Blogger users have been granted an easier way to integrate AdSense with their blogs. Google recently launched a built-in AdSense interface within Blogger’s main panels. Making money from contextual advertising has never been smoother than this.

Podcasting is a portmanteau word combining the words Broadcasting and iPod. The term Podcasting is misleading in a way, because to listen to a Podcast you don’t need an iPod and you certainly don’t need one to broadcast either.

Let’s say for example that I wanted to broadcast this blog in the format of a radio-show, so you could listen to this blog instead of reading it. First I’d need a microphone and some recording software (windows comes with a simple voice recorder as standard). Then I’d sit myself down, grab my coffee and get totally wired (very important), then when i’m ready start recording the show. When that’s done it’s time to convert my recording into an Internet ready media format, such as MP3 or WMA for example. Then the final step is to simply upload the file to my web server for everyone to download onto their portable players, or simply stream over the internet on their computer.

You may also choose to get fancy and add some jingles or other cool effects into your Podcast. The more professional and friendly your Podcast sounds, the more likely people are to download the next broadcast.

Obviously podcasting will consume a great deal more bandwidth than your standard text based blog, so make sure you check with your webspace provider about storage and bandwidth limitations.

The team is in the process of cutting up new ideas on the dS operating table, so please stay tuned and check back soon.

A while back I talked about the latest anti-splog (blog spam) measures over at blogger.com (aka blogspot). While that was a great tip for visitors browsing blogspot blogs, it still didn’t give the rest of the world a way to report spam from non-blogspot blogs. So after much searching and digging around in my favourites folder and google, I came across Splog Reporter:

Splog Reporter allows users to submit splogs they encounter to its database. The data is complied, confirmed and made available to search engines that wish to optimize search results for their users. Ultimately, the users who submit splog to Splog Reporter benefit from the accumulation of this data through search engine improvements.

Bring it on….

Ping is the method to let some well-known sites know that you have recently updated your blog. This is a little bit different in concept than the traditional ping, which you use to ping a computer on a network to see if it responds or not. When you ping your blog, it sends a note to the site you pinged letting that site know that your site has fresh content. People visit these big web-sites, often, to find out a list of recently updated sites. The whole wide web is so big, that it is almost impossible to see another site being updated without having a reference to it. You can bring that reference to the attention of the people through the pings. One of the most famous site that falls into that category, and has been around for a while, is Weblogs.com .

There is one basic rule we should follow when using this technique; if we update our blog every 5 minutes during any time period, we should not send a ping every 5 minutes. While it may bring in more visitors, sending a ping repeatedly within very short time spans may actually get a site banned from the site that is receiving the ping, as such a technique is also used by those who simply wish to have their site noticed more often, whether or not they have updated content on their sites.

Many blog publishing tools offer you the option of pinging Weblogs.com or some other popular sites. There are several places you can send a ping to, which is a problem today as webmasters and writers have to ping numerous sites repeatedly to let them know that the site has been updated. One of the online tools that allow you to ping numerous sites at the same time within one interface is Ping-O-Matic.