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I stumbled across this presentation introducing Twitter to beginners. Twitter is a microblog in which you can broadcast what you are doing right now. It is also a great way to promote your blog if you Twitter every time you write a new blog post.

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We looked at the top 100 blogs ranked by authority on Technorati.com, and then looked up the unique monthly visitors on Compete.com. 

From the Technorati blog:

Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.

The best way to increase your Technorati Authority is to write things that are interesting to other bloggers so they’ll link to you. Linking to source material when you blog is also a great way to engage in conversation and help others find what you find interesting.

Note that Compete.com does not calculate the monthly visitors to subdirectories. That is why all of the wired blogs, for example, show the same visitor number of the parent subdomain, blog.wired.com.

All data below is current as of February 9, 2009.

What are the best WordPress Plugins? There are four WordPress plugins that I can’t live without. They are:

Akismet — the only way to stop spam comments from ruining your blog. Akismet is very accurate and works like a charm.

Google Analytics for WordPress — I used to cut and paste the Google Analytics script into the footer of my blog, but then you have to worry about it every time you change your theme. By using a WordPress Plugin, you can change themes without worrying about changing the Google Analytics script.

Google XML Sitemaps – This is a very handy WordPress Plugin not just for creating the XML sitemap every time you make a change to your blog, but also for notifying the major search engines of the change.

All in One SEO Pack — It takes a little work to fully put this plugin to use, but it is very helpful in allowing you to set the title tag for each post and each page, including your main page. The title tag seems to be the most important one for search engines in identifying what a page is all about, and this plugin lets you tailor the title tag as well as other parameters.

What about Google AdSense or other advertising-related plugins? I usually put the AdSense script in a text widget, so I don’t use a plugin for this.

Zuckerberg arranged for Facebook polls to be conducted during twelve key sessions. In one poll, during a session called Advice to the US President on Competitiveness, Facebook users were asked if the stimulus package is on target. 120,000 responses were recorded in twenty minutes. 59% of respondents said “no,” 15% said “yes” and 26% said unsure.

The poll results were displayed prominently above the panelists, including Rupert Murdoch CEO News Corp., Ellen Kullman CEO DuPont, Duncan Niederauer CEO NYSE Euronext, David Rubenstein Managing Director, Carlyle Group and Ronald Williams CEO Aetna. The panelists largely approved of the stimulus package in their comments before the poll results came in. Facebook users obviously disagreed the entire session is embedded below.

via Facebook Polls Bring Reality To Davos Elite .