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Or when you use programs that use a lot of screen real estate. Being able to drag windows to the other monitor and work in one window while seeing updates in the other window really does make a difference.

As mentioned, Digg has a rather narrow target market: male's, 16-25, left-leaning, technology aware and frat-tastic.

If your brand targets this demographic, you will do well. If it doesn't, you have no hope of making a mark.

So Digg is important in its own niche. But sites like StumbleUpon got to be bigger, because they span a larger audience. And they do a better job at serving topical content to their users.

quite right..many people actually find the blog format more readable than the actual website as it is written in a simple easy to understand way. It can help in triggering the visits to a site and obviously search results.

I watched it and it was a very funny video...hilarious, really. Thank you for sharing, Sirius.

I think that even on Facebook, you can come across as a big old salespitch, if your are not subtle enough.

Lorenz wrote:
Digg is a meme tracker. Meaning that people can vote for which articles on the web they found interesting. The more people vote for a particular article, the more exposure it gets on Digg.

Digg in particular has a male 16-25 year old male demographic, with a slant towards liberal politics, technology and frat-tastic humor.

I also am not hearing about DIGG as much as I hear about sites like Stumbleupon, for instance. I wonder why?

Taggart is right that blogs can help your website with their keyword density.

But ultimately, blogs have no special powers of high rankings. What they do have (if done correctly) is fresh, unique content. Search engines do tend to like that, regardless of the format. If they know any given site is adding new articles on a frequent basis, they will come around often to index it. Blogs are certainly one way of easily adding new information to your site. Newsletters archived on your site can provide a similar benefit, as can archived press releases, or a popular forum.

The "pinging" done by most blog software these days also seems to help get blog posts spidered and indexed very quickly, which is a plus. In addition, blog posts will also show up in blog searches such as Google's Blog search, and Technorati Blog searches.

Tags and categories will further help search engines to better identify the topic of your blog post. Again, these features do not need to be limited to your blog.

A blog is really a great way of providing your readers with an easy e-zine they might want to follow or subscribe to.

Chris, if the product wouldn't be good, why is the business in business for in the first place?

Taggart, making money from a website is all about volume. The more visitors you have, the more money you can make from your site, providing the ads you serve are relevant to their interest.

So yes, running a forum could be a huge money maker.

Although that is not what we intend to do with this forum. We want to offer our clients and knowledge base and a sense of community.

Back in 2002 when I got my current computer (ancient! ) my tech guru suggested two monitors but I declined at the time.

I think with the price of them now, I'd probably consider it. I spend a lot of time in Cubase, the music recording software and there are several windows that you may want open at the same time.

I think that running a forum for your business is a good idea as long as your product is a good one. Otherwise, you'll have customers posting complaints about your business...not a good form of publicity.

I prefer short domain names (and short book titles) because they are much easier to remember.

I think that exclamation points can be useful in advertising copy and elsewhere, but one or two go a long way. I read a quote somewhere that stated, "using exclamation points are like laughing at your own jokes." I agree and almost never use exclamation points in my own text.

The people following you on twitter where automated accounts. They weren't active accounts that started following you.

There is a worthwhile aspect to networking on twitter, but you have to stay clear of the automated accounts and start conversations with real people.

I read everywhere that it will help my rankings, but I don't understand how.

Thanks.

I don't want to cause misunderstanding:

CON: You have little control over the comment appearance and settings.

That means that Facebook's styling and way of working can currently not be changed.

But you CAN moderate comments. So if comments become innapropriate in tone, they CAN be removed.

Yes, that's right. You don't have to subsribe to any RSS feeds to receive the Yahoo news. They select it for you.

My impression of online guestbooks is that they're not really in fashion any more, but I think they may be useful and kind of novel for the sites mentioned above in the last paragraph.

I have paid attention to a feature at some forums that shows the last few comments of people commenting on threads.