In some markets there are way more than enough blogs on specific subjects. If you are thinking of starting another one, think again. If it’s in the list below, the market is either saturated, or it’s just a plain bad idea. Just because you could write it doesn’t mean you should. Or have really you got nothing else to write about?

1. Blogs about Making Money Blogging

Have you actually made any money with your blog, or are you hoping a blog about making money blogging will end up making you money? I personally find the subject interesting but it’s a saturated market and you’d have to be doing something really special to get seen here.
Already been covered by: Problogger

2. Blogs about SEO

Ahem. Sometimes wish I’d never started this one. SEO blogs are 10 a penny. Most have very few readers but SEO guys are always telling clients to get a blog, so we kinda should be doing it too.
Already covered by: SEO Book

3. Blogs about your pets

Even your mum wont read it. Honestly, I can’t believe how many blogs there are about cats out there. I have a cat, but that is the only mention you’ll ever read about it in any blog I write.  There is an off-chance your blog might get read if you get yourself an exotic pet, like a polar bear, but otherwise forget it.
It’s already covered by: I can has cheezburger

4. News commentary

Oh, you are really wasting your life now. You just want to do this to let of steam don’t you? People want their news and commentary from reliable news sources, not from someone who’s been commenting on the news for 10 minutes.
It’s already been covered by: The BBC

5. Blogs about Search/Google

There are plenty of people ready to jump all over any search engine for anything they do, good or bad. Do you think Google cares? Are you gonna devote your free time to writing about what Yahoo just did?
Already covered by: Searchenginewatch

6. Blogs about Yourself

Are you a celebrity? Politician? No? Who’s gonna read it then? Your friends? That’s just gonna get awkward.
Who’s done it successfully: Rosie O’Donnell

7. Blog About Your Kids

Don’t do this! Allow your kids to be brought up without every facet of their young lives being paraded on the interweb. This is a worse idea than your mum getting out your baby pictures when you brought home a date.
Who’s done it successfully: No-one!

I’m sure there are a ton of other blog ideas that are just plain bad. A way of wasting not just your time, but the time of anyone unlucky enough to stumble into it. If you can think of any others, please leave a comment. On the flip side there are plenty of great blog ideas out there and I’ll try and cover a few of them at a later date.

I can’t believe I didn’t work out how to do this until this morning, but if you want to write a post in WordPress but not have it show up until a later date or time, all you do is edit the timestamp on the post to the future time and hit publish. Job done.
This could mean you could focus on one blog for a few hours while you write loads of posts then move on to another job but still have your posts appearing at regular intervals for the next week. Now I know how these guys keep blogging while they are on their holidays. Doh!
PS This post should be appearing at 1am but I will be sound asleep by then. I hope.

Over the weekend I was experimenting with a component for Joomla called Mojoblog. It is essentially WordPress blog software that works as a component within your Joomla Structure, so no need for building a separate template etc if you want to use WordPress. You can download it and try it at www.joomlify.com.

If you want to blog from within your Joomla build, having a WordPress build is perfect. It allows you access to a lot of WordPress plugins, it gives you a great comments system. The category, archives and latest post links are all automatic and robust, allowing you to get on with the real job of writing content.

And as for the RSS feeds – well, I’ve been trying to get a good RSS feed working on Joomla for a while but never managed to get just what I’m looking for. With the blog in place I can mention any new sections of the site within the blog. That goes into the blog rss feed and gets syndicated by whoever picks up the RSS feed e.g. Technorati.

Congrats to the guys at Joomlify.com for coming up with this and to the makers of JD-WP which is the original component it was based on I think.

I use both WordPress and Blogger, but I prefer WordPress by a mile.
It seems that in recent months Blogger does nothing buy hang around 1 out of 3 times I’m trying to publish a post to a blogger blog on one of my own domains. As such there is a lot of time wasted republishing over and over again just for a one paragraph post.
Wordpress doesn’t have that problem. That’s one pretty major reason to go the WordPress route in my opinion if you are starting a blog.

Anyone running a business these days can usually benefit from high quality market research in their field. Often the question is “how do I do it?”. The Business to Business Market Research blog is probably where you want to start looking for answers. It is a huge repository of high quality market research information and will keep you reading for hours. Visit www.b2binternational.com/b2b-blog/.

Take one cucumber recipe. Write a witty blog post around it and post it here. Wait two days and serve it up here. In a blind taste test, 100% of the public couldn’t tell the difference. When asked how it tasted, some people reckoned “bitter”. Distribute the results around the blogosphere and watch the fur fly.

UPDATE: 24 Hours later and the copied article has disappeared from the Telegraph.

Microsoft have a new blog tool out to allow blog owners to write their content locally then publish it to their blog whether it’s on Live Spaces or on Typepad, WordPress etc. Nice touch that it also allows publishing to Google’s Blogger service. Does that mean we are all friends now?
The software is still in beta, but might definitely be worth a look.

My current bugbear is going to sites (web 2.0 sites especially) and registering, or adding a link or doing something else that gives that site more content then seeing that the link back to my site has had a nofollow tag put on it.
If you want someone to take time to use your site and help you out then you should be prepared to give them a link back. Yes, I know that the spammers would zero in on the site and pound it, but if you put in other ways to keep them at bay then your real users would be in with a chance of getting something back from you.

So for this reason I’m removing the nofollow attribute from this install of WordPress.

I thought this would be a simple task of flicking a switch somewhere in the WordPress control panel, but no, it’s never that simple in WordPress.

First off I found some code to remove the nofollow tag here.

Then it was going on about putting it in the my-hacks.php file which I couldn’t find in my install of WordPress. No worries though, this wiki has all the info on switching on and adding a my-hacks.php file.

I decided the time was right for this as I can moderate all the comments that come in anyway. Akismet is installed to take out the blatant spam, and I want to give something back to anyone who takes the time to write a comment.

So please go ahead and leave comments now and know that you’re getting some link-love back.

Blogging really has come of age when you get sites displaying blog jobs. Today I came across a site dedicated to letting people know about blog jobs – get paid for writing.
When people are employing other people to blog for them you have yourself an industry.

So what can you expect from a blog job? Depends on the blog network really. Some will pay an amount per post, some will pay a small monthly retainer with a promise of an increase when the blog gets busy and profitable. Others will offer a profit share. Some blog jobs will want you to post once a day, others 5 times a day.

The beauty of blog jobs though is that you can usually do it from anywhere around the world. You could be in Australia blogging for a company in the UK or in America blogging for a German company. Some blog jobs will want you to post at certain times of day though in their local time zone, so it might be worth checking this out before applying for any particular blog job.

When applying for a blog job it helps to have a solid body of work behind you already. This display of your work will be preferably in blog form to display your knowledge of writing in that medium. Also it helps if you can show understanding of writing in the industry that the blog job is going to address.

In my opinion though the best blog job is the one where you write for yourself, own your own blog and keep all of the profits. It’s not for everyone though as you have to maintain your blog software, work out and maintain advertiser relationships and do all your own promotion. I guess this is why people are happy to apply for blog jobs that just let them write and remove the need for all the other distractions associated with owning your own blog.

Look for a blog job here.

Interesting thing this morning with WordPress hanging on a standard install. Lots of people are having trouble with getting to the dashboard on their own domains. This would appear to be connected with the site wordpress.org being down.
The dashboard page calls external info which must be hosted on wordpress.org – when the info doesn’t come through your browser hangs.

Try entering your login info then after waiting for a while, change the browser address to:

http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/post.php

That let me into the admin section.

Next thing will be to comment out the external data calls within the code for the dashboard page so that this doesn’t happen again.