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(All book recommendations I do are written by me and all authors are unaware that I am recommending their books. I am not paid in any form.)

Twitter is hard. I can admit that.

Twitter has its own set of rules and lingo. Every single person that has stepped foot into Twitter thinking “Hey, it’s social media just like Facebook!” has had to reel back in horror from the thousands of short sentences being randomly flung every direction. And this is just after one minute.

The truth is there is a method to the madness. This giant jumble of tweets that seems to be bouncing off the walls like atoms are actually all part of a giant system. Mark W. Schaefer’s “The Tao of Twitter” aims to not only teach you how to understand Twitter and it’s complexity…

It wants to teach you how to harness it to…

This past weekend some friends and I were discussing how some people use images from Pinterest, Facebook and Google Images.  I shared a copyright infringement story with them, and told how shocked I have been recently to find so many of my images ‘shared’ on Pinterest.  But I should be honored, right? Flattered that an award-winning photograph had been ‘pinned’ without my permission and uploaded, and basically been given to the world wide web to be used however they’d like!  I think that that person who pinned the above image agreed before adding the image that they owned or had permission to share it.

This past week WordPress put their spotlight on reblogging and also on Using Other People’s Images.   Both posts received a lot of interesting feedback, including a link to  DON’T STEAL MY STUFF, DUDE  – Laura at ‘Lolabees’ states her clear case and…

Your blog is the space where you show the world the things that make you tick. You put together stories and images that entertain and enlighten, and invite your visitors in. It’s your own carefully designed museum-living room-coffeeshop packed into a screen.

Some rooms feel a bit cozier, though, with a choice item from the flea market or the antique store. Likewise, your blog can come to life with some well-chosen materials you’ve collected on WordPress.com (and the web in general). Many bloggers are already curating thoughtful content on topics as diverse as design and science — here are some ideas on how best to find and present others’ materials on your blog.

Digging for content

The WordPress.com community creates, collectively, over a million posts every single day, generating an endless wealth of information and opinion. This shouldn’t deter you from looking for content to enhance your blog. On the contrary, you…

Widgets, the handy features built right into your WordPress.com dashboard, allow you to add cool features to your site so you can make it your online home. Have you poked around in Appearance → Widgets, recently? We want to make sure you know how quick and simple it is to activate — and customize — widgets. If you haven’t enabled them already, try these:

Chances are that if you’re running a public facing blog, you’re probably happiest when someone actually reads it. Preferably lots of someones. Your blog’s stats can give you some great ways to get to know a little bit more about your readers, and what it is about your work that most attracts them.

While the more liberal artsy types among us might shoo off the idea of obsessively stat trawling as something for the more scientifically inclined, there’s actually something for everyone lurking just beneath the surface, whether that’s inspiration or cold, hard logic. If you want people to read your blog, making use of your stats can give you an arsenal of information to help make that happen. In our Stats Wrangling series, we’ll be digging in to how to get to grips with your blog stats, one module at a time. But in today’s post, we’ll start with…