Reading Darren's 7 ways to get to the top of del.icio.us post im compelled to tell you that I think the "10 ways to stuff a walrus" type posts are history this year. Im not sure why, but personally Im a little bored of them, and I think we'll see some new trends emerge in the next few months and this little list craze die out.

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We’ve posted before that link exchanges are stupid. That doesn’t mean you don’t need links, though. You do need links. The more the merrier.

But why exactly do you need links so badly? And how can you get them without being cast into to a slow, tedious, link building hell?

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Tim Mayer must have been laughing his nuts off at SES this week when we had some coffee on Wednesday morning. I told him I'd recently switched to My Web2.0 (their version of del.icio.us) but had just switched back as it had no damn firefox extension! Now I see he had something up his sleeve all along. Yahoo! have just bought del.icio.us, and not only is it of course, totally in character with their other tag based trendy purchases this last year, it's probably the best one of the lot, bar flickr.

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I'll be in Chicago next week speaking on Tagging and communities at Search Engine Strategies Chicago, and wanted to find out if any of you will be there, but also, what it is you might like to know about using tagging to promote your blogs?

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Very few things in the blogosphere are as misunderstood as Google PageRank. Everyone and their mate's mum likes to run their mouth on the subject... whereas about 9 out of 10 of them are rather clueless, I'd like to run through some of the misinformation out there, lest you miss out on one of your most powerful allies in the blogging game--Google juice.

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We've talked about what the Digg Effect does to your site. Of course, many of you may be wondering how to get DUGG in the first place!

Now before I go any further, let me state for the record that there is a not-so-fine line between promoting the cream of your writing crop and bookmark spamming. One can give you some nice traffic and links, while the other could potentially cause you to lose all credibility.

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With a lot of talk of search engine traffic doing the rounds in the blogosphere, it's probably a good time to talk about alternate sources of traffic, and information.

Most bloggers need information, and because of that, have to become good at sourcing it. Again, most bloggers have time problems: There simply isn't enough of it! So they end up, like me, using all manner of aggregated RSS subs to cast a wider net, and avoid the individual blog subscription if possible. Well ok, you may not, but I do ok? heh..

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Pretty in yer face statement huh? I'll bet there are quite a few folks reading this that advocate swapping links, and seeking "link partners" to ahem... increase their blogs pagerank. Well, let me let you into a little secret: It doesn't work.

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After having some fun talking about linkbaiting and a cautionary tale of bad link company, I went to visit an old link visualization tool, that still rocks. If you've not seen the TouchGraph Google Browser before, go have a look, but be warned, you may need to be using IE, the website looks like a bag of cack, and you need Java installed. (it's worth it though, promise..)

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It seems Technorati's algorithm is not working effectively (read, broken) to rank blogs on their true worth. This post shows how one Blogger leapfrogged their system by mistake.

Any algorithm based purely on the number of links pointing at your blog is not going to be very effective and is bound to be gamed - just ask Google!

I agree with the poster, something else is required. Personally I thnk the best way of ranking blogs is by traffic .. providing everyone can agree how that is measured.

If there's anything that running The Pope Blog has taught me, it's that one mention in an A-list blog can you really turbocharge your traffic (in that case, it was Buzzmachine that did it). There's the infamous Slashdot effect which used to bring down a lot of servers. And now there's the Digg effect.

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Ever found it hard to get other bloggers to link to a new blog? Sure you have, it's not easy sometimes. Even established blogs need to expand their traffic and influence on a regular basis, and linkbaiting is one way to do it. It's not without potential perils, but the time honored tradition of being contrary, in order to get attention is well proved, and done right, it's a killer way to break into a new area. There are also safer ways of linkbaitng, they're just less fun :)

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