Windows Live Writer is free software from Microsoft that enables you to easily create, edit and publish blog articles.  It’s like a simple “Word for Blogs.”  Click here for a list of features in Windows Live Writer.

Following are instructions on how to download, install, and setup Live Writer for your blog.

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Web publishing is a different paradigm than traditional publishing.  When you produce a TV show, for example (or newspaper, magazine or movie), your audience shows up at a specific time to watch, and then that’s it until reruns or syndication. 

But when you produce a blog, it can take days or weeks for your loyal audience to discover and read your new articles, and you’ll often find that more people are reading the stuff you wrote two years ago than what you wrote last week.

WordTwit is a very handy plugin for WordPress blogs that automatically publishes your blog articles to a selected Twitter account.  Twittering your blog posts is a great way to promote your blog and reach a wider audience.

There are at least a dozen Twitter plugins for WordPress.  But what makes WordTwit special is it uses shortened URLs generated from your own domain, rather than a third-party URL-shortening service like bit.ly or tinyurl.com.

For example, a recent article at our blog DevTopics has the WordTwit shortened URL http://devtopics.com/iz.  The advantage of using your own domain is it helps promote your site, allows “link juice” to pass to your domain instead of a third-party service, and gives people confidence that clicking on the link will take them to your blog and not a spyware or attack website.

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You may receive this error message while attempting to setup email subscriptions in Google’s Feedburner service:

FeedBurner encountered an error adding your feed to FeedBurner

The best thing to do is wait a minute and try again.  Typically this is a transient problem that will clear itself with time.

You’ve got a great business idea, now all you need is your Web domain.  But it seems like all the good domain names are now taken.  Here are some tips to help you find a domain name that fits your business:

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24/7 Wall Street has calculated the value of the top 25 most valuable blogs.  As they say in their report, it is difficult to accurately value a blogs.  Almost all blogs are owned by private companies which do not have to report earnings.  Like many content businesses, the true value is what a buyer will pay. 

This year’s list does not include blogs owned by larger companies, because traffic for these properties is rarely broken out.  Also excluded are blogs used as fronts for other businesses and blogs with no revenue.

Here is a partial list of the most valuable blogs:

1. Gawker Properties — $170 million
2. Huffington Post — $90 million
3. The Drudge Report — $48 million
4. Perez Hilton — $32 million
5. Sugar, Inc — $27 million
6. TechCrunch — $25 million
7. MacRumors — $21 million
8. SeekingAlpha — $11 million
9. GigaOm — $9.5 million
10. Politico — $8.7 million

Read the report

FKA200 has compiled a list of the most expensive domain name sales ever.  Many of these sales were completed before the dot-com bust in 2001.  It makes you wonder if the buyers were ever able to recoup their costs.

See the rest of the list at FKA200

What do you do if original content from your website or blog is stolen and republished in full on another site?  You fight back!

A splog or "spam blog" is a blog that steals content from other web sites, then aggregates and republishes the content on its own blog.  Splogs are created primarily to make money from ads shown on the splog and/or promote affiliated web sites.  Splog owners are too dishonest, lazy or stupid to create their own original content and instead thieve yours.

Splogs are harmful because they effectively steal a portion of your blog's search engine ranking, traffic and ad revenue.

Read more at DevTopics

Copyright infringement is the sincerest form of flattery.

What's a Splog?

A splog or "spam blog" is a blog that steals content from other web sites, then aggregates and republishes all or some of the content on its own blog.

Splogs are created to promote and increase search engine ranking of affiliated web sites, and/or to make money from ads shown on the splog.  Typically splogs are automated, but they can also be manual copy & paste.  A recent study indicated that 56% of all blogs are spam, and there are over 575 thousand splogs reported.

Read more at DevTopics

Social news sites first became popular when Digg.com launched on the Web in 2004. A social news site enables its users to submit news stories and vote on them. The most popular articles percolate to the top of the list and are rewarded with a huge surge in Web traffic. A candid discussion of each article often appears. The most popular social news sites are Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon, which recently hit 2 million registered users. DotNetKicks is an excellent social news site for .NET programming.

As described by TechCrunch, the theory behind social news sites is that the world can do a better job than a handful of editors to determine which news stories people want to read. The problem is that voting by mass consensus often results in the lowest common denominator. Also, many of these sites use super-moderators, which like super-delegates in the Democratic primary, can result in a few key votes overwhelming the will of the majority. On Digg, this means that the most popular stories are usually about Apple, Linux, and Ron Paul.

But social news sites are becoming an increasingly important marketing and public relations tool for companies and especially bloggers. Even a mild Digg can send ten thousand or more fresh viewers per day to your blog and significantly increase your ad revenue. Though these traffic spikes tend to be short-lived, there is often a residual effect of viewers that enjoy your site and return for future visits. Most bloggers will see a persistent traffic increase with each Digg surge. Hence, it's important to understand how to use social news sites to your blog's advantage.

Read more at DevTopics