In case you hadn’t noticed, most mainstream websites and blogs are making full use of social bookmark buttons on their sites (the image on the right comes from CNN). While social buttons are not a guarantee to hit the front page of Digg they do offer some help to chose wanting to share your articles.

This makes it possible to bookmark your articles directly from your site.

If you are not using social buttons on your site yet I suggest that you give it a try. There is a site called iFeedReader that automatically generates the buttons. All that is required is to select the bookmark services that you want to include, provide details about your blogging platform and the site will generate a code that you can copy and paste right to your blog.

You’ll want to avoid including all the available social bookmarks, because well, that would just seem spammy.

I’d recommend you select 2 or 3 of them and place them in such a way that won’t disturb readers that are not concerned with social bookmarking.

Another option would be to use TweetIt Wordpress Plugin. That’s what I use here and while the author of the plugin is no longer providing updates – the service seems to work well for now.

When it comes to blogging platforms, perhaps I’m a bit biased, but I think the top two are Blogger and Wordpress.

I’ve been asked several times which platform I prefer and further, I’m asked for all the why’s and why not’s of each. I realized I was missing a large opportunity to share this information and encourage other people to share their views and preferences as well.

When it comes to comparing BLOGGER and WORDPRESS and the reason I choose to use both platforms, I have to admit affordability is the driving factor of why I still have some blogs on Blogger.

I can’t exactly justify moving a Blogger blog to a hosted domain when I don’t feel it would be able to support itself. I’m not trying to be greedy by any means, but I would at least like for a blog to be able to pay for it’s own existence.

There are some topics I blog just for the sake of blogging. I like it that way.

Free blog platforms are a great way to test the waters. By testing the waters with Blogger, I learned the topics I was most passionate about and which would most likely sustain longevity.

Most people who explore becoming a blogger will realize within 6 months if they have what it takes to keep a blog going or whether they should explore another topic or throw in the towel altogether.

I’ve also felt at times that Blogger blogs carry a sort of stigma. Sure there are some that have made it to the big time by way of Blogger, but for a Blogger blog to really hit it big, I think it’s rare.

For the sake of discussion, I’d like to focus on Blogger and Wordpress.

Story Problem:

A friend comes to you and wants to start blogging. They have their topic, title and name picked out. They’re ready to start but need to choose a platform – What do you tell them and why?

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. Akismet is included with your Wordpress installation. I use Askismet on all my blogs. Download

Amazon Product in a Post - Amazon Product In a Post Plugin is used to to quickly add a formatted Amazon Product/Item to a post or page by using just the Amazon product ASIN (also known as the ISBN-10).

This plugin can be used for to add Amazon products to an existing post and to monetize your blog posts with custom Amazon product and add your own reviews. Download

Bad Behavior – Bad Behavior is a PHP-based solution for blocking link spam and robots. Simple installation. Download

Breadcrumb NavXT – This plugin generates locational breadcrumb trails for your WordPress blog. These breadcrumb trails are highly customizable to suit the needs of just about any blog. Simple installation. Download

Broken Link Checker - This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links that may be contained in your content, pages, blogrolls and other custom fields and will notify you on your dashboard if any are found. Simple install. Download

Contact Form 7 - Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on. Simple install. Download

Easy Adsense – Easy AdSense provides a very easy way to generate revenue from your blog using Google AdSense. With its full set of features, Easy AdSense is perhaps the first plugin to give you a complete solution for everything AdSense-related. Fairly simple install with minimal customization required. Download

Google Analyticator - Enables Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog without template modification. Stats show up in your Dashboard as in the screenshot below (and then some). Fairly easy install with minimal customization. Download

Platinum SEO Pack - SEO plugin allows you to specify keywords, description and more to make them more search engine friendly. Easy install with minimal customization. Download

Popshops - Use this plugin to build product feeds from affiliate marketing networks like Commission Junction, LinkShare, ShareASale, LinkConnector, Pepperjam and more. Fairly simple install with some customization. Download

Popularity Contest - Popularity Contest keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular. There are numerical values assigned to each type of view and feedback; these are used to create a ‘popularity score’ for each post. Simple install with some customization. Download

Search and Replace – A simple search for find strings in your database and replace the string. You can search in ID, post-content, GUID, titel, excerpt, meta-data, comments, comment-author, comment-e-mail, comment-url, tags/categories and categories-description. Simple installation with dashboard access to conduct search and replace. Download

Simple Social Bookmark - The Social Bookmarks plugin for WordPress adds a list of graphic links at the end of your posts and/or pages that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites. Customizable section in the WordPress Dashboard that lets you customize it. You can enable/disable social bookmarking sites and exclude specific pages from the plugin. Download

Subscribe to Comments – Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address! Advanced installation requires some code manipulation. Download

TweetMeme Button - The TweetMeme retweet button easily allows your blog to be retweeted. The button also provides a current count of how many times your story has been retweeted throughout twitter. Fairly simple install. Download

WP Email - Allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend. Download

WP Polls - Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. Download

Yet Another Related Post – Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Simple install with some customization. Download