Nominate your favorite blogs for the Performancing Blog Awards 2007.

It would be nice to get Random Bits nominated for “The Best Blog Podcast” since Sara does such a fantastic job with it!

Perhaps Search-This could get nominated for “The Best Blogs You’ve Never Heard Of” too. Although that may be one you don’t want to win.

Anyways, get over there and vote people!!!

Official Categories For The 2007 Performancing Blog Awards:

1. The Best Overall Blog
2. The Most Influential Blogger
3. The Best Blog Design
4. The Best Blog Typography
5. The Best Blog Name
6. The Best New Blog
7. The Best Blog Community
8. The Most Improved Blog of 2007
9. The Best Blogs You’ve Never Heard Of
10. The Best Blog Podcast
11. The Best Use of a Corporate Blog
12. The Best Video Blog
13. The Best Writing/Blogging Blog
14. The Best Science/Technology Blog
15. The Most Controversial Blog
16. The Best SEO Blog
17. The Best Celeb/Style Blog
18. The Best Business/Money Blogs
19. The Best Photo Blog
20. The Best Sports Blog
21. The Best Blog WebHost
22. The Best Family and Parenting Blog
23. The Best Political Blog
24. The Best Food/Health Blog
25. The Funniest Blog
26. The Best Travel Blog
27. The Best Education Blog

I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE - In 1968 Marvin Gaye released Motown’s longest-running No. 1 hit topping the U.S. chart for seven weeks. In 1970 Creedence Clearwater Revival would cover the song for what would be their most popular album, Cosmo’s Factor. In 2003, the album was ranked number 265 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

AFTER MIDNIGHT - J. J. Cale released this song in 1966. Several years later, Eric Clapton would record the song on his first solo album, Tulsa. The song would become one of Clapton’s standards.

LITTLE WING - Jimi Hendrix released this in 1967. Since then it’s been covered by over thirty different artist, but no one does it better than Stevie Ray Vaughan. Hendrix may have knocked up the song, but Stevie Ray Vaughan married it.

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS - The Beatles released this classic in 1967 on the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But The Beatles aren’t the only ones that found success with the song; Joe Cocker also made the song number one on the British singles charts in 1968.

While The Beatles may be the most covered band in history, The Beatles also found much success by covering other artists such as: Chuck Berry, The Isley Brothers, The Miracles, Little Richard and more.

What’s The Point?

“I can’t blog about that because so-and-so did last week…”

“I can’t find anything to blog about that hasn’t already been covered…”

“That technique is just the same one that so-and-so already talked about…”

I repeatedly hear these reasons from people on why they feel they can’t blog about a topic. So in this article I’ll explain why each of these reasons shouldn’t stop anyone from “covering” it themselves.

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Running a community site can be absolute murder sometimes. Keeping the balance between a happy operator and happy users is a deadly dance. Being the owner/operator of a now comatose niche community site has given me the supernatural power to see into the future and warn you about the baleful consequences of ignoring the blood-thirsty mob. Here are five grisly mistakes you can make when running a community site, be it a blog, social network, or message board:

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Today is Blog Action Day. It’s a day where bloggers around the web will unite to post on a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment.

You will no doubt see a wide variety of opinions throughout the web on this issue. I expect there to be a lot of finger pointing — it’s the democrats fault or it’s the republicans fault, or it’s the SUVs fault, or it’s because people are having too many kids. Whatever. People will then say that we need to do something, we need to write to congress and the President and demand action.

Of course the environment is a huge topic for the 2008 presidential candidates. Each candidate has their own plan or program to solve the problem. You can read about them here.

But, I believe –

If the world is saved, it will be saved not by old minds with new programs, but by new minds with no programs at all…

Every culture is a collection of individuals, and each individual has in his or her head a complete set of values, concepts, rules, and preferences that, taken together, constitute the building plans for that particular culture. This is known as the cultures Vision.

Vision is to culture what gravity is to matter. When you see a ball roll off a table and fall to the floor, you should think, “Gravity is at work here.” When you see a culture make its appearance and spread outward in all directions until it takes over the entire world, you should think, “Vision is at work here.”

Vision is the flowing river. Programs are sticks set in the riverbed to impede the flow. What I’m saying is that the world will not be saved by people with programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved because the people living in it have a new Vision.”

Every year, without fail, we outlaw more things, catch more people doing them, and put more of them in jail. The outlawed behavior never goes away, because, directly or indirectly, it’s supported by the strong, invisible, unrelenting force called Vision. This explains why police officers are much more likely to take up crime than criminals are to take up law enforcement. It’s called “going with the flow.”

If the world is saved, it will be saved because people begin to think in a different way about the world and humanity’s place in it.

Most of this is from the mind of Daniel Quinn. Author of Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit and The Story of B.

Please take 10 more minutes and continue reading here!

If you want even more reading, try this.

I highly recommend his books. They will change your way of thinking…

If you are a blogger, whether a newbie or a seasoned pro, take five minutes and make sure you have the five items on the list below checked off. The websites below can bring traffic to your blog, they can inform you of who’s linking to your blog and from where, they can show you who visits your blog and they can allow you to share your blog with others.

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Do you know why you work so hard? No community - it’s the price you pay for being independent.

If someone told you that you are a very independent person you would probably take that as a compliment. It means that you rely upon no one for anything. In today’s culture that is looked upon as a positive quality. But, I believe there is a price to pay for being independent — and we’re all paying it.

You and I work hard because we have to support ourselves entirely. I need my own house, my own car, my own computer, my own microwave, washer, dryer, television, xbox, lawn mower and all the rest. And you need these things too, because after all you want to be independent don’t you? You wouldn’t want to have to ask your neighbor if you could use theirs. Chances are if you are like most people, you probably don’t even know your neighbors well enough to feel comfortable to ask them for something. You don’t need to, everything they have, you also have. You don’t need your neighbors for anything — and they don’t need you.

In order to acquire these things you need to work for them and I need to work for them and so does everyone else. But, if you really thought about it - why do each of us need to own these possessions? I only use my microwave from time-to-time; same with my lawn mower — only on Saturday mornings do I use it. In fact that’s true for just about everything I own. Why couldn’t we share the lawn mower? In reality our entire block could share a lawn mower and just about everything else. But that’s not how independent people work.

In the average neighborhood in America, every household owns the same essential things.

Why is that?

It didn’t use to be this way and in some parts of the world there are people that still don’t live this way. Our textbooks call these people tribal or some even use a more derogatory term — uncivilized. We civilized people don’t need a tribe. We rely upon no one - for anything.

And because we rely upon no one we have no one to rely upon. You need to work hard so that you don’t need to ask for anything from anyone and so do I.

Why do I tell you such things? Well because I’m a big believer in being part of a community and have experienced the benefits that come with it. Being part of a community is more than just for the purpose of sharing things, ultimately it’s about being stronger as a group instead of as individuals.

Now to try and relate this to blogging…

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Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted — One moment
Would you capture it or just let it slip? — Eminem

I can’t believe I’m quoting Eminem either, but the song delivers a powerful message: “What if you only have one shot, or one opportunity to seize the moment?”

Guess what?
That’s usually how it works…

– In a television commercial, we’re told, the sale is made or lost in the first three of four seconds.

– In a print ad, tests have shown that 75 percent of the buying decision is made based on the headline alone.

– In a sales presentation, data has shown that, the sale is made or lost in the first three minutes.

So what about blogging?

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