A cou­ple of new things to tell you about today.

First off, I’m try­ing a new exper­i­ment. I’ve decided to close and remove com­ments on this blog. Just to see what hap­pens. Why? Here’s the thing…

When I post a new blog post, it will be cross­posted to a few social net­works. Some, by design with the help of a few tools and plu­g­ins. Oth­ers, by sub­scribers and read­ers who retweet, reblog, or track­back to my posts.

What I’ve noticed is, on these social net­works — Twit­ter, Face­book, Friend­Feed, Digg, and now with the new Google Buzz — my posts seem to incite dis­cus­sions on these loca­tions. Dis­cus­sions I love to par­tic­i­pate in, too, when I have a chance.

I want to har­ness that social media power and divest myself of the con­stant mod­er­a­tion of this blog. I feel that, since there are so many dis­cus­sions tak­ing place else­where, why not take advan­tage of social media and bring the dis­cus­sions to the pub­lic instead?

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I often get requests from peo­ple ask­ing me what plu­g­ins do I use on this blog. Or, what are my favorite plu­g­ins. Some­times, I post about them. But these lists usu­ally become stale fast, because I test new plu­g­ins and change them all the time.

So I wanted to post an update and list some of my favorite plu­g­ins. How­ever, it was cum­ber­some to pick and choose which ones I wanted to post about because there are so many. So I’ve decided to do some­thing dif­fer­ent this year.

Using a plu­gin that lists all the plu­g­ins in use on a par­tic­u­lar blog (I’ll share that one with you in a moment), I man­aged to print a list of all my plu­g­ins in a sin­gle post.

How­ever, the descrip­tions you will read are those of the plu­gin authors. Some of them are poor and insuf­fi­cient. Oth­ers don’t explain how I use them specif­i­cally on this blog.

So I’ve also added a mini-​​description with addi­tional com­ments to each plu­gin to explain why, how, or where I’ve used it on this blog. I sin­cerely hope this list is use­ful to you. If it is, con­sider it a Christ­mas gift from me.

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Thanks for being patient with me. I haven’t posted in a while because of some­thing that hap­pened last week.

You see, my blog was hacked (not by a per­son but with mali­cious code that creeped into my blog), and as a result I was blocked by Google. I’m sure you’ve heard about it, as peo­ple talked about the news.

How did it get blocked?

When­ever my site(s) came up in Google, there was a “this site may harm your com­puter” warn­ing. And when peo­ple clicked on my link, it lead them to a Google error page pre­vent­ing peo­ple from access­ing my site.

Appar­ently, Google checks its indexed pages against a data­base of “known offend­ers” (at Stop​Bad​ware​.org, which is sim­i­lar to many IP black­lists for spam), and turned all my list­ings on Google to unreachable.

So my site wasn’t banned. But the worse part was, Google not only blocked my site but also dis­played a dire warn­ing that my site was mali­cious! (You can only imag­ine what kind of dam­age this can cause to someone’s reputation.)

But that’s not all…

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Part of my job as a copy­writer includes, from time to time, cre­at­ing names for busi­nesses, prod­ucts, and ser­vices. Choos­ing a name may be the sin­gle, most impor­tant busi­ness deci­sion you will ever make.

We are con­stantly bom­barded with mar­ket­ing mes­sages. Lim­ited by people’s very short atten­tion span, your mar­ket­ing mes­sage has to be effec­tive to the degree that it must com­mu­ni­cate its essence and cre­ate top-​​of-​​mind aware­ness within an extremely short amount of time.

Names are often the best tools — and some­times the only ones — for accom­plish­ing this efficiently.

In the game of posi­tion­ing, your name has to stick firmly in the mind of the mar­ket­place and must do so instantly. While unique­ness is an impor­tant fac­tor, there are many other ele­ments that can help the anchor­ing process — ele­ments that help a name become mem­o­rable as well as cho­sen when a cus­tomer expe­ri­ences a spe­cific need or desire.

So, here are some sim­ple rules to fol­low when choos­ing a name for your com­pany or product.

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Long before I wrote my “Death of the Saleslet­ter” report, my friend Jim Edwards has pio­neered the use of audio and video to sell online.

He is not only the expert in mini-​​sites (salesletter-​​driven web­sites), but also the pub­lisher of Inter­net marketing’s first mul­ti­me­dia newslet­ter using audio and video, enti­tled “I Gotta Tell Ya!”

(And this was before YouTube or Google Video even existed.)

He may be laid-​​back, brash, and opin­ion­ated. But like him or not, his advice has made count­less mil­lion­aires. And now he is giv­ing my mem­bers, sub­scribers and clients an oppor­tu­nity to learn some of his advanced tech­niques using another one of many strengths: the online “webinar.”

And it’s absolutely free!

This is a chance for you to learn from both of us, as we use the Inter­net to show you, live and in real-​​time, some the hottest trends online right now. (And all you need is an Inter­net connection!)

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Nowa­days, it’s no longer a choice between the A and B piles. It’s no longer a choice between hun­dreds of sta­tions or chan­nels. It’s a choice between mil­lions if not bil­lions of options called “websites.”

But there’s some­thing else.

The Inter­net has mul­ti­plied not only the num­ber of options but also the num­ber of choices, too! (If you want a hint, think of those choices as “applications.”)

From mil­lions of web pages (as opposed to just hun­dreds of direct mail pieces, TV chan­nels or radio sta­tions), to var­i­ous deliv­ery meth­ods for each one (e.g., text, audio and video), to addi­tional appli­ca­tions that equally demand atten­tion (on the web as well as on a com­puter desk­top), a user’s choices have there­fore become expo­nen­tially more complex.

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The “Google Slap.” You’ve heard of it. You were prob­a­bly affected by it. Essen­tially, Google, the world’s largest search engine, recently penal­ized a whole bunch of sites because they, too, judged them to be of poor quality.

Either they dimin­ished their pager­anks into obliv­ion, or they increased their AdWords costs by jack­ing up the prices if the cam­paigns led to poor con­tent. (And as you prob­a­bly know, this has dri­ven a lot of mar­keters out of business.)

But keep in mind, Google didn’t make this change by pulling it out of thin air or to dic­ta­to­ri­ally decide what’s good for the Inter­net. They’re sim­ply fol­low­ing what peo­ple want and giv­ing it to them.

(In fact, when Google makes such major changes, let it be a good indi­ca­tor of what’s going on in the marketplace.)

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