Jason Calacanis of Weblogs, Inc. is in the market for the top users on DIGG, Delicious, Flickr, MySpace, and Reddit. His offer, $12,000 a year in exchange of 150 stories a month - basically less than what these top users are already doing without pay.

It’s interesting to see the blogosphere mutate from an innocent way for people to express themselves into an expanding money market.

As Jason puts it:

Talent wins, and talent needs to get paid. I love paying talented people so they can sleep well at night doing what they love. That’s my biggest joy in business: gettin’ people paid.

I guess what matters at the end of the day is… everybody’s gotta eat!

From The Jason Calacanis Weblog via ProBlogger.

We all like to procrastinate from time to time all the time, so it’s important to formulate new working habits to work around our slack. Here’s a good work hack from LifeClever that might help you become a more effective worker.

I’ve implemented the (10+2)*5 procrastination hack with a shareware application called Meridian. So what is this (10+2)*5 math mumbo jumbo, you ask? The idea is simple: dedicate a fixed amount of 10 minutes for work and 2 minutes for play. Repeat 5 times.

• 10 - Work for ten minutes with single-minded focus on moving toward completion on a single task. Ten minutes, and that’s all you’re allowed to do is work, work, work. No cheating, because (DING!) you actually get a break when you’re done…
• 2 - After ten minutes of sweaty, dedicated work you get a 2-minute break to do whatever you want—drink coffee, read 5ives, call your bookie, whatever. When the two minutes are up, it’s back to work on the next task on your list. This is important.
• You’re going to iterate this four more times for a total of one hour’s working/breaking

They chose Meridian because it has multiple timers and doesn’t take up too much real estate, but you can use your own favorite timer. I suggest using the old fashion chess clock. *ding* it’s work time… *ding* it’s time to call the bookie… *ding* Uhhh you get the point.

If we lived in a perfect world then those stars and celebrities in the magazines are for real. Unfortunately not, and people in real life aren’t perfect. That’s where Photoshop comes in, smoothing away your skin blemishes, zits, blackheads, freckles, etc to make you look like a fashion model. How? Check out Mizuno’s Super Airbrush PP Tutorial - written step by step to help you transform yourself (and your loved ones) like magic.

Via LifeClever

BrowserShots is a great and easy way to test your site in different browsers without having to load the individual browsers themselves. This makes a good shortcut for site creators to make sure their site will work in every browser without a glitch.

Ther mission statement:

In our dreams, the web looks good for all users. So we let web designers view screenshots of their pages in different browsers, at different screen resolutions and with different plugins. We’re trying to make this service easy to use, open for all (including access to the source code) and 100% free, as in free beer.

Yes free is great but as most free online tools they’re usually overloaded fully utilized so sometimes it takes a few tries before you can actually make use of it. Still it’s a great service and it’s really worth supporting.

Via Ades Blog.

CreateBlog has close to 900 FREE MySpace Layouts you can use to change the look of your MySpace Profile. They have a very nice intuitive user interface to help you browse through their extensive list of beautiful layouts. When you click on a desired layout you are presented with a preview and the code you can copy-and-paste into your About Me section. It doesn’t get easier than this, so check them out.

Liz over at Successful and Outstanding Bloggers talks about 9 + 1 Things Every Reader Wants from a Writer which can help all of us understand our readers better.

It can seem complicated to write for a readership that includes beginners to experts. I’ve done it for almost three decades. It can seem like there’s too much to consider to meet them all at their own level.

Yet my experience is that beginners and experts are not that differernt when they read. They might choose to read different things, but we all do. Beyond that difference of content, beginners, experts and those of us in the middle — every reader — wants the same things from a writer.

Her breakdown on these ten things include picking an idea that intrigues you, tracing out a simple structure, writing for someone who’s like you but doesn’t know what you know about the topic, making clear decisions about what to include, setting aside your expensive vocabulary, and so on.

This is really worth reading if you want to improve your readership and if you care about repeat visits and readers satisfaction.

Via ProBlogger.

Web page design (and of course, blog design) pricing is a controversy these days. You’ll find a full range of spectrum on initial quoting, from ridiculously cheap $50 designs to ridiculously expensive professional $250 an hour design services. The question is what and who to choose to take on your project, and what are the standards?

To answer this question The Blog Studio elaborated on Chris Pearson’s original post on the matter.

Pricing is a hot topic in web design, especially at the small to medium end of the spectrum that most designers and clients occupy. At issue is the fact that there are no standards: no standard industry rate, no standard industry process. No standard industry anything.

Shopping for a designer must be incredibly frustrating. Asking “how much to design my blog” will return quotes ranging from the insanely low to the absurdly high. Why? There are a number of reasons, a few of which I’ll review here.

First, we’ve got to separate providers of web sites into three groups: professional design/develop agencies, professional design/develop freelancers, and amateurs. Generally speaking, agencies will charge more per hour than freelancers, and freelancers more than amateurs.

There’s a lot of truth to what they have to say (follow the link above to read the entire article) but we’re sticking to our own standard despite the controversy, which we believe reflect our quality of services while saving our clients from burning holes in their pockets.

At the end of the day it’s your decision who you want to hire, so a little research and shopping around never hurts!

While blogging gets more and more popular so is the need of having a custom template (theme) for your blog to stand out from the crowd. If you’re a WordPress blogger then your luck is huge, but if you’re a Blogger blogger you might have a hard time finding decent custom templates out there. Well Gecko and Fly decided to port some of the best WordPress themes into Blogger templates, and we gotta give it to them cuz some of them are just spanking cool.

From blogHelper via ProBlogger.

Don’t lose money over your next bill or PayPal transaction. Use the PPCalc a PayPal Fee Calculator to see how much to charge to get a specific amount (or how much you’ll be charged to receive a specific amount).

Thanks Darren!

The days of making an income out of AdSense is still young, but some people are already making a good fortune out of the system. Michael Cheney is one of them, with around $19,000 monthly AdSense earnings. Obviously he’s a guy who has mastered the art of making money through AdSense, and now he’s sharing his secrets with us in his AdSense Videos.

The truth is it’s not easy, but Michael is willing to let you in on his secrets. In his own words:

You Are Going To Watch Over My Shoulder And See EXACTLY How I Make $19,156 Per Month With AdSense And Then Steal My Step-By-Step Blueprint To Explode Your Own Earnings..

So check him out if you ever want to achieve that six figure dream from the comfort of your own bedroom!