I’m always looking for new ways to entice readers to subscribe to my blogs’ feeds, add my blogs to their Technorati Favorites, sign up to get my feed by email, and add my posts to social bookmarking sites. Feedburner has the links for the feeds, Wordpress has a plugin for the social bookmarking, but there are lots of people posting graphics in the “Web 2.0″ style that are really eye-catching.

But what I’m wondering is, do readers really use bookmarking icons? For example, at the end of this post you’ll see the graphic that says “Bookmark” with icons that link to Digg, Delicious, Stumble, and more. But do readers actually use them? Or do readers who regularly submit posts to Digg or Delicious or who often Stumble posts have their own methods for doing that? I know that personally, I use the Stumble toolbar to Stumble posts, and to be honest, I never use Digg unless someone I know emails me and asks me to Digg something for them.

And yet, I have the bookmarking plugin on all my blogs. I think at the least, the icons will remind people that hey, I want to Stumble this post or add it to Digg or whatever. Then they can use their own methods to do so. On my other blogs I get a ton of traffic from Stumble, so I plan to keep the icons on my blogs for now. What about you?

“Citizen journalism”-have you heard that term before? If not, one of the best examples I can give you is NowPublic, a participatory news network based in Vancouver. NowPublic has thousands of reporters operating in 140 countries, ready to report on breaking news stories. For example, during Hurricane Katrina, NowPublic reports that they had more reporters in the affected area than “most news organizations have on their entire staff”.

The tagline for the site is “Crowd Powered Media”, which means anyone can contribute a story to the site. You create an account, submit your story, upload photos, video, or audio, using easy links on the site. If you use the photo sharing site Flickr, you might find one of your public photos in a story, which is how I found out about the site. A photo I took of Kaitlyn standing on our sidewalk with her wagon was grabbed for a story, and I got an email from the reporter asking me to approve or deny the use of the photo. All my Flickr photos are public so I approved it.

And now I’ve just had two more photos used in a story, photos I took just of a plate of tomato slices and a plate of lettuce leaves were grabbed to illustrate a story about how a new research study on how consuming fruits and vegetables may protect against lung cancer. By checking a box under the post, I made sure that my photos are credited to me and give a link to my Flickr page.

I’m just fascinated by this concept of participatory news, that I could be somewhere and see something news-worthy, take a photo or video of it, and have it appear on a news site. What do you think?

My cell phone is driving me crazy. It’s only a little over a year old, but the reception is awful. I was at Best Buy the other day looking for a new one, but there are so many choices and they all look good! How do I know if I’d rather have a Samsung or a Motorola or an LG? Today I poked around iMobileplaza.com to see what some of the differences are between different phone.

As cool as it would be to have a smart phone like a Blackberry or an iPhone, I’m not sure I would use it enough to justify the extra monthly expense for the data plan. And then there’s that whole cost of several hundred dollars thing-on iMobileplaza.com, an 8 GB iPhone is $439.00. Ouch.

All I really need is a phone with clear reception, a good address book, decent texting, and a camera that takes photos that are recognizable in case I am out and really want to take a photo of something. Even though I’ll eventually buy a new phone at a store like Best Buy, I do like to do some comparisons on a phone site like iMobileplaza.com.

I believe it was last year that they claimed to have started a mail delivery service where they would print out your emails and then deliver them to you by snail mail-ha! This year, they have announced a new email service, “Custom Time”. I know it’s a joke, but it’s darn funny.

The idea behind “Custom Time” is that you can change the time on any email you send. Missed Grandma’s birthday? Roll back the time on the email so she thinks it arrived on time! It works by using an “e-flux capacitor”, obviously allowing for the Marty McFly principle to take effect-LMAO! And the best part? You only get to change the time on ten emails, because:

Our researchers have concluded that allowing each person more than ten pre-dated emails per year would cause people to lose faith in the accuracy of time, thus rendering the feature useless.”

Bwahahahaha!! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go over to the IZEA blog and read all about how “Sun microsystems wants to buy Social Spark”. April Fool’s Day is much more fun online, isn’t it?

Nominations are open at Webware for the top 100 Web 2.0 apps in ten different categories. From all the nominations, the top 300 were chosen. You can vote for up to three nominees in each category. The categories are:

o Audio: Music, podcasts, audiobooks.
o Browsing: Browsers, start pages, RSS readers, widgets, runtime engines.
o Commerce and events: Retail, auctions, travel, real estate, concerts, conferences.
o Communications: E-mail, chat, voice.
o Productivity: App suites, to-do lists, groupware.
o Publishing and photography: Blogging, content management, photo sites.
o Search and Reference: Search engines, encyclopedias, mapping.
o Social: Social networking, family sites, recommendations, online worlds, contests.
o Utility and Security: Infrastructure providers, storage, online protection.
o Video: Video storage, playback, streaming, editing, and animation.

Voting ends March 31st, and the winners will be announced April 21st. So get on over there and vote!