Since today is sort of a slow news day, being Friday and everything, I thought that I would mention 10 or more items that are useful tips for bloggers and marketers alike.

Legit News Photos for Free. Om Malik has the scoop on PicApp, where you can get legit news photos for free. It’s an interesting service, but I actually prefer to use something like the Voxant, a service that actually pays you for views of the latest news. I like free stuff, who doesn’t, right? Well, it’s even better if they pay you. Here’s sample content from today from Voxant, about the Republicans who have been instructed to blog, blog, blog:

In an interesting post, Louis Gray says that “The new company profiles on LinkedIn are a gold mine for reporters who want to get data beyond what the PR guys may want to dish out.”.

Henry Blodget asks if Facebook is hot today and going to be dead tomorrow, like AOL. I guess Henry forgot about the post that I wrote a while back, saying that AOL is really going to be TMZ, which is hot now.

There is not much time left to sign up for evernote for free. downloadsquad has all the scoop about it.

TechCrunch talked about how mytopia, the new casual gaming network works with all sorts of other stuff. Monday it will release the same games across the major Web and desktop widgets: iGoogle Gadgets, Apple Dashboard Widgets, Yahoo Widgets and Windows Vista Toolbar Widgets, says TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld.

According to Cnet, Google wants to fill in the TV white spaces. Google is “planning a conference call with journalists on Monday to discuss a company filing with the FCC regarding the use of unused portions of the TV spectrum band, known as white spaces.”

OK, well, that’s not quite the number of updates that I thought I would make today, but five is quite enough. So, to fill up some additional space on this post (bold, right?) let’s again see what Voxant has to offer today:

Eric Lander has a great blog post about Sphinn. If you have not heard of Sphinn.com, Sphinn is a “News, Discussion Forums & Networking for Search & Internet Marketing Professionals” site. It’s Danny Sullivan’s social networking site for internet marketing professionals.

Since Eric has written a great post and has pointed to my activity on Sphinn, I thought that I would respond to his blog post and make some observations about Eric’s post, about Sphinn, and, more importantly, point out that the typical search engine marketer does not understand social networking.

Eric points to some interesting statistics. I agree that these statistics are a few weeks old. Nevertheless, they definitely get the point across. Let’s look at the statistics of Sphinn that Eric has collected:

Registered Users: 12,410
Users with 5+ Submissions: 750
Users with 2+ Comments: ~1,300
Users with 1+ Sphinn: 6,259

To be honest with you, Eric, I have to say that I’m not surprised at all with the numbers. Really. You have to understand that the majority of the people who are members of Sphinn are internet marketers, SEOs, Online Marketers, or whatever you want to call them. What they are not is social networkers. Yes, you heard me correctly, the majority of Sphinners (Sphinn members) are not social networkers. Frankly, I would say that the majority of the users on Sphinn “don’t get it”. They do not understand that to build your own personal social network you have to add friends. You have to submit stuff. You have to comment. You have to be active. Yes, you have to vote on stuff.

Unless I’m entirely off base here, and I know I could be – I believe that five submissions would classify a casual user of the network, not a leader.

No, Eric, you’re absolutely not off-base here. You are correct. I would actually say that those Sphinn users who have only submitted 5 things are not even casual users. They are probably search engine marketers who have just “jumped on the bandwagon” and become a member of Sphinn because others in their industry are members there. I would not even all those people casual users, they’re just registered users. That’s it.

Bill Hartzer, The Sphinnmaster
Bill Hartzer (bhartzer) has cast 10,427 Sphinns. The next active user, Maki (DoshDosh) has 5,108 Sphinns. That’s 48.9% of the actvity of Bill. In other words, Bill’s out there giving our Sphinns like candy on Halloween. Stopping short of accusing Bill of just sphinning everything he sees, I’ll say this… Bill has 1 comment for every 100 sphinns cast. Continuing the comparison, DoshDosh has nearly 5 comments per 100 sphinns cast. aimclear, Sphinn’s third most active user produces nearly 12 commens per 100 sphinns.

I’m sorry Bill, I just don’t see how you can vote for that many items without providing more commentary. I’m certainly open to your response though. Am I just assuming too much on the numbers?

Thanks for bringing this up. Yes, really. I’m very glad that you have pointed out that I am active. Obviously very active. Take a look at how many friends I have on Sphinn. I have to admit that I visit every single day (sometimes more than once a day) and look at the Sphinn home page. And yes, I don’t have any problem with Sphinning (or voting) on everything on the home page. I actually use the Sphinn home page as one of my personal news sources. It’s a great way to keep up with what’s really going on in the industry.

Let’s take a look at another reason why I am so active on Sphinn. I love being active. In fact, voting is a part of being active in the social networking communities. Part of being active means that you vote on your friends’ stuff. And oh yeah, have you seen the “who Sphunn this” link on the Sphinn pages?

Wow, that’s a link back to your profile. In fact, those are links back to your profile. I guess you could actually say that there are probably 10,427 links back to my profile page on Sphinn.

Regarding the comments? Well, let me just say that you probably have never met me in person. I do admit, though, that I really need to start commenting more. Could you consider this blog post one large comment. Perhaps. Take a look, though at how many others are commenting. Some are just more talkative than others.

Is there enough data?

Sphinn is a new social networking community. There is enough data to make some pretty broad assumptions here. In fact, although Sphinn’s goal is to be a social networking community for search marketers and SEM topics, you have to realize what they community is made up of. A social network is only as good as its user base. Sphinn is made up search engine marketers. Search engine marketers are search engine marketers, They know PPC, they know SEO, they know how to get links to sites. Search engine marketers, the majority of Sphinn users, are not social networking experts. The typical search engine marketer does not understand social media. And the numbers really show it. The majority of Sphinn users are not active. Friends’ stats are not available, but I would imagine that most Sphinn users have not added a lot of friends to their network.

Is there enough data? Yes. Is Sphinn the typical social networking community? Absolutely not. It’s a great community of search engine marketers. The typical Internet Marketer does not understand social networking. And that is not a bad thing.

For many years now, I have always been a fan of creating custom, unique 404 error pages. I have also, at the same time, been rather annoyed that a site as large as Digg can consistently serve up an error page like the one below.

Not only have I been rather annoyed from time to time to get that error page, apparently many others have been seeing it today. It might have to do with some sort of upgrade they are doing, but that is only speculation on my part. In fact, I would only hope that Digg is doing some sort of upgrade because their rather slow page load times have been going on for a long time now. And it’s those slow page load times that have caused me to go on over to sites like Mixx and a few other social networks.

Anyhow, enough about Digg. I thought that I would post today about something that has helped me be rather successful in the social media space; paying attention to your social media profiles.

My Social Media Tip for Today
If there is one thing that I love is social media and the way I can share my favorite resources, stories, news, URLs, and other things that have found online. If you are into the same sort of stuff that I am into, then it would pay to follow my RSS feed or, better yet, follow my social media RSS feeds. I recently posted on our company blog about why it makes perfect sense to pay attention to your social media feeds.

One thing that I didn’t really go into a lot on that blog post is the fact that you can aggregate several social media RSS feeds and combine them appropriately and create additional content. If you have a blog or a personal website you might consider including some of your own social media RSS feeds as a part of the content in your own site.

There are also other sites like FriendFeed (mentioned in my blog post) that will allow you to bring RSS feeds into them and create new content. I would certainly take advantage of this whenever you can, as the whole point of social bookmarking is to get additional traffic, visitors, and links to the URLs that you are sharing, right?