It’s 7:30PM on a Saturday and I’m “blogging for comfort”.  Michigan (my alma mater) just lost to Ohio State in, from a third party perspective, what was a really fabulous game. But, we still lost … sigh.

I am cheered up, however, after finding a great tool that you can all use in evaluating in-bound links to your web site.  Go to Yahoo’s Site Explorer (still in beta), type in your URL and then click on “Inlinks” at the top.  Compared to Google, this gives an amazingly comprehensive listing of what must be every page on the internet that points to your site.  Very cooool.

Enjoy!  I’m going back to help my wife back up HER alma mater … Cal — playing USC.  grrrah!

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Plug It! Launched just a few weeks ago, a new social network site (very Digg like) called PlugIM is geared especially for internet marketers and advertisers. Quickly growing, it already has LOTS of great content to review. Unlike Digg, you don’t have to be a member to give a post a “plug”.

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Start up a discussion of WalMart at the next mixer you attend and watch what happens. The discussion may go in any number of directions, but it will be lively. If you have a strong opinion about “the Walmart effect” (good or bad), you’ll want to read this article by Art Carden at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

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Aaron at BrandPlay lists his top ten brand books. His list - including some heavy hitters - was inspired by Seth Godin’s reference to 30 books that equal an MBA (chosen out of about 300). I was feelin’ all warm and fuzzy inside when I realized that I’ve already read 7 of them … and the other three are already on my Amazon Christmas wish list. (That last sentence was a hint to my wife to go look at my list if she hasn’t already done so).

Since I AM a voracious reader, and am always looking for great reading recommendations, please let me ask YOU, dear readers, what books do you recommend?

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Combine Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point idea of “Connectors” with Fred Wilson’s observations on his early days of connecting as a VC using traditional venues with the bigger concept of the blogosphere. The result? The imperative that ALL connectors (even newbie ones) need to be blogging!

Are you a Connector without a blog? Dive in, the water’s warm! Swim in it ’til your fingers are pruney!!

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Re: Equal’s new design for sugar packets. A quickie reference to a blog post by Seth which refers to the original post by Scott Ginsberg. Described by Scott as “brand breathing brilliance”… it’s hard to argue with that.

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I had dinner this evening with a business associate and the discussion of blogging came up. A question was posed “how often should you post to your blog?” One good story is a post by Rob Clark at TheElusiveFish.com. After a site redesign, his blog posting increased from once a week to about every other day. The result? With this change came a 100% increase in traffic! ZOW! However, after a posting lull later, an expected (but less dramatic) drop off in traffic was observed… 10%-20% per week.

The bottom line: As long as you have high quality, high value, thought provoking information to share with the world, your readers will keep coming back for more. Valuable information is like a drug. Cut people off and they’ll go elsewhere to get their fix.

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