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I’m continuing to tinker with the Christian Web Trends blog in an attempt to build a stronger, more interactive community and facilitate better discussion on ministry/technology issues.  A couple of weeks ago I wrote about 7 Steps Towards a More Interactive Blog, which I took with CWT and recommend to you if you blog.

Here are 4 more interactive blogging tips - things I’ve added to enhance your experience on this blog and would encourage you to add to your own blog.
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In the course of making continued improvements to the Christian Web Trends blog I came across 2 startling statistics this week: CTW has 17,000 email subscribers but only 50 RSS subscribers. I was shocked!

So, I hope the title of this article gets your attention long enough for me to convince you that you could save lots of time and become better informed with the help of a simple RSS feed reader. If you are still fuzzy on what RSS is and how it can benefit you, I’ve included a great little video that will help to clear that up.

You would like to save time and be better informed wouldn’t you???
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One of the things I enjoy most about writing for the Christian Web Trends blog is the interaction with other people.  I appreciate the comments you post because of the insight it gives into other perspectives.  I enjoy reading the blogs of those of you who have posted links to CWT.  I’m especially grateful for the opportunities I’ve had to get to know some of you a little better via email, forums, etc.

The goal of Christian Web Trends has never been to be a lone fountain of knowledge or wisdom (which would be futile for me anyway), but rather to spark conversations so that we can all learn from each other.

With that in mind, I recently set out to upgrade the CWT blog to make it more interactive.  I hope these additions will help you become more involved in these conversations.  If you blog, these are features I strongly recommend you add to your blog.
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Blogs4God and GospelShout both recently launched interactive Christian news websites where the articles and placement of those articles are determined by their users, like they are on the popular news site Digg.

Digg is one of the hottest and fastest growing news websites online.  Unlike traditional news websites like cnn.com or msnbc.com, on Digg stories are submitted by users and their placement on the page is determined by the voting of the Digg community of users.  It’s a truly democratic, Web 2.0 approach to news.

Digg originally launched as a tech-only news site.  While it has added categories for world, business, sports, and entertainment, it is still dominated by technology stories because its user-base is primarily young men with a strong interst in technology.  So, as Digg has grown so have calls for similar less tech-centric news websites and similar sites that focus on other niches of news.

Last year Pligg was released.  Pligg is open-source (free) software that allows people to quickly and easily create their own Digg-like site.  Since its release there has been an explosion of Digg clones, including at least these two that focus on Christian articles.
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Good afternoon and happy Friday to you all.  Last month in our blog survey we asked if you would be interested in reading about related articles found on other blogs.  A significant percentage of those of you who responded expressed an interest in that, so we’re going to experiment for a while with a Friday afternoon blog article featuring some of the articles from the week which I thought were interesting.  Some of the articles are a little off-topic, but it’s Friday, and we have to have a little fun.
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We’re wrapping up blogs month at OurChurch.Com, so what better way to end it than with a list of blogging tips.  Sure, there are lots of blogging tips articles out there already.  I even found an entire series of 30 articles each on a different tip for bloggers.  What I want to do, though, is boil it down to the best, most important, absolutely essential blogging tips.  So, here are my top 12. 
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Today marks Christian Web Trends’ first birthday.  To celebrate we would like to thank the people who have contributed to the success of this blog, take a look back at some of the highlights of the first year, and a look at what lies ahead.
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Comment spam is a huge problem for blogs.  Spammers use programs to automatically post thousands of bogus comments to blog articles with links to their websites in them.  Because search engines consider a link to a site to be a vote of confidence for that site, spammers spam blogs in the hopes that the links they post will boost their Viagra-hocking site (or whatever) to the top of the search results.

The NoFollow link attribute was developed to combat blog comment spam by telling search engines not to follow the link or count it in their ranking algorithm.  The theory was that if spammers are not getting any benefit from the links the post, they would stop spamming.

Unfortunately, the theory is flat out wrong and the NoFollow attribute has been a total failure. Why is that?  And what has Christian Web Trends done about it?
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As you probably know by now, February is Blogs Month at OurChurch.Com.  We’re pulling out all the stops to help people develop, improve, and promote blogs.  So, today we’re doing something very simple to advance that goal, a blog roll call.  If you publish a blog, post a comment with the name of your blog, a brief one-sentence description, and the URL.  It’s an opportunity for you to help get the word out about your blog to our 16,000+ readers.

Even if you don’t publish a blog, it’s a great opportunity to see what your fellow CWT readers are writing about.
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A blog can be a great way to help people by sharing information, insight, and inspiration with others who share your interests.  A blog is also one of the best ways to attract new visitors and links to your website.  But blogging is not for everyone.   In this article…

- Find out if blogging is a good fit for you
- What you need to know before starting a blog
- The biggest blogging decision you’ll ever make
- Tips for making a blog great (more…)