In the early days of blogging you could go to the Technorati Blog Index, enter some identifying terms for a particular niche topic and discover what the top blogs were in the field.

Identifying top niche blogs is invaluable knowledge for anyone wanting to enter, study or market to people in a particular field. It's one of the fastest and most effective ways to learn the lay of the land and get involved in the community of successful artists, real estate agents or 4-H club leaders using social media. I've been seeing a lot of demand for this information lately so I thought I'd write up some quick pros and cons of the options I'm familiar with. Perhaps you'll add some of your own favorite methods in comments.

With great design and implementation you can break all the rules and still be successful. This, by any other means, shouldn't have worked. It shouldn't have reached the ridiculous number of 3,338 diggs after being posted just 4 days ago. It was Flash animation. It was an advertisement for a product. It was selling you something. But as the submitter "ad-hater' #1 stated :

The web is a big and wonderful place, full of exciting pages and information that we all would like to go back to from time to time. Then comes the problem when you open your bookmarks and… you can't remember the name of the site, or what folder you put it in, or you find a bookmark and you can't remember why you saved it! Well, you're not the only one - that's why over the years people have been coming up with new and intuitive ways to bookmark and save content. We've gathered together 13 such tools to help you save your bookmarks with a visual twist, highlight sections of a page, and more.

New Y Combinator startup 8aweek aims to help you stop wasting all that time on random Internet sites. They offer a Firefox plugin that monitors the web sites you visit and how long you spend on each site. If you are on a user-defined "restricted site," the plugin will tell you when you've spent too much time there. Or alternatively, it will block sites if you tell it to be a little more aggressive about time management.

When I speak to people about branding, the first thing they usually tell me that comes to their mind is the Nike swoosh or the McDonald's Arches.

Banish this connotation from your head; your thinking of the identity or imagery of the company. By thinking and focusing on this, your hurting your small business and being detrimental to how you sh

Do you know what a value proposition is? If you do, do you have one for your business?

Without a strong value proposition, you risk not being able to convert as many customers as you need. If you want to stand out from your competition, this article tells you how.

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Online content is usually created to express opinions or share information with others. For entrepreneurs and web publishers, content is developed as a means to generate direct/indirect income.

However, one should not only view content as a means to receive immediate benefits like traffic or revenue. It is not just fodder for pageviews but a tool to enhance more abstract factors like reputation, reader trust and peer relationships.

There's an old well-worn addage that says, "The customer is always right." On the surface, it means that you should always strive to provide good customer service. But on a deeper level, it means that if your customers do things with your service that you never intended, perhaps you should just go with it. That's likely what happened with Twitter, which started out as a place to report the random little happenings in your life, and has begun to evolve into a platform for serious discussion and breaking news.

This post is by Maeve Maddox.

By definition a pun is "a play on words." The "play" may be on the sound of a word or the similarity of a phrase to a well-known saying. Sometimes the pronunciation being played on is a stretch and deserves a groan, but sometimes the relationship is extremely apt and deserves the reward of an appreciative laugh.

Having worked exclusively with small businesses for the first nine years of my online marketing career, I have a lot of appreciation for the hard work it takes to succeed. So, with full respect to current and future clients who don't qualify as "small," here's a Valentine's Day note of appreciation for small businesses.