Matt is on the Web Spam team at Google so he’s become one of the most closely followed people by SEO experts and Webmasters. His presentation describes how WordPress is seen through the eyes of Google, and explains how you can improve your blog’s results in Google searches.

Matt keeps it interesting with some humor and I picked up several new tips that will pay dividends in the years ahead. If you have a Website you will benefit from watching this video even if it’s not built on WordPress… yet.

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For more information you can find the original post on WordPress TV and for info on WordCamp check out posts on WordPress’ blog about WordCamp.

The group recently gained attention when 35 members of the Summit Series project met with the White House to discuss the economy with senior members of the Obama administration.

Earlier today they announced their Aspen Summit 2009 retreat would take place in Aspen Colorado April 2-5 with 115 attendees expected. Their focus will be on educating attendees on the power of contributing resources and idea capital to philanthropic organizations.

Guest speakers from several charities will describe their missions and strategies in an effort to stimulate some innovative thinking that can lead to greater success. Tapping into some of the sharpest entrepreneurial minds makes great sense and something that should be standard practice for nonprofits trying to rise above the noise and succeed.

For more information: Summit Series Announces Aspen Summit ’09

And it made sense to 20-something “regular guy with a big imagination”, Cheru Jackson. Cheru had an idea so he set out to invent a method of posting a reatime alert on his Website immediately after a post had been published. It works!

Essentially when I’m finished with this post and click the Publish button the headline, short summary, and a link to my site will be presented on his site for millions (well someday…) to see. Pretty neat stuff for the “Alpha Addicts” his site has hooked thus far.

I discovered Alpha Inventions after I noticed on several of my sites that spiking traffic had been sent from his Alpha Inventions site. Seems that enough people are watching the blog posts roll by on his site and clicking that it’s noticable in the daily traffic reporting.

So here’s a a shout out to Cheru for taking an idea and running with it to the point of a fully functioning worthwhile new tool for bloggers. For more information visit his blog, Alpha Inventions blog or his actual invention at Alpha Inventions.

Add From Server: WordPress 2.5+ includes a new Media manager, but, it only recognizes files uploaded via the WordPress interface and not any files uploaded via other means like FTP. Add From Server allows you to browse the file system on the web server and copy any files into the WordPress uploads system, Once “imported” it’ll be treated as any other uploaded file, and you can access it via the Media manager. This is a huge timesaver for bloggers that add a lot of images to their blogs.

FAQ-Tastic Lite – this plugin is a multiple FAQ plugin that make it easy to answer questions from your site visitors. Unlike other FAQ plugins, FAQ-Tastic can help you build different FAQs for different areas on your WordPress site.

Category Order – this plugin allows you to easily reorder your categories the way you want via drag and drop.

Widget Logic – This plugin gives every widget an extra control field called “Widget logic” that lets you control when/where the widget appears. The text field lets you use WP’s Conditional Tags, or any general PHP code. There is also an option to add a wordpress ‘widget_content’ filter for you to tweak standard widgets to suit your theme.

Email Immunizer – this plugin protects against email harvesters by taking email addresses and mailto links on your blog and converting their text to numeric character references.

One recent winning video, Jalapeno Labor, for a Hienz Poppers contest, is quite entertaining.

This clever grassroots method of creating cutting edge videos for larger organizations makes a lot of sense and appears to be catching on fast. The clients love it because they establish a reasonable cost for a great video “advertisement” and the brightest, most creative, members of community love the opportunity to earn a living with no creative-stifling strings attached.

This past year they launched a successful new program named “The Rocket Awards” where awards given to the best creative projects uploaded to GeniusRocket.

Rocket Awards are given for competition in rotating categories – from “Best Acting” to “Best Editing” and “Best 3-Minute Sitcom Pilot” to “Best Ad Without Spoken Words”.

Rocket Awards reward extraordinary contributions to GeniusRocket and promote opportunities for creative advancements in non-advertising fields and emerging media. They also are looking to financially reward creative contributions that become “outside the box” hits among their creative community and viewers.

Recently they were offering $17,000 in Rocket Awards through the GeniusRocket Primary. They will undoubtedly offer more contests revolving around political campaign seasons in the future. You could say it’s in their blood.

If you’re into creating short YouTube-like videos then this site is a great site and business model for you. Or if your organization or company wants to create some hot new videos that have a decent shot at going viral Genius Rocket is a perfect place to tap into a pool of talent.

• Askimet – intercepts spam making it very easy to zap the crap before it stinks the place up
• FeedBurner feedsmith – captures all RSS feed subscriptions and reports the total subs in one place
• Share-This – consolidates all of the social bookmarks into one neat-n-clean icon
• Vipers video – makes it super easy to add video clips from a wide variety of sources
• All-in-one SEO pack – easy way to boost the SEO value of posts
• Google XML sitemap generator – creates and then updates sitemaps with a click. Notifies Google, Yahoo, MSN, ask.com automatically.
• WordPress stats – Very nice presentation of site stats including referring sites, etc….
• WordPress Automatic upgrade – A major timesaver in keeping WP and plugins updated as the quest for perfection continues.

There are hundreds of other quality plugins here: WP Plugins

If you have suggestions or questions please feel free to post them in the comments section.

One such solution is CRE Loaded. CRE Loaded offers an open source version tht you can use to build small stores and then when you need a more robust solution they steer you into their “Pro” version. That’s the version I chose to use for my first online store, Big City Pet, an online pet store. I chose this solution after soliciting feedback from some online retail pros and the fact that you pay them one time for the solution and never any monthly fees or transaction fees like some of the other options available out there.

After getting started on building out my first online store it became apparent that I was going to need their Store Manager for CRE Loaded to speed up and simplify the process of starting and later maintaining Big City Pet.

Store Manager for CRELoaded is a Windows application that allows you to manage your CRE Loaded-based online store much more efficiently. You can add, delete and update products, categories and manufacturers, automatically upload your product images while editing products, categories, manufacturers, view reports, orders and keep the track of your online sales. All this from your computer. CRE Loaded Manager was made for ordinary entrepreneurs not geeks, and after only a few settings required for the program to start and it just works.

I’ll report back when my store is live, but so far it seems to be working great! They offer a free 30-day trial period if you want to check it out yourself. Free Store Manager trial

It’s not clear what the ramifications are going to be, but it is clear that they’re trying to keep these news domain names out of the hands of small entrepreneurs and cybersquatters by setting price tags at $50,000 and up.

The new names should begin appearing sometime in 2009.

For more information:

ICANN

VNU Net

ICANN Watch

At the start of 2002 Darren didn’t know much of anything about blogs or blogging, but an article he had read about blogging changed the trajectory of his life. Within 24 hours of reading that potent article he had started his first Blog – a personal blog where issues of Pop Culture, Spirituality and Blogging are explored. He has since started many other blogs including the one that caught my attention, ProBlogger.

Today Darren blogs for a living. That’s right, he doesn’t commute to work. He writes for a living and doesn’t have to mess around with publishers, printing, book signings (yet), and all the other garbage that used to be associated with writing for a living.

I’m new to his ProBlogger site, but I plan on picking his brain and learning from his experiences as much as possible. His mission with ProBlogger is to: help bloggers add income streams to their blogs.

Way to go Darren! Blog on!

Tips for Successful Blogging

Some of the best tips include:

• Determine why you’re blogging and who you want to read your blog.
• Schedule the days you’re going to post to your blog and stick to it.
• Be personal. Let people know who you are and what you’re about. Be real.
• Pay attention to what other bloggers are saying and feel free to elaborate or argue a different point of view and link to the post and blog you’re writing about.

The above tips were written with the help of a post on eLance by  Chris Bennett, a Search Engine Optimization expert and owner of 97th Floor.