I have to admit that I’ve pretty much resisted this entire twitter craze going around, but I think I may have been missing out. Every time I went on twitter I was bombarded with people selling this or selling that and I did not see a lot of sense in it.

I see people with 100s of thousands of followers and following just as many people. There is no way you can keep up with all these people so I did not see the point.

Well I broke down a couple of weeks ago and started twittering a good bit on an account I created. I started adding followers and in return they started following me. Well I normally use Live Writer to blog and there is a plugin for it that allows you to send every blog post to twitter. What I found was that people started coming to my blogs from my posts from me telling people about it on Twitter.

I’m not one of these people who push an affiliate program with every tweet. I’m sure these are the people who read some eBook on how to make millions with Twitter and now they are pushing a some money making link every chance they get.

Now if that is your thing, then who am I to judge, but its not the way I would do things. To me Twitter is a networking tool which you can use to build you brand and blog awareness. This may be a longer term approach and I may not get paid a couple of dollars tomorrow for my tweets, but over time using Twitter as a networking and brand building tool will produce more money in the end. I’ve always lived by the motto sacrifice today for tomorrow.

I recently created a twitter account for this blog. If you want to follow my tweets check me out at http://twitter.com/nononsenseIM I still need to create an unique background so I can brand it better, but I’m thinking of getting a new theme for this blog so I was waiting until after I decided on a theme for this and brand the twitter account the same.

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The programmer in me is really excited about possibilities that Silverlight will bring to the web development world. I’ve been playing with this platform off and on for a few months and I really like it. I’m by no means an expert or even really an advanced newbie with the Silverlight technology at the moment, but I’m coming along. Seems that Microsoft has put together 4 and 1/2 hours of free silverlight training that you can get on Lynda.com. If you want to get your feet wet with this new silverlight technology you may want to take a look at these silverlight videos while they are still available.

If you are not familar with SilverLight then you may want to do some research as I’m sure it will become a popular part of Web 2.0 or Web 3.5 or what ever you want to call the current direction that Web applications are taking. Silverlight allows you to mashup data from different sources and provide that information to visitors in the format that provides them with unique and pertinent  information based on their preferences. As more and more people start to utilize Silverlight as a development platform thne you should start to see some really interesting applications on the web that do way more than what is currently available.

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Everyone who has been blogging for any amount of time is aware of the power of Technorati for helping your blog placement throughout the Blogsphere. I’m sure you also realize the amount of traffic that StumbleUpon can bring your blog if you stumble your own posts and select the correct category. While Stumbled traffic is not great at converting, I have been able to utilize this service to add subscribers and readers to my blogs.

Since I’ve been thinking a lot about how to increase the number of readers to my blog, I’ve looking at both these services to see how I may could use them to help me out. Well something occurred to me while looking at my page on StumbleUpon, as long as I write a description about a page I’m Stumbling, then a corresponding entry is placed on my Stumble page with a link to the site. Which brings up another point about utilizing stumble.

If you are just stumbling your sites and just selecting a Category and tags, without writing a description then you are losing a backlink as well as losing some valuable exposure for your blogs. I used to never write a description and while I would get the increase in traffic from the stumble, I would lose out on the long term benefits of having he link on my StumleUpon page. The morale is to always write a couple of sentences in the description when you stumble as a teaser for longer term traffic.

Well back to the point of this post. It is possible for you to Claim your StumbleUpon blog on Technorati. You basically just use manual claim process where you go to Technorati, start the claim process and then when it asks you for proof, write post on your blog. You then post the code for Tecnhorati on your Stumble Upon blog and its claimed. Then everytime you stumble one of your blog posts you are actually helping your Technorati rank at the same time. I’m looking for other ways this can be utilized on other sites. I’m pretty sure the same thing should work for your personal page on other social bookmarking type sites where you are allowed to post HTML in the description. Have fun, but don’t spam as it does not help anyone.

Technorati tags: technorati, blogging, seo, stumbleupon, social bookmarking

BuzzNet tags: technorati, blogging, seo, backlinks, stumbleupon, social bookmarking

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