From the guys at ReviewMe, now comes BlogRolled.

As you would have already guessed it, BlogRolled serves both the bloggers/web site publishers and the advertisers. Bloggers sell their blogrolls instead of text link, advertisers choose blogs to advertise, bloggers add the advertisers’ links and get paid, it’s that simple!

Since selling text links is illegal, and may get your Google PageRank penalized, exchanging blogrolls are legal " who in the would know you actually sell them?

Free, Hosted Blog or Standalone Blog

Free, hosted blog is the easiest and quickest way to get started. Generally, it is free and you do not have to download any software. The three most popular free, hosted blog platforms are Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad. While Wordpress.org and Moveable Type are the preferred standalone blogging platform.

Although many beginners started off using free, hosted blog for blogging — when blogging becomes more than just a hobby, they are most likely to switch from free, hosted blog to standalone blog with their own domain name and hosting service. This may not always be necessary as Seth Godin has successful blogged using Typepad as his preferred platform.

Pros & Cons

Generally, the pro of having your own standalone blog is that it is flexible to customize any ways you like. The downside is, of course, you have to pay for your domain name and hosting service every year. Some companies do offer unlimited domain hosting at only $9.95/month, so you may want to grab this great offer before it disappears.

Types of Blog

There are many types of blog, listed below are the most common types of blogs: -

1. Personal blog
2. Corporate blog
3. Photo blog
4. Video blog or Vlog
5. Travel blog
6. Splog

The types of blog are primarily categorized between Personal blog and Corporate blog.

Personal blog

Personal blog is usually a blog written by an individual or a group of individuals with common interests. Usually a personal blog focuses around a niche, although some blogs may focus on a variety of topics. Individuals generally blog about his/her own life, including one or more of the followings: – the food I have eaten, the places I have traveled to, the daily rants, the movies I have watched, etc. These days, potential employers will usually screen an individual through the Internet, therefore, ranting too much or revealing too much personal information on your personal blog is not a very good idea.

Corporate blog

Blogs are not new to the corporate world. With more than 5% of the Fortune 500 companies blog externally, you can only wonder, does your company have a blog too?

Corporate blog is divided between internal blog (can only be viewed by employees) and external blog (can be viewed by the public).

Internal corporate blog can be useful for internal discussions and sharing of ideas. These days, it functions almost like an Intranet but with the mobility of an Extranet.

External corporate blog is meant for the public eye, therefore, usually involves discussion of general topic, i.e. new product and services launch, company news, press releases and more. Some says the main existence of corporate blog is for branding purpose.

The Official Google Blog is one of the most popular corporate blogs, ranks in Technorati top 50 listing among all blogs worldwide.

View the Corporate Blog List at NewPR Wiki.

Further Resources

The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right

According to Webster’s New Millennium™ Dictionary of English, a blog is an online diary; a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a Web page; also called Weblog or Web log.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia stated, “A blog (an abridgment of the term web log) is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.”

Check out Wordpress: Introduction to Blogging for a more detailed explanation.

As we all know, ShareThis used to be a Wordpress plugin which enables the readers to share a specific blog entry they like to their friends via Digg, reddit, Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon, etc. Yes, ShareThis is still a Wordpress plugin, but now, publishers can also find ShareThis in the form of Blogger Plugin, Typepad Plugin as well as for non-blog publishers.

Ordinary web users can also install ShareThis button into their Internet Explorer or Firefox browsers so they can share their favorite web sites with their friends and family.

By registering at ShareThis, publishers get an additional perk — they can track users through a Report tool.

An example of ShareThis Report

Check out http://answers.polldaddy.com.

The default permalinks is ugly. It usually looks like this: http://yourdomain.com/?p=N where N is a number.

There are many reasons to use “pretty permalinks”. Below are the reasons why we should make use of “pretty permalinks”: -

Easier to remember

http://yourdomain.com/britney-spears-sob-story is definitely easier to remember than http://yourdomain.com/?p=283.

Love At First Sight (or Hate)

By just looking at the URL of your article, http://yourdomain.com/britney-spears-sob-story, users understand what the article is about and thus, will click (or will not click) on the link depending whether the person are interested in the story.

Increase Search Engine Visibility

Search Engine loves text more than anything. Having “keywords” on the URL is more beneficial than ever.

The most common usage of permalink structure is as follow: /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ (i.e. http://yourdomain.com/2008/01/20/britney-spears-sob-story/)

However, there are many people who think that is way too deep for search engines to crawl as there are way too many levels, hence they cut it short to /%postname%/ (i.e. http://yourdomain.com/britney-spears-sob-story/)

By using the shortest permalinks, many thinks the permalinks usage is optimized. But this method usually will create problems for the owners sooner or later. By using just the %postname% the rewrite rules may make it impossible to access pages such as your stylesheet (which has a similar format) or the /wp-admin/ folder. Furthermore, the dates are essential especially if you plan to use calendars and archive system to archive your posts.

So, the best method would be: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ (i.e. http://yourdomain.com/2008/01/britney-spears-sob-story/) or /%year%_%monthnum%_%day%/%postname%/ (i.e. http://yourdomain.com/2008_01_20/britney-spears-sob-story/)

To understand more about Permalinks, read Using Permalinks at Wordpress Codex.