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With the holidays upon us, we are all getting busier and busier. The community is still growing and we are all still yapping away! Here are some of the more recent to highlights:

• How to get stumbled? - Ian from TVs Words Adverts asked how to get your blog and your articles stumbled! The consensus was to be active in the SU community and make it easy for people to stumble your articles! What have you done to help get stumbles?
• How to NOT depend on google for traffic - Fred Sandford from Sportaphile started a great discussion on other ways to get traffic your blog and not relying on google. What do you do to bring you extra traffic?
• Gaining more readers - New TBE member, MissChuck0526 has a MySpace blog and posed the question about gaining more readers. This is a challenge as her blog is very MySpaceish. What advice would YOU give MissChuck?

Our little community continues to grow each and every day. At the time of this writing we have 376 members and we are 4 months old now! There are some good things on the horizon here and I’m excited to be a part of it all!

If you haven’t joined yet, you should do so now! Registration is free!

It seems everyone in the blogosphere was talking about the big “G” last week, to include our members here. I’ve highlighted a couple of the discussion threads:

• Google PR Updated Possibly - JohnC first noticed a few changes on Monday. Several people commented how they had seen some sites with reduced PR but no one else had seen the increase…yet.
• Google declaring war on blog networks - On Wednesday we started discussing how many sites that belong to blog networks were being penalized.
• Google definitely messing with PR - On Thursday, DeronSizemore noticed some changes on one of his sites that was in development.
• Its finally happened, Oh long last PR - Yesterday KingJacob brought to all of our attention, the climax we had been waiting for. The PR was in fact happening.

I made a comment in one of the posts that Google is like Lucy from Peanuts, always pulling away the football from Charlie Brown (the webmasters and bloggers). At times it seems like Google rules us and that definitely shouldn’t be the case. Google just has such a large percentage of the SE traffic that it would be stupid to ignore it. At least we have some kind of resolution to the mystery, “will there ever be an update.”

What else is new around here? Well, we saw a lot of activity this past week here in the community. This week we had 30 new registrations and we reached 10,000 posts! I guess you could say we’ve had a lot to talk about! In addition to all of the activity in the blog forum, we’ve released some great and free WordPress themes for our members.

This week should be good for bloggers. Halloween gives you a chance to have a little fun with your blog and November 1 marks the start of NaBloPoMo or National Blog Posting Month. I’ll leave you with a couple of questions:

1. Were you affected by the latest PR update?
2. Are you brave enough to sign up for NaBloPoMo? (I’m not!}

While I’ve been busy trying to get our WordPress theme gallery ready, our members have been busy chatting up a storm as usual. Here are some of the latest highlights:

• Who clicks on URLs in comments? - Shyflower asked a great question about who clicks on commenters links from blogs that aren’t your own! When I see a good comment on someone else’s blog, I do check it out and I hope when I leave thoughtful comments, that people besides the site owner will check mine out. What do you do?
• How do you beef up short posts? - I was curious what were some ways to beef up short posts; I know I use images if I can. The conversation eventually led to, “Should you beef up short posts” which is definitely an interesting question. What are your thoughts?
• What do you do when you can’t see the text? - tater03 asked us what would we do if we were reading a blog and the text was just so hard to read because of the colors the blog uses. It’s kind of like asking what do you do when you see someone with their zipper down or toilet paper sticking on their show. We should all help them out and send them an email as they may not know!

There are a couple of things right around the corner. Is anyone doing anything for Halloween? Also, Jess pointed out that in November is NaBloPoMo. If you don’t know (and I didn’t), in order to participate, you need to commit to blogging every day of the month of November. That’s a pretty big commitment! Are you up for it?

Thanks to all of the members who make this a great place to come every day (multiple times). You rock!

I got back from the states this past week and it’s great to be back! We’ve added 24 new members to our community. Check out what you’ve been missing and then stop by and join!

• Who uses w3counter? - Deron Sizemore mentioned he wanted to use the web stats software, w3counter, and people chimed in on their experiences with that as ewll as with other programs.
• What is the best way to find link backs? - Goldfries asked what the best way to find out your backlinks. Between Technorati, Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Publishers, etc., there was a pretty good list compiled of places to check for backlinks. Where do you find yours?
• Paid links and no follow - SarahG started a discussion about the big G’s official policy about penalizing sites who sell links without using nofollow. This affects so many bloggers, to include member’s of our communities. Weigh in with your opinion.
• Have you turned any friends or family on to blogging? - I was curious to find out if anyone’s family or friends started blogging because they were a blogger. I’ve had a couple of friends turn to the dark side, how about you?

Thanks to all of the members who make this a great place to come every day (multiple times). You rock!

The past couple weeks I’ve been doing a lot of traveling but that hasn’t slowed down the great conversations happening in the community. Check out what you’ve been missing and then stop by and join!

• Do .edu back links have more weight?? - Deron Sizemore started a discussion on the weight of .edu backlinks vs. other extensions.
• Paid posts on blogs - Deron also asked the group what our thoughts are on seeing paid posts in our favorite blogs. There was a good mix of responses.
• Commenting to get your site off the ground - Bunk started a discussion about commenting and how it’s a great way to help get your blog off the ground.
• Does Alexa rank really tell you how popular your site it? - Warrior Blog was curious to know if Alexa could really be used as an accurate gauge!

We’ve had over 30 new members in the past two weeks yet it is still a pretty close-knit group. There is plenty more to come here so stay tuned!

This week’s wrap-up is a little delayed, but with good reason! The community here is growing at a rapid rate with 28 new members in the last 28 days! What are you waiting for, join now!

• What makes a blog, a blog? - Goldfries, who has a tech blog, asked everyone what makes a blog a blog. There were some interesting ideas thrown out there, but there wasn’t a consensus. What do you think makes a blog a blog?
• Dealing with non-native language comments - Mark from Search-This.com asked how people deal with comments left in another language than their own. How do you deal with these?
• How frequent should I post? - New member Sagewing, who has a web business blog, is new to blogging and is curious about how frequent to post. Do you have any advice to share?

Time for the Weekly Wrap Up here at TBE. In the past two weeks we have added 25 new members to our community and a couple daysago we hit 6000 posts; not too shabby for a community that is less than 2 months old! We are growing fast and have a ton to say! Make sure you join the free community if you haven’t done so yet. Here is a sample of some of the great discussions going on:

• Does anyone have private sponsors? - TBE member, tetsujin asked who has private sponsors which led people to talk about how you get private sponsors. This is a topic I think a lot of people are interested in and I would love to hear your thoughts!
• Do you ever get lucky? - Michael Martin from Pro Blog Design asks if anyone has experienced a sudden influx in traffic and if so, where was it from. There were some interesting responses to this question.
• What is your worst blogging fault? - It is very important to know your weaknesses and Kirk M from Just Thinkin’ posed that question to all of us here. Have YOU thought about what your worst fault is related to blogging? We all owned up to it, now it’s your turn!

Thanks to all of the community members here at TBE. It has been an awesome time getting to know you all and I look forward to the future of our community!

We are going on our 6th week here and things are growing fast. The Blog Experiment has had 158 registrations and the forum has over 5000 posts! That is pretty cool if you ask me. The members here are really great and I’m excited to see the community continue to grow. Here are some of the conversations we’ve been having:

• Do you blog angry? - That is a question that a new member, Kirk M, asked us. We got a good mix of responses from people who do and those who don’t blog when they are angry. Do you?
• Unrelated Comments -jlee brought up a good topic about what to do with unrelated comments. Stop in and tell us what YOU do!
• Reasons for blogging -Boris, who writes about the french expat life wanted to know what the groups reasons for blogging are. Come tell us why YOU blog!

As always, I want to invite you to join the free community!

It’s been a great week again in our Blog Forum! We’ve had 799 posts this week and have had 15 new members join! If you haven’t joined yet, registering is easy!

• Are there benefits to using a hosted solution? - armchaircritic is wondering if there are any benefits to using a hosted solution vs. a self-hosted. He has a friend who switched from blogger to his own install of Wordpress lost a lot of traffic. I think that is possibly due to a lack of redirect. What do you think?
• Turn Lurkers to Commenters -Golgotha tells us that his blog gets about 2k visits a day but only 2-5 comments. Do you have any recommendations on how he can improve this?
• SEO your Blog -Shyflower shares a plugin she uses to improve the SEO of her blog. What do you use on yours?
• Guest Bloggers -fatnewt recently made a guest blog post and ask others what benefits they have received from their experience. I know personally I have received an increase in traffic. What about you?

Well, another week has passed (man the time is flying by!) and we’ve had so many great conversations going on in our Blog Forums!

If you haven’t registered yet, now is the time! Membership is free and the benefits are great! Register now!

Let’s get down to business! Here are some of the highlighted sections that came up this past week:

• Who Sees Your Ads? - Dan Schulz pointed out a really neat looking plugin that lets you decide who you show your ads to! This looks really cool to me. If you have a user who has visited your site more than 10 times, you can set it so they don’t see your ads, for example. I have not tried this yet myself but I may do so on one of my blogs. Does anyone have any experience with this?
• Do you submit your site to StumbleUpon, etc? - deronsizemore from Random Jabber brought up a great question about submitting your own sites to social networking and news article sites. What do you do?
• Default Dealing with social/bookmark/tagging intensity - fatnewt from XBOX Living also has these social media sites on his mind. He poses a great question about which icons to display in your blog posts; yes you can have too many chiclets!
• Why do I need feedburner if I have the Wordpress Feed - doorlight asked why she would need feedburner’s feed if Wordpress comes with a default feed. This prompted some great discussion on the benefits of using Feedburner over your standard built-in feed.

The community is really growing and once again proving they have plenty to say. Can’t wait to see what happens this week!