their comment.

Whisper – Lets users “whisper” comments that are only visible to one person.

Moderate Comments Effectively

Comment Twitter SMS Notification – Notifies you of new comments via SMS through Twitter.

Bannage – Adds the ability to ban users from commenting by name, email, or IP.

CommentCentral – Allows batch opening and closing of comments on multiple posts.

404 Notifier – Provides a log of your 404 errors.

Admin Dropdown Menus – Streamline your crowded admin panel menus by turning them into dropdown menus.

Admin Panel Comment Reply – Adds a “reply to comment” option in the comments section of the admin area.

Ajax Spell Checker – Uses a variety of dictionaries to spell check your posts.

Auto-hyperlink URLs – Provides you with several options for automatically turning URLs in to hyperlinks.

AWSOM Pixgallery – Designed to allow artists and webcomic creators to create a portfolio of their artwork.

Batch Categories – Makes it easier to add posts to another category, or to organize posts when importing from another blog.

Custom Admin Menu – Gives you the power to rename, hide, or move just about anything you want in the admin area.

Custom Write Panel – Allows you to customize the “Write” panel of WordPress by hiding things you don’t need such as “Post Password” and adding things you would like easier access to.

Dashbar – Allow your admins to have admin access while working in the frontend of the blog without having multiple windows open.

Dashboard Editor – Completely customize your admin dashboard using PHP, HTML, and widgets.

DashNote – Adds a post-it note feature to the dashboard to jot down notes to yourself.

Digital Fingerprint – Adds a digital fingerprint to your posts so you can search the web to see if your content has been scraped.

Domain Mirror – Allows one WordPress install to be accessed from multiple domains.

Download Counter – Counts and tracks the downloads of all your files.

Email Users – This plugin allows you to mail registered users on your blog based on their role.

Enforce WWW Preference – Provides 301 redirects to queries with /index.php and enforces your use or non-use of www to make sure your search engine indexing is uniform.

Excerpt Editor – Provides you with more control over the excerpts such as length and auto creation.

FeedBurner FeedSmith – Ensures all your RSS feed subscribers get counted in your FeedBurner subscriber count.

Fix Database – Checks your WordPress database for errors and attempts to fix them.

Genki Announcement – Allows you to add an announcement before your first post without editing your themes.

Genki Pre-Publish Reminder – Allows you to write reminders for things like setting categories before you post.

Google Analyticator – Inserts Google Analytics code on every WordPress page.

Google Sitemaps Generator – Will create a Google compliant site map of your blog.

GT Post Approval – Adds “Approve” and “Reject” buttons to the administrators view on all posts, which is ideal for blogs with multiple authors.

Instant Update – Handles the tedious chore of upgrading your WP install with just one-click.

Just Unzip – Allows you to upload a zip folder from the Write page. Just Unzip will then unzip the contents and associate them with the current post.

Khanh’s Instant Notepad (KIN) – Allows you to jot notes to yourself on a notepad.

Leprakhauns Word Count – Adds a Java powered word counter to your editing page.

Mass Post Manager – Allows you to move or delete all the posts in a category at once.

Mutliply – Allows one administrator to control multiple blogs.

NextGEN Gallery – Adds an image gallery to your control panel.

OneClick Install – Adds an extremely powerful uploader and installer for plugins and themes to WordPress, eliminating the need to unzip or FTP.

Page Link Manager – Allows you to easily rearrange, hide, and move pages.

Permacop – Allows you to redirect any URL to another.

Post2Page – Allows you to take existing posts that you have and convert them into pages.

PlugInstaller – Helps you install new plugins by obtaining it, uploading it and unpacking it.

podPress – Includes numerous features for bloggers wishing to add podcasts to their WordPress install, such as previews, RSS feeds, and adding cast to posts.

Search and Replace – Search all your posts at once for specified text, quickly replace it.

Share This – Adds multiple social bookmarking links and an e-mail-this function in one handy button.

Simple Pop-up Images – Add a thumbnail image to your post; when the user clicks on it, they get a larger pop-up of the picture.

Simple Tagging – Simplifies the tagging process to drop down menus and includes the ability import from your current tagging plugins.

Site Unavailable – Publishes a message that your site is down while still allowing admins to login.

Throttle – Monitors your bandwidth and limits non-essential items during heavy load times to help performance.

Wikipedia-NoFollow – Written in response to Wikipedia’s implementing a “nofollow” rule to their outgoing links, this plugin allows you to add nofollow to links you give to Wikipedia pages.

WordPress Mobile Edition – Strips your blog down for easy reading on phones and PDAs.

WordTube – Why use YouTube when you can host and stream your videos as you please? Includes a flash player.

WP Grins – Adds clickable smilies to both the administration area and comments section.

WPAds – Add rotating banner and text ads to any location you define on your blog.

WP-Custom Login – Allows you to modify the user login page logo to an image of your choice.

WP- DBManager – Provides you with the ability to optimize the database, back it up, restore, delete the backup database, drop emptied tables, and run selected queries.

WP-phpMyAdmin – Provides you with quick access to your PHP databases directly from the WP admin area without having to login to phpMyAdmin.

WP Plugins Tracker – Verifies all of your plugins are the latest version by checking them against the wp-plugins-db.org database.

WP Super Edit – Provides you with more control over the Visual editor including emoticons, layers, style attributes, and more.

WP-Table – Allows you to add a table directly in the Visual mode or import from a spreadsheet.

Image Management Tools

Aniga Gallery – Allows you to create picture galleries that use the WordPress comment system.

Batch Image Uploader – Upload and resize multiple images to your blog at once.

Duh Gallery – Creates a photo gallery from your uploads folder in WordPress.

ImageManager – Includes interface for browsing and uploading images and basic tools such as cropping and rotating.

WP Image Gallery – Create photo galleries from within WordPress and display them in posts.

fMoblog – Post pictures with descriptions from a mobile phone.

Pop-up Image Gallery – Photo gallery plugin with various options for transitions.

PhotoZip – Allows you to upload a .zip file to create an image gallery.

PictPress – Automatically generates a picture post from a directory on your server and resizes pictures on the fly.

Importing Images from Other Services

Another Flickr – Allows your readers to browse thumbnails from your Flickr albums and go directly to full size images.

BubbleShare – Display photo galleries from your BubbleShare account.

Facebook Photos – Shows thumbnails of photos from your linked Facebook account.

Flickr Photo Album – Pulls in your Flickr photo sets and displays them as albums in WordPress.

FlickrRSS – Displays most recent images from any RSS feed from Flickr such as a user, group, or tags page.

Fotobook – Import your Facebook photo albums into a WordPress page.

ImageShack Uploader – Upload an image to ImageShack’s free storage service and insert a thumbnail into your posts.

Slickr Gallery – AJAX photo gallery that pulls in images and photosets from Flickr.

Smugmug Gallery Bar – Insert photos from your Smugmug account into blog posts.

Image Display Effects & Hacks

Enlarger – Displays a thumbnail but loads the bigger image in the background so when clicked the full size version loads instantly.

IImage Panorama – Helps you create a 360 degree panorama picture to add to your blog.

Image Headlines – Create cool text images for the titles of your posts.

Lightbox 2 – Generates thumbnails that when clicked load in a lightbox.

Multi-Topic Icon: Shows images that represent each of the categories assigned to a blog post.

Random Image – Pulls a random image from your blog and links back to the post it came from.

Transparent PNG Fix – Make sure your PNG files don’t look nasty.

WP Wetfloor – Create the ever-popular reflection effect for the images on your blog.

Playing Music

Del.icio.us MP3 Player – Makes links to MP3s in your posts playable and easily postable to del.icio.us.

Audio Player – Inserts a simple MP3 player into your posts that plays uploaded audio files.

XSFP Player – Flash player that allows you to embed music on your blog via http.

What Am I Listening To?

DG PlayingNow Updater – Displays the song you are currently listening to on iTunes, MSN Messenger, or J. River Media Center.

EZ-Scrobbler – Displays your most recently listened to tracks on last.fm.

iTunes Spy – Displays your most recently listened to tracks on iTunes.

Pandora Feeds – Displays data from Pandora feeds, for example, a list of your stations, bookmarked songs, and bookmarked artists.

onAirNow – Now playing plugin that displays most recent song from iTunes or WinAmp.

Podcasting Tools

Odeo – Embed a podcast that you recorded on Odeo.

Podcast Release – A “release” form for guests of your podcast, accepting your terms.

PodPress – Full featured plugin for podcasters including feed generation, iTunes preview, and download stats.

iPodCatter – Helps podcasters create a valid feed for the podcast directory on iTunes.

Miscellaneous Audio Tools

Evoca Browser Mic – Allow your blog readers to send you voice comments which you can later post to your blog.

Odiogo – Converts your text to speech and provides a link for your readers to listen to your posts.

Video Tools

Anarchy Media Player – Plays a wide variety of audio/video file formats in the appropriate player on your blog.

Easy Inline SWF – Allows you to insert Flash files in .swf format into your posts without any weird tags.

SeeTheFace – Complete tool for recording video and posting it to your blog.

Extreme Video – Plays any .flv file on your blog with support for YouTube, Google Video, Quicktime, and more.

Noembedder – Automatically adds a noembed section to any embedded content that does not already have one.

YouTube Brackets – Allows you to simply enter a URL for a YouTube video versus copying and pasting embed code.

wordTube – Video player that includes the ability to program a menu of videos.

TubePress – Display YouTube galleries as blog posts or a sidebar item.

YouTube Video Gallery – Displays thumbnails for any gallery from YouTube.

vPIP – vPIP stands for “Videos Playing In Place,” meaning it will only embed after a specified image or link is clicked by the user.

Stats for the Blog Owner

AWStats Xtended Info – Requires AWStats and adds things such as screen size, Flash, PDF, and Java support.

Backlinks inbound links counter – Uses MSN to track all incoming links to your site.

Bluetrait Event Viewer (BTEV) – Tracks your logins, deleted users, last passwords, invalid user names and more.

Bsuite – Tracks page loads, search terms used on incoming links, top performing posts, and lists related posts at the bottom of each entry.

CountPosts – Shows you how many times each post gets visited while ignoring visits from the admin.

DownloadCounter – Counts downloads of files you attach to your posts.

Dschini Bot Checker – Lets you know which pages are being checked by which search bots and how often.

Feed Statistics – Monitors your feeds and tells you which readers are being used, the links that readers click on, and which stories they are reading.

FeedBurner SiteStats Enabler – Helps you install the FeedBurner script in your site with instructions in both Italian and English.

FeedBurner StandardStats – Simplifies the process of installing the FeedBurner script so you can monitor your RSS feed statistics.

FeedStats – Statistical tool for counting your feeds, measuring length of stay on your site and more. Stats appear in the dashboard.

FirStats – Full-featured, Ajax powered stats for your admin area.

GoStats web counter – Lets you install the GoStats counter in your blog as a text widget.

Lightstats – Plugin generates bar and pie graphs for statistics about posts, comments, and categories.

Live – Lets you watch the activity on your blog in real time. See things like posts visited, new comments, and feeds grabbed.

Open Web Analytics – Tracks page views, visits, unique visitors, clicks, referring websites, and plots visitor geography on Google Earth.

Posts/Comments Time – Shows you the number of posts and comments for the hours of each day so you can better plan your posting times.

Search Phrases – Straightforward plugin that just displays what search terms brought the visitors to your site.

Social Traffic Monitor – Monitors the social sites Digg, Netscape, Reddit, Newsvine, Fark, Slashdot, Del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon.

Ultimate Google Analytics – Adds the Google Analytics script to your site while also counting downloads and outbound links.

Word Count – Tracks the word count of your posts.

WordPress.com Stats – Uses your WordPress API key to pull stats and places them in a page in your admin area.

WP OnlineCounter – This plugin counts the number of readers currently online, highest number of visitors at the same time, and the total count of visitors.

WP-SlimStat – Tracks all of the standard stats you’ve come to expect from a stats package, but in a very compressed database for less load on your server.

WP-Stats – Very general statistics package focusing on your number of posts, comments and so on.

Stats to Share with Visitors

Akismet Spam Count – Show off your Akismet spam power and let spammers know you’re protected from their attempts.

Alexa Rank – Allows you to display your Alexa rank for the world to see.

GeneralStats – Displays your choice of number of users, categories, posts, comments, pages, links, words in posts, words in comments and words in pages.

Google PageRank – Display your Google Page Rank on your front page.

Impress – Display number of users, posts, pages, comments, categories, words, and more on your blog.

Jon’s Showoff Rankings Widget – Displays your Google Page Rank, Alexa Traffic Ranking, and Technorati Rank all in one plugin. (Ed note: this plugin is no longer supported, and the developer recommends using the widget version instead.)

Post Administration & Layout

Add Graphic Signature – Adds a graphic of your signature to your posts either automatically or via the insertion of a simple tag.

Adman – Allows you to post ads such as Google AdSense at the beginning or middle of a post.

Another WordPress Meta Plugin – Allows you to add Meta tags and keywords to your post to try to further optimize your blog for search engines.

Category Remindr – Category Remindr puts a button next to the “Publish” button to remind you to select the categories for your post.

Corrector – Adds Google Spell Check to your admin area and can spellcheck in 27 languages.

DropCap First Character – Enlarges the first character of a post to give it more of a magazine appearance.

Front Page Excluded Categories – Allows you to exclude posts from certain categories on your front page.

Limit the size of main page posts – Set the number of words you want each of your main page posts to contain so that if they exceed that limit, a link is provided to a page with the complete post.

Notify On Draft Post – Notifies the editor when the authors of a multi-author blog post a new draft for review.

Post Notification – Sends an email to a list of registered users when you make a new post. Includes the option to include the post in the email.

Post Repeater – Re-posts an entry with significance every week, month, or year.

Post Templates – Allows you to set up repeating templates such as a “Picture Of The Day” without all of the tedious copy and pasting.

PostPost – Allows you to add content such as advertisements before or after every post.

Posts Expire – Set an expiration date on your post.

Subscribers Only – Lets you mark a post as “subscriber only” so they are visible only to members of your site.

Subscribe-Remind – Adds a reminder to the bottom of each post to subscribe to your RSS feed.

WordPress PDA – Helps your readers view your blog on a PDA browser.

WP-orderposts – This plugin allows you to custom order your posts (as opposed to the default reverse-chronological order).

WP-Sticky – Make a post the default first entry on your blog.

Post Tools

Auto Link – Use the Google API to set delimiters like [movie]Move Title[/movie] to make it auto link to the page on IMDB.

Author Complete Post List – Gives you the ability to display all the posts by an author, including the ones where they are co-author.

Blog by Mail with Categories – Changes the “Blog by Mail” feature in WordPress so you can also set the category.

Code Markup – Allows you to include snippets of code, including HTML, in your post without it affecting the page.

Easy Post-To-Post Links – Allows you to use a shortcut when writing a post linking to another post on your blog.

On This Day – Displays posts posted on the same day in previous years.

Plain Text Paste – Helps to ease the pain of pasting something you wrote in Microsoft Word into WordPress.

TD Word Count – Displays a word count for each post on a blog, and gives you a total count.

Ubernyms – Allows you to make shortcuts for terms and links you use often. Just enter the abbreviation and this plugin fills it in for you.

WP-Footnotes – Allows you to add footnotes to a more detailed post.

wpSpoiler – Allows you to hide text behind [spoiler] tags. Ideal for sites with tv or movie reviews.

Crossposting

DJ-Email-Publish – Once you publish on your WordPress blog, this sends the post as an email to your other blogs such as MSN Spaces.

Live Space Sync – Allows you to import all your posts to your Microsoft Live Spaces so you can advertise your blog to your contacts.

LiveJournal Crossposter – Automatically posts your latest entries to your LiveJournal account, or any other LJ software based site.

Vox Crossposter – Cross-posts your posts to your Vox account.

Xanga Crosspost – Allows you to have your posts appear on your Xanga account.

RSS Feed Tools

©Feed – Adds copyright info to your feed and places a digital fingerprint on it so you can search the web for content theft.

Add to Any Subscribe Button – Allows your readers to subscribe via most popular RSS readers.

AddThis Sidebar Widget – Adds RSS info and social bookmarking links to the sidebar.

Better Feed – Adds a “read more” button, a copyright notice, and a “Add to del.icio.us” link.

DeCat – Allows you to select certain categories to not be included in your feeds.

Feed Control – Gives you the ability to exclude posts from your feed, add pages, and more.

Feed Footer – Adds copyright and advertising to your RSS posts.

Feed Master – Assigns a number to your feed readers to give you a better idea of stats specific to them.

Feed Styler – Allows you to style your feed.

FeedBurner FeedSmith – Make sure all your RSS feed subscribers get counted along with the ones signed up via FeedBurner.

FeedStats – Gives you statistical data on your feeds.

Feedvertizer – Add text links to the end of your feed posts.

RSS Flashfeeder to Myspace – Feeds your last two posts to your MySpace page.

Slash Comments – Adds info to your feed about how many comments are on the post.

Subscribe-Remind – Adds a little reminder to subscribe to your feed at the end of each post.

Social Bookmarking

Digg Button – Allows you to add the Digg button anywhere in a post with a simple code snippet.

Digg IT – A plugin that allows the inclusion of the Digg button.

JPF Add to Reddit – Allows readers to submit your posts to Reddit.

Share This – Adds multiple social bookmarking links and an email-this functionality in one button.

Sociable – Adds the linking information for 61 social bookmarking sites.

Social Bookmark Buttons – Adds social bookmark buttons for Digg.com, Netscape.com, Reddit.com, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon.com, Google.com, Socialogs.com, and Socialposter.com.

Social Bookmarks Plugin for WordPress – Provides you access to the social bookmarking icons for more than 20 popular sites.

Socializer Plugin – Adds the ability to post to nearly 40 social bookmarking sites.

SocialList – Allows you to see which of your posts have been submitted to del.icio.us and Digg.

Socialogs.com – Allows you to have your entries submitted to Socialogs.com.

WP-Notable – Adds the icons for numerous social bookmarking sites to each post.

wphotspots – Tracks the activity of your posts on several social bookmarking sites.

Social Site Integration

Blogmark Integration – Display your Blogmarks list on your blog.

DiggClick – Add the Digg button to the beginning of your posts.

DiggIT – Allows you to add the Digg button even if someone had already submitted your post.

Facebook Comments – Allows you to bring comments on your Facebook notes over to the relevant blog post.

Gregarious – Combines a Digg button plugin with Alex King’s popular “Share This” plugin for social bookmarking.

Ma.gnolia Widget – Display links from your Ma.gnolia account using this widget.

Reddit Button – Adds a Reddit button to your blog posts.

StumbleCrumble – Display a pre-determined number of your latest Stumbled websites on your own blog.

Status Indicators

360Voice Bits Plugin – Connects with 360Voice.com to post the latest info on your 360 standings.

AIM Online Status Indicator – Let your readers know if you’re online.

IM Online – Presence indicator for AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk, Skype and ICQ.

MeeboMe Plugin For WordPress – Display a Meebo widget on your blog so you can chat with your visitors.

WP-ICQ-Status – Display your current ICQ status on your blog.

Xbox 360 Gamercard WordPress Plugin – Allows you to display your Xbox 360 Gamecard.

Miscellaneous Site Integration

.Mac Sidebar WP Plugin – Display information from your .Mac account in your WordPress sidebar.

Amazon Wishlist – Add your Amazon Wishlist to your blog.

Bloggersnap – Allow your visitors to take a webcam shot and post it to your blog.

EasyPayPal – Allows you to accept payments for many services including subscriptions, trial periods, and more.

Ebay Sales Lister – Display Ebay listings (from your account or others) on your site.

Facebook Photos – Allows easy access to your Facebook photos for use in your blog.

GetWiki – Embed a Wikipedia article in your blog.

iTunesSpy – Display your latest played songs on your WordPress blog.

Last Amazon Review – Displays latest reviews from an Amazon RSS feed. Supports Associate IDs.

MasterWish – Place your wishlist from MasterWish.com on your blog.

Netflix – Share portions of your Netflix queue with your readers.

Phoogle – Add Google Maps with markers you choose to any of your posts.

Slashdot.org Headlines – Display the latest headlines from Slashdot on your site.

PayPal Donate Button – Allows you to add a “Make a Donation” button powered by PayPal.

WP-Twit – Display your latest Twitter postings on your site.

Yahoo Browser-Based Authentication – Allows users to sign in to your blog using their Yahoo ID and password.

Your YouTube Favorite Videos – Display your favorited YouTube videos on your site.

YouTube Video Gallery – Display a gallery of YouTube videos on your site.

Left Sidebar

DarkT – Slick black design, extremely legible, very modern looking, fixed width and widget ready.

Green Bug – Very pleasant looking fixed width and widget ready theme, great for a nature blog.

HijauSegar – Very open with easily edited headers. Fixed width.

Integral – Very uncluttered design, makes a great theme for a company blog, fixed width and widget ready. Fixed width.

Melod Art – Unique coloring, would make a great family blog. Fixed width and ready for widgets.

Notes – Make your personal website look like an actual personal journal.

Rainbow Feather – Fluid width theme, perfect for a writer or someone aspiring to be one.

RedHorizon – Clean and professional, stylish. Fixed width and widget ready.

Riaz – Very professional and classy looking, could be used for many needs. Fixed width and widget ready.

Rounded Transparent – Very clean, easy to navigate, stylish, fixed width, widget ready.

Simply Blue – Nice rounded corners, modern looking, fixed width and widget ready.

Simplicity 2.0 – Just as the name applies, very simple, but visually appealing. Would make a great personal blog, or possibly fashion related. Fixed width, widget ready.

Skeletons In My Closet – Very easy to read, fixed width, great for a personal or music blog.

Solid – Very stylish, clean reading, fixed width, widget ready.

Was: ImJTk – Nice mixture of colors, very smooth and free flowing, fixed width, widget ready.

Right Sidebar

Blending Curves – Pink is a difficult color to pull off in a lot of themes, but this one does it well with blending in a “torn out journal pages” feel. Fixed width and widget ready.

Blogger’s Cafe – Very simple, great for sites about blogging, coffee shops, or just plain old coffee lovers. Fixed width.

Blue-Ridge – Muted colors so as not to distract, great for a personal blog, fixed width, widget ready.

Boxy Mint – Great personal page or company blog, versatile, modern look. Fixed width and widget ready.

Elegant Purple – Great personal blog with an all purple look. Fixed width and widget ready.

Green Love – Great personal or travel theme, fixed width and widget ready.

Green Pro 2.0 – Excellent use of green, versatile look that can be used for many different sites. Fixed width and widget ready.

Leaf On Edge – Very versatile theme that could be used for blogs on any number of subjects, fixed width.

Lemon & Lime – Pleasing colors, logo placeholder, fixed width and widget ready.

Melmac – About as modern as you can get. Fixed width, widget ready.

NightLight Idea – Nice black theme with lite animation in the header. Fixed width and widget ready.

Otek – Orange colored, but not enough to be distracting, clean navigation, Fixed width and widget ready.

Persian Minyx – Fixed width and widget ready, unique way of marking the width.

Pgreen – Very readable, versatile look for a fixed width theme that is widget ready.

Raised – Blue everywhere, but still readable. Child page navigation is a little sloppy, but passable. Fixed width.

RedPlanet – Great for a science or technical blog, very customizable, fixed width, widget ready.

Silver Light – Another good professional person’s theme, fixed width, widget ready.

SybmimDX Remix: Ghost – Very simple, would make a great professional blog, fixed width.

05 Moon 1.0 – This is an excellent black theme, variable width and widget-ready.

Acid Green Pro – Fixed width, centered layout with widget ready sidebars. Tons of space in the sidebars for lots of goodies.

Alike Theme – Another darkish theme, but quite easy on the eyes. AdSense ready, fixed width and widget ready.

Ayumi – Primarily white theme with good highlights, easy to read and widget ready.

Bionic Jive – Compartmentalized well, clean read, variable width.

Blogging Simply – Fluid width, widget ready, loads of space in the sidebars for all the extras you want.

CitrusIsland – Variable width, widget ready, colors that pop.

Cordoba Green Park – Variable width, widget ready, easily changeable color schemes.

Creaker – Widget ready and perfect for customizing.

Crunch – Available in multiple colors, easy to change header.

Daily Digest 3.0 – Fixed width, widget ready, newspaper style.

Fava Beans and a Nice Chianti – Very elegant looking, great for a foodie blog, variable width.

Fresh Apple – This theme is based around a green apple, how can it not be soothing to the eye? Variable width and widget ready.

I Like Grey – Variable width with lots of boxes in each side column for customization.

i3Theme – For Mac lovers, this theme makes your WordPress blog look like your favorite operating system.

Illacrimo – Widget ready, smooth appearance. Perfect for a graphic artist’s site.

Intensive – Google AdSense optimized, good for newish blogs.

Journalized Winter – Variable width, great for someone that likes lots of info on their pages. Also available in Sand colors.

Mandigo – A fixed width (800 or 1024) theme that can be two or three columns based on settings on the Options page. Widget ready.

Mogle – Black and orange professional looking theme, Adsense ready.

Navigation WP Theme – Based on the WordPress Admin area, variable width, widget ready.

Nuberu – You can’t get much cleaner than plain black & white. Fixed width.

OmegaLeaf – Very sleek white and red theme, fixed width.

Pink Web 2.0 – Versatile theme with numerous uses, widget ready and fixed width.

ProSense – Fixed width, clean reading, and available in three different color schemes. Widget ready.

Soccer Theme – Fixed width, widget ready, great for a sports-themed blog.

Talian 1.0 – Clean colors, easy to read, variable width, widget ready for easy customizing.

Track 17 – Variable width, great for a tech themed blog.

TyreMonkey – A nice red and black three column design. Fixed width.

Ubmodicus – Lightweight, fast loading, widget ready.

Unnamed – While it lacks a name, it has Ajax features (the black area you see is a pop-in) as well as being widget ready. Fixed width.

Zen – Very stylish, easy to read, fixed width, widget ready