Raj Setty offers some great pointers for starting a business blog in his Blogging Starter Checklist:

1. Register a domain name with your name and redirect to your blog.
2. Get a "Creative Commons License"
3. Get a feedburner account and direct feeds through feedburner
4. Implement subscription chiclets
5. Enable search
6. Claim your blog at Technorati
7. Allow users to get your blog via email
8. Link to your profile
9. Link to your photo album
10. Announce your blog to the world
11. Provide a way to contact you
12. Link to your bookmarks
13. Create meaningful categories and chunk content
14. Put your photo on the home page
15. Ensure that your RSS feeds are OK
16. Geo-tag your blog at Feedmap
17. Include a blog link in your email signature

This is a great list. Be sure to check out Raj's post for the details behind each of his 17 points.

Some things I might add:

• Add Technorati tags to your posts. It's as easy as adding some hyperlinks at the end of your post, like this:Technorati tags: Tagging, Blogging

  There are some handy plug-ins for WordPress that make this even easier, like Bunny's Technorati Tags plugin and Ben O'Neill's Technorati Tags plugin.

• Add a "tag cloud" that shows what tags and/or categories are most popular on your blog. For example, check out the tag cloud on the right hand side on O'Reilly Radar. Two different WordPress plug-ins that allow you to do this are: Ultimate Tag Warrior and the Weighted Categories plug-ins.While you're at it, also add a Swiki "buzzcloud" from Eurekster to your blog. You can see an example of a buzzcloud on the Eurekster blog on the top right undeneath "Hot Searches". It's a great way to show your readers at-a-glance what search terms in your niche topic area are the most popular.
• Have a custom favicon. This allows subscribers to your blog to see this custom icon in their newsreader. Take a look at the screenshot of part of my subscription list in the newsreader I use, NetNewsWire. Notice that the Dilbert Blog, Matt Cutts' blog, and ResearchBuzz all show the same generic favicon. Custom icons would look much cooler.
• Post a Flickr badge on your blog. Here's an example (underneath "Recent Photos" on the right). You can use the badges supplied by Flickr or some free third-party ones like this one.
• Install an industrial-strength comment spam plug-in into your blog, such as Akismet or Spam Karma.
• Give your blog a boost in link popularity. Link to it from your home page and ask customers, suppliers, business partners, and colleagues to link to it too. Review my Powerpoint on link building for many more tips on boosting link popularity.

No secret that I think Flickr is hot stuff (just refer back to my recent posts about Flickr here and here). It's definitely Web 2.0 material. Flickr investors like Esther Dyson must be pretty happy right now, but Yahoo! stockholders should be even happier. John Battelle says his sources estimate the deal to be worth around $15-$17 million, while Om Malik says his sources figure $35 million. Either way, that's one hell of a deal for Yahoo!, particularly when you consider that Ask Jeeves also just got bought — for over $1 billion! Jeremy Zawodny at Yahoo! has some interesting things to say about the Flickr acquisition.

I have already mentioned how Flickr has the characteristics of a massively multi-player online role-playing game, but I wanted to expand on this a little more. A "sticky" site has a sense of play to it. Flickr does this wonderfully, with interesting features just a few explorative mouse clicks away. What's more, Flickr encourages you to explore and make interesting connections, and this exploration keeps Flickr incredibly sticky.

For example, Flickr constantly encourages you to explore other people's photo collections, from the tag searching, to latest photos on the home page, to groups and contacts; everything invites you to network and make links. But it never bullies you into doing this, merely points you along a path you can chose to take.

Exploring Flickr is like exploring any game environment. You can make discoveries, amusing connections, get lost, and find your home again. Along the way you will meet interesting characters, perverse characters, and the incredibly dull. Flickr is not only a game, it's a story, and it succeeds because the story is about us and our lives, and it's delivered visually.

Perhaps this is why the 'friend networks' have invariably failed to sustain their original hype. People's personal profiles are only so interesting; people's photos on the other hand are intimate, personal, and interesting.

The realization that Flickr is, in many ways, a game, leads one to an interesting thought. Is it possible that all truly great websites are games? Ebay is a nice example of this. People don't just log in to buy and sell, they also log in to play, explore, and even fight with other users over items. Who hasn't heard from a friend of a great Ebay discovery, or a bidding war, or a fantastic sale? Play makes Ebay fun. Google is another example. It has exploration and discovery game elements in abundance!

Perhaps when we think web usability and design we should also be catering to human kind's innate curiosity and desire to solve problems that games tap into. With these ideas in mind, let's hope the next generation websites learn from Flickr and sites like it to produce truly interesting experiences.

What is Flickr?

Until recently, I defined Flickr simply as a free service for bloggers who wish to post photos, not only on their blog but also on the Flickr service for other Flickr users to peruse, vote on, add to their favorites list, etc. Flickr even supports RSS feeds, with ability to add comments and notes to photos. You can of course use Flickr to share your family photos and snapshots with friends and relatives. And amateur photographers can show off their work. On Flickr, the photographic "creme" rises to the top, due to other Flickr users who make comments, post blog entries, and cause the photos to achieve recognition in "most popular" lists.

But now I've come to realize that Flickr is so much more. It's not just a cleverly designed web application. It's a repository of human knowledge and creativity organized organically. It's a visual conversation. It's countless stories intertwined. It's a community. It's a virtual world. It's a massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

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