An often cited way of generating traffic is to leave comments on blogs and forums along with a link to your website. Write a relevant and well written comment and this could bring visitors to your site.

Even better, if the link is ‘do follow’ the major search engines such as Google and Bing may recognize the link as a ‘vote of confidence’ in your site, thereby helping your site rank higher in the search engines.

According to Technorati’s ’2010 State Of The Blogosphere’ report – based on a survey of 7,200 bloggers – the number of ‘professional’ bloggers has grown in the last year, with self-employed bloggers making up 21 percent of those surveyed (up from 9 percent in 2009) and corporate bloggers making up 4 percent (up from 1 percent in 2009).

The majority of bloggers are still ‘hobbyists’ but as a percentage of all bloggers, their number is decreasing – from 72 percent of bloggers in 2009 to 65 percent in 2010.

TechCrunch has just been acquired for a reported $30 million… Demand Media is planning a $125 million initial public offering (IPO)… both companies have large ‘new media’ advertising-driven media businesses… one is renowned for breaking tech news… the other has been accused of running ‘content farms’…

So which of these new media businesses is more attractive to advertisers, and which new media business model is more profitable?

There is no copyright in newspaper headlines, according to a recent decision by the Australian Federal Court.

Ruling in a case between LexisNexis Australia and Australian newspaper publisher, Fairfax, the Australian Federal Court is the first court in the common law world to consider whether copyright subsists in newspaper headlines.

Last Thursday the U.S. Federal Trade Commission revealed that California based Reverb Communications had settled charges over posting fake reviews in Apple’s iTunes store.

The FTC had charged Reverb over engaging in deceptive advertising by having its employees write and post positive reviews of clients’ games in the Apple iTunes Store, without disclosing that they were being paid to do so.

PadPressed by Jason Baptiste is a WordPress plugin that makes your WordPress blog look like an iPad application when accessed using Apple’s iPad tablet device.

Essentially, when someone uses an iPad to access your blog, PadPressed lets them use various iPad features such as swipe to advance gestures, accelerometer aware column formatting, touch navigation and so on.

Time Magazine has released its list of the 25 best blogs of 2010. Topping the list is Zenhabits and the list is a mix of political, entertainment, technology, lifestyle and various other kinds of blogs.

In addition to its 25 best blogs of 2010, Time has also released lists of the 5 essential blogs and the 5 overrated blogs.

I rarely watch television, let alone television news shows. I get all my news online. Well, it turns out that, as a result of this, what’s ‘news’ to me is not the same as ‘news’ to people who watch television newscasts.

I suspected as much based on discussions with friends and family who watch TV news. Now, however, a study from the Pew Research Center confirms that people who watch TV news do not get the same news as those of us who consume online news.

Last week Techmeme introduced ‘Mediagazer.’ Just as Techmeme aggregates the latest technology news headlines, Mediagazer will aggregate the latest news headlines from topics around the content production and distribution business, including journalism, blogging, video production, e-books, and digital distribution.

Source: Gabe Rivera, “Mediagazer is to Media as Techmeme is to Tech,” Techmeme, March 8, 2010

Internet marketers that spend more than half of their marketing budgets on ‘inbound marketing’ methods – marketing initiatives designed to ‘pull’ leads to them, spend 60 percent less per lead than those who spend more on traditional ‘outbound marketing’ i.e. methods designed to ‘push’ messages out to prospects.

In other words, according to HubSpot’s ’2010 State of Inbound Marketing’ report, inbound marketing – which includes such Internet marketing methods as search engine optimization (SEO), paid search engine marketing, blogs and social media marketing are more cost-effective for lead generation than outbound marketing tactics such as advertising in broadcast media.