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If you want to join the podcasting wave but either don’t like recording your own voice, or simply don’t have the time, Odiogo now has a Wordpress plugin that generates a podcast from your RSS feed.

The voice quality is still a bit robotic but better than I was expecting. They incorporate ads into the podcast (surprise, surprise) so run your own test before installing the addon.

I’m not sure this is going to be a sustainable business model for them but we shall see.

I’m currently experimenting with a couple of SEO plugins for Wordpress. The first is All in One SEO Pack from Uberdose.

Click for full size image.

This nifty addition adds meta tags to each post. I know all the SEO experts will tell you that meta tags are long dead and buried but we aren’t using them here to gain ranking, but to give the search engines a nice user-friendly title and description.

The second plugin is Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress

I had a very bad experience with XML sitemaps when they were first introduced. It wasn’t that Google ignored my sitemap. Quite the contrary. It came calling hard and fast. Only trouble was I had built one of those grey-hat sites (dark grey) with about 800,000 pages. It was a long time ago when bandwidth was measured in megabytes and it got very expensive very quickly. Since then I’ve been shy of generating them, although I’m a reformed character now and only use purely white hat techniques. Honest.

This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search. As well as generating the sitemap it calculates a priority for each post based on the number of comments and notifies Ask.com, Google, MSN Live Search and Yahoo via ping.

Obviously you can also submit the sitemap via Google webmaster console to monitor its progress.

According to this report in the Wall Street Journal it’s pretty easy for a blogger to pull in the big bucks. It does show that just about any niche can earn you a decent living. No need to build those mesitholemiamathoma (or however you spell it) blogs after all.

Via Money making Blogs

Or maybe you just want to become a famous blogger?

Maybe, according to these posts.

I’m not convinced Google is making us dumber, but it’s certainly making us less patient.

Remember going to the library to look up something? Not anymore. Just Google it. If their spam algorithms are working this month, the information is right there. If they aren’t, it’s on page six.

Out attention span decreases with every dose of instant gratification. We get frustrated if we can’t find the information NOW.

Think I’m going to turn off the computer and read a book.

The social marketing directory is a master resource list with three categories of social (web 2.0) sites that you can use to create your very own streams of highly targeted traffic/subscribers/sales for your websites in 2008 and beyond!

This resource guide contains:

Over 100 Social Networking Sites (i.e. MySpace, Squidoo, etc..)
Over 150 Social Bookmarking Sites(i.e. StumbleUpon, Digg, etc..)
And Over 180 Video Sharing Sites (i.e. YouTube, AOL, etc..)

ONLY $9.95!

At least that’s what it says on the sales page.

It’s actually a decent list of Web 2.0 resources. But, being a Nice Guy and all, I got the resale rights so you can get it here for free.