Who is in control of your brand?

As we all know WordPress is the ultimate blogging platform, so flexible and generally awesome. I have spent many hours searching for good quality WordPress blog themes & templates, and I realised that you might find these lists useful. There’s at least 200 good quality free & paid themes & templates within these lists & if you’re starting a WordPress blog you’ll be sure to find what you’re looking for.

Free WordPress Blog Themes & Templates

• http://wphacks.com/best-premium-wordpress-themes-gallery/
• http://www.wpthemespress.com/
• http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/16-free-premium-wordpress-themes-that-dont-suck/
• http://wpjunction.com/
• http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/41-great-looking-free-wordpress-themes/
• http://www.darrenhoyt.com/topics/wordpress/
• http://www.wordpresspremium.com/
• http://www.inspiredm.com/2010/01/03/best-wordpress-themes-2009/
• http://www.levoltz.com/2010/01/06/100-best-wordpress-premium-themes-of-2009/
• http://www.antsmagazine.com/2009/03/100-superb-wordpress-themes-for-free/
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/08/100-excellent-free-high-quality-wordpress-themes/

Paid & Free WordPress Blog Themes & Templates

• http://michaelhutagalung.com/tag/wordpress/
• http://themehybrid.com/
• http://www.paddsolutions.com/category/wordpress/

Paid WordPress Blog Themes & Templates

• http://www.studiopress.com/themes/child
• http://www.wpzoom.com
• http://www.elegantthemes.com/

What did I end up choosing?

I’ve ended up with a shortlist of four themes, hopefully I can make a decision today and get blogging about food before you know it. (The new blog’s going to be all about food – logs, reviews & recipes – because I just love food. It’ll be called TummyCrumble.com when it’s up, hopefully today!

Personal privacy has become a hot topic for Facebook, however, full anonymity is the ultimate in privacy and creates some interesting human behaviour. The biggest anonymous community is 4chan.org an image board, inspired by a Japanese image board, 6 or so years ago, created (apparently) by Christopher ‘moot’ Poole.

“Because of the lack of rules, 4chan has fostered an environment where there’s a lot of creativity and good things coming out of it.” Christopher “moot” Poole

4chan is the source of many of today’s internet memes (two you might have seen are Lolcats & Rick Rolling), only 6 years old the site gets 70m visitors per month, producing 700,000 posts per day. It’s a force to be reckoned with. In April last year the community hacked the Annual Time 100 Poll to get ‘moot’ to number 1 spot AND coordinated the top 21 first names to spell out ‘marblecake also the game’ (lost more on this here). The community also use their power for good, in Feb last year a young guy posted a video of him abusing his cat on YouTube, the community didn’t like it and using a number of techniques the had figured out his name in 24 hours and the guy was arrested in 48 hours.

Unusually, moot recently spoke at TED explaining the ‘case for anonymity online‘ this 11 mins is a fascinating insight into an unusual yet gigantic online phenomena.

The founder of 4chan, a controversial, uncensored online imageboard, describes its subculture, some of the Internet “memes” it has launched, and the incident in which its users managed a very public, precision hack of a mainstream media website. The talk raises questions about the power — and price — of anonymity. (Recorded at TED2010, February 2010 in Long Beach, CA. Duration: 11:24)

Do you regularly visit 4Chan, or have you heard of it before? Is it good, bad or otherwise?

Last night’s Social Media Club Melbourne (#smcmelb) event with a panel made up of ProBlogger aka Darren Rowse, Duncan Riley of the Inquisitor, Pip Lincoln aka Meet me at Mikes and MC’d by Yvonne Adele aka Ideas Culture went off pretty smoothly! We landed a Swarm badge on FourSquare and had a super rapid stream of tweets coming through on #smcmelb, thanks to a great turnout of 130-140 people, just the right amount for the venue. Brent, in conjunction with Cath, have already posted a great summary of the event, pulling out their key takeaways. Brent’s post covers the following topics:

Here’s the video for those of you who want to see the whole event.

Thanks to David Neiger for video production.

The tweet stream was thick and fast and this word cloud gives you a taste of what was discussed. Here are just a select few of the tweets

amcal

Anna

@amcal: Yes 'cause you meet interesting people with similar interests RT @aaronroach #smcmelb can running a popular blog pull you chicks?

Jun 8, 2010 @ 11:55 AM from web Powered by Tweeted

haikugirlOz

Kim Tairi

@haikugirlOz: #smcmelb yay @meetmeatmikes pip suggests tagging & categorising your posts so peeps can find my librarian heart went pitterpatter!!

Jun 8, 2010 @ 09:32 AM from Echofon Powered by Tweeted

kylielewis

Kylie Lewis

@kylielewis: @problogger: use email subs to drive blog traffic and loyalty < totally agree! Worked for me too (feedburner great for this IMHO). #smcmelb

Jun 8, 2010 @ 09:30 AM from Twitter for iPhone in reply to problogger Powered by Tweeted

tonyprysten

Tony Prysten

@tonyprysten: Why treat bloggers differently to say magazine publishers when it comes to 'selling out'? These guys have a right to earn #smcmelb

Jun 8, 2010 @ 10:04 AM from TweetDeck Powered by Tweeted

laramcpherson

Lara McPherson

@laramcpherson: Cynics who think social media will stop people from communicating with each other should be @24moons tonight witnessing #smcmelb

Jun 8, 2010 @ 10:08 AM from Twitter for iPhone Powered by Tweeted

UPDATE: Some more event reviews have started popping up

• Chloe from TechFluff.tv
• Samantha Bell
• Sharon Nathani

Optimising your eCommerce is simple math; if you increase performance it directly improves the bottom line.

Online Shopping in Australia is at an all-time high, with 37.6% of us spending a total of $23B. Yet so many big brands are so late to the game. We’ve reviewed a range of studies that will help you either enter the eCommerce game or improve your current platform.

There are many important areas that impact sales, today we focus on some critical components that fall under User Experience & Shopping Experience. Applying just one of these learnings has proven to increase sales by 257%.

I’ve summarised the most important & impactful findings on the VJ Blog in the following categories.

1. User Experience
   1. The checkout process
   2. Checkout load time
   3. Make it easy to fill out forms
2. Shopping Experience
   1. Shipping & Handling costs
   2. Price & Product comparisons
   3. Free & easy returns policy
   4. Choice of delivery time
   5. Ratings & reviews

See my full post on the Visual Jazz Blog: http://blog.visualjazz.com.au/strategy/getting-the-most-out-of-ecommerce/