Top row: Spot the guy who traded the giant red paperclip for a house?

That’s me in the top row, 2nd from the right.
In Tino’s own words:

There are dozens of social networks that bring the blogosphere together, with Technorati and MyBlogLog being two of the biggest. I wanted to bring a whole bunch of bloggers together on one page. 2000 bloggers to be exact!

Lots of familiar faces among the 300 listed there.

Top row: 4th from the left, Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney) holding his $132,997.94 check from Google

Bottom row: 3rd from the left, Kris Jones (Pepperjam), Jim Kukral (Blogkits) is right next to him

Also spotted in the mass of bloggers are:

• Robert Scoble
• Matt Cutts
• ProBlogger Darren Rowse
• Todd Malicoat
• John Chow
• Chris Sandberg
• My buddy and forum specialist Ryan Chua
• Japanese “Cash Quest” babe Kumiko Suzuki

and a host of others.
—

One thing I’ve noticed is that there’re quite a number of blogs hosted at WordPress.com and Blogspot.

If you’re a recreational blogger, I believe it’s ok to host it at a free site.

However, if you see yourself as a serious blogger/SEM/SEO, and you are building a brand and PageRank and backlinks to your blog, would you really want to host it at a free blogging service?

Granted, it’s free.

But if web hosting costs you $100 a year. Don’t you think your branding is worth at least 10 times that?

You could potentially (and I know of cases) of bloggers losing their free domains because of a violation of the terms of service (whether deliberate or inadvertedly), a perceived ‘excessive’ attempt at monetizing their blog, ‘excessive’ traffic coming to their blog.

I’d suggest two steps to “professionalize” your blogging efforts:

• Get a domain name. NameCheap.com is my preferred domain registrar.
• Get low cost, reliable host. I especially like BlueHost.
• Go with a hosted WordPress blog. BlueHost provides a one-click idiot-proof install of WordPress through it’s comprehensive control panel.

It’ll enhance your blog longevity.

For more information on Tino’s project, visit:

–> 2000 Bloggers