I'm trying to figure out all this blogging stuff, but I'm a bit confused about two aspects of blogging: pings and trackbacks. What's the difference?

I have a couple of blogs (using Blogger) that are monetized using Google. But, the ads that appear are often completely unrelated to the content - sometimes embarrassingly so. Is there any way of getting the ads to be more relevant? I do use tags, but that doesn't seem to help. Sigh.

I want to add photos to my blog, and a buddy told me that I can use images from the Yahoo Flickr site. I don't want to get in trouble, though, so can you tell me if there's some way to identify those photographs and other images that are legal for me to republish?

I've been blogging for a few weeks now and have taken to heart the advice you gave about trying to include graphics, images or photographs in blog entries. Problem is, I can't figure out how to have the text flow around the graphic and it's getting really annoying. How do you do that on your business blog entries?

I know you have shown how to add a Google search box and such to my site (see Add Google search to your site) and even saw that you've written about how to utilize Google Custom Search (see Add Google Custom Search to your site), but I want to implement a cool widget I saw on another site from Lijit. Do you have any info on that?

I am about to open a new business (hopefully) and was told that blogging can really help - not only with website rankings but for more interest. So, my question comes to this:

If you do a business blog, should you ever delete or edit a customers bad entry about the business? If so, under what circumstances? If no, what if you could tell he was from a competitor and just trashing your business?

Second question, when should you open a business blog? Immediately when your business opens or after some time? Any suggestions here?

Now, the big question: do you need to do this for your business to be more successful as we move into 2008 and beyond?

You know you do.

The problem is, who do you turn to for trustworthy, accurate and honest answers, advice that can help you rise above the noise of your marketplace?

And how the heck can you get a free holiday in Hawaii out of the deal?

My answer to you: The Aloha Social Media Summit.

In the interest of gaining more visibility for my new cat blog, I want to have a link on the blog itself that will easily let people "favorite" it on Technorati. How do I do that?

The biggest thing I want to get out of my blog is to leverage it in every way possible, and I thought part of that was by "syndicating" posts to other sites. I got the impression that that is possible on more than just other sites you may own. Is it possible to syndicate titles of new posts to other sites?

For example, when you make a new post on apparenting.com, or askdavetaylor.com, your site Intuitive.com also updates on the home page, sending a link to that newest post. Is it possible to do the same with other sites that you recommend using to help get extra exposure such as myspace, facebook, squidoo, digg, technorati, etc. or am I mixing things up? (In other words, are all of those additonal sites able to automatically update with snippets of new posts, or is that a manual process?

I love your site. I learn a great deal from you. But I am stumped and need some help: I publish a small blog that I hope to monetize. With blogs I subscribe to, I like to read the content in a feed reader and rarely click through to a site. I would like to insert my own banner ads in my feed but have not figured out a good way to do so. I use typepad for my blog. (An arrangement similar to what self-help guru Steve Paulina does in his feed with product recommendations is what I would like to do.) Can you help?

Just bumped into the latest bit of blogging jargon: a "tumbleblog". What the heck is it, something out of the old west?

Well, mine is an online lingerie store. A healthy one, ok ?! My level of HTML is simple one... things like css, php, still don't know how to use.. What kind of contents of article should i have?

What are your thoughts about putting an email/contact address on a blog?  Sometimes people don’t want to leave a comment and send me long letters through the ‘conversation’ function at my Etsy shop, which is really strange, because they have to go to a whole different website and set up an account.   I don’t want the email addy to be harvested but I think I need a way for people to get hold of me aside from the comments.  What’s your recommendation?

I notice that about two weeks ago your site changed subtly, Dave. Before, I'd click on "POST" to submit a comment and then wait and wait while it processed. Now it's still as slow (sorry!) but as soon as I click on that POST button it grays out so I can't click on it again. Cool. How do you do that?

Over time I've managed to create a bunch of different blogs, some of which are live and others that have been relegated to the digital recycle bin. Except they're still in my Movable Type installation. How do I actually delete a blog from MT?

You mentioned that Google Reader was the only reader that you use. The R.S.S. reader I've used, FeedDemon has been annoying me with frames that I don't want, and stories I've deleted coming back. I've just started using Google Reader because you mentioned, so I thought I give it a try. However, not to say I'm completely clueless, but I can't figure out how to delete a story from Google Reader when I'm done reading it.

Okay, so I read through your earlier blog entry about how to change default page view in Google Reader and was struck by one thing: Your link on the bottom of the article to "subscribe to this blog in Google Reader". How did you do that?

I keep reading from people like Robert Scoble that there are all sorts of keyboard shortcuts that make Google Reader one of the fastest for reading lots of RSS feeds. All that I've figured out is the space bar, however. Can you share them all for us?

Okay, I'm dabbling with Google Reader and am finding it pretty cool except for one big issue: every time I start up the program I have to read their "helpful hints" and am forced to click on "All Items" to see my news. Surely there's a solution?

I've been using NewsGator Online to read my RSS feeds for years, but with the beta of their new "Ajax" interface, I think it's time to move to something else: Google Reader. Can you step me through exporting my RSS subscription list (in OPML, I guess) and importing it into Google Reader?

How to add a comment box in my blog? This is my blog: www.sillydrunkfish.blogspot.com. I would love to have a comment box that open for public to comment about my blogs, but i don't have one.

I have a wordpress site. My challenge? I wish to have my home page display only my latest 5 entries, yet want to have categories for my blog (when clicked upon) display all of the previous posts for that category, not just 5. I am not a programmer so I don't know or understand much about coding. However, I have been told that this is not possible. Is that really the case? Is the program as inflexible as this? Or is it just a matter of taking time to program in a different number of posts for the homepage versus the other page displays.

I am a bit frustrated that my ISP lets me do whatever I want to the software in my account, but doesn't make my actual log files available from my server. This effectively means I can't track my traffic. Or can I? Are there solutions for tracking site traffic without being able to install software on my server?

Hi Dave. I work at a small, new company and I've been hounding the CEO to start a corporate blog. He mainly interested in increasing Pagerank and I've explained that a corp-blog will help with Pagerank, page views, branding, et al. (That is correct, isn't it?) Well, he's warming up to the idea and I want to give a roll out plan, but my tech knowledge only goes so far.

Ideally I'd like propose something that means nobody else has to do more work, so I can own it. When I saw that Blogger is now offering custom domain names (or whatever it is), I thought that might be my ticket. Would that be a quick solution to what I'm trying to do? What exactly happens behind the scenes there? The URL shows our site, but the blog is actually on Blogger's servers? Will that undermine the Pagerank goodness we'd get from (the inenvitable) in-bound links to our (high quality content) corporate blog?

I dunno if you can help me out, but I've been using Typepad for quite a while now and it's time to move to my own blogging solution on my own server. My question is: how the heck do I actually cancel my Typepad account?

I manage a Movable Type blog that has a number of different authors and one of my less prolific writers just emailed me saying she can't log in any more. Is there a way I can change her password as the MT administrator?

I just purchased Growing Your Business with Google and can't wait to start reading it. Here's my questions. What are the major differences between Blogger and WordPress and why would I want to use one rather than the other?

I'm a big fan of the book reviews that Thomas Duff writes on Amazon.com and was suddenly struck with the question: can I actually get his reviews mailed to me so I can keep up on what he's recommending? For that matter, there are a number of other reviews I've found that have very similar tastes to my own, so I'd really like to have some way to keep track of what they're recommending too.

I'm kinda stuck, Dave. I really want to learn how to really focus my blog efforts so I can gain more business advantage, but I haven't been inspired yet. Worse, I am stuck out in the boonies and don't have any Internet folk or bloggers in the area who can help me advance. So, help, what do I do?

I'm pulling out my hair! I want to include images in my blog entries and have those images show up in the RSS feed too, but either I end up with no image showing up at all, or I end up with the text abutting the image, which looks terrible. What's the best practice with this, Dave?

I have a problem with my Google Adsense, I have placed it on my blog as per your directions [see Get Started with AdSense]. The thing is when I place the code in my template and preview it, is all ok, but when I publish it I get the PSA adverts instead (I changed it now to a white fill). The strange thing is that when I click on the individual posts the adsense adverts appear all ok.

I just read about a new blog for money service with the exceptionally weird name of CREAMaid. What's it about, how does it work, and can I really make a few bucks signing up for its service? Thanks!

I have a pretty long list of sites that I ping but only recently realized that I have no way of pinging the new Google Blogsearch service when I have a new entry on my MT blog! Is there a way to do this that I just haven't bumped into?

I don't get it. From my statistics, it appears that I have a pretty good readership for my weblog, about 200-300 people per day, but no-one ever comments on what I'm writing. I just don't get it, what's wrong? is there some design error on my site, or ... ?

I was reading through some of your myspace help and it's great. thanks so much for letting me tweak my background without having to slap a bunch of stupid adverts on for your site! :) While I was reading your profile on myspace [dave's profile on myspace], I noticed you had a nice effect with some text that you somehow put into a box. How did you do that??

I'm a big fan of Google News - http://news.google.com/ - and want to know how some blogs have become news sources! How can I have my blog become part of the elite Google News source feed list?

My daughter is a complete Neopets fanatic and has asked me to help her keep track of what people are saying about neopets in the blogosphere. I tried using NewsGator [see Searching the Blogosphere with NewsGator Online] but its search feed had too much junk included. Is there a better alternative?

One thing I really like about your blog, Dave, is your little links to both Digg and Del.icio.us. Simple, neat, but I'm baffled, how the heck do you do that within a Movable Type template? Do you mind sharing with us rabble? :]

I read a ton of blogs every day and sometimes I see a video from YouTube that someone's included on their entry. I know how to do that [see Add YouTube Video to your Blog for a tutorial] but how do I easily copy a video from one page to another?

I'm really getting into blogging, but am starting to get a bit paranoid (especially after I read about how Robert Scoble lost years of his blog entries after 9/11 [ref]) and feel like I really need to create my own backup of my blog, not rely on someone else to manage it. How do I do that in Movable Type?

I keep finding these great videos on YouTube and want to include some of them in my Typepad blog but I have no idea how to do that. I tried dragging and dropping while I was composing an entry, but was totally unsurprised when it didn't work either. Can it be done?

Dave, I'm impressed! My review of Growing Your Business with Google hadn't been up for much longer than an hour before you had already commented on it -- and posted the review on your own website. (Embarrassingly before I corrected a few typos in my own article.) You have this blogging thing down to a science! Which leads me to my question: What secret weapon (or weapons) do you use to keep so up-to-date on who is writing or blogging about you on the web?

Can you give me the rudimentary HTML tags that I need to be able to create bold, italics, change font colors and include both hypertext references and images to my blog entries? Thanks!

Ever since you recommended it at a conference a while back, I've been a big fan of NewsGator Online as my RSS reader. As you said, being able to catch up on my feeds from any Web browser anywhere in the world is darn convenient. However, there's a dark cloud: I have been using various "smart searches" to keep track of our company, our competitors, my wife, etc., and find that I get the same match again and again in the reader. Is there some way I can create a more sophisticated search?

Dave, I'm awful curious about how exactly you have the PSP book advert that shows up on your pages related to the Sony PSP, but nowhere else on your site. Is that some fancy trick you're doing with Movable Type, or is that some separate bit of programming wizardry you've done?

I've been using Blogger for a while and have grown to really like, especially after I read your note about changing templates (How to change your Blogger template). My question now is that I have a new design that's mostly reds but the Blogger NavBar is blue. Can I change its color?

I have been blogging pretty happily at Blogger.com for a while, but now I have decided it's time for a bit of a facelift, and I've heard that Blogger just added a bunch of new templates. Nice! How do I get to the template setting and change my appearance?

I've been blogging for a while now and am having a good time, but I'm now a bit puzzled about how to expand into the next wave of content: video. Specifically, I bump into funny or informative videos on Google Video but have no idea whether I can embed it on my own page and if I can, how to do that. Can you offer some pointers?

I'm interested in watching how the online world responds to the release of the brand-new Volvo c30 coupe, and am wondering what tools are out there to make it easy to accomplish. I know that I can use something like Google, but that seems pretty inefficient. Also, I'm imagining that this is probably a more general question.

Dave, I host my images on my own server, but I hate using some of the more primitive tools to work with it, especially FTP. So, tell me, is there a way to add images to my blog entries if I'm using Wordpress without using the file transfer protocol software?

I've just started blogging and am fascinated by the recent announcement of PayPerPost.com, a site that appears to offer me money to write favorably about products from specific advertisers. Even without any traffic to my weblog at all, I can now make at least a few bucks to pay for hosting and perhaps even a nice dinner once a month with my g/f. What's your take on the service, Dave, and are you going to sign up?

I've been really getting into this whole blogging phenomenon, thanks in part to your business blog, actually, but now I want to have some of the people on my team able to keep track of what I write about without them having to learn how to work with an RSS reader. My flash of genius: is there a toolbar I can install on their browsers a la the Google toolbar that would give them a continuous scrolling ticker of my RSS feed? Y'know what I mean?

I heard that eBay's announced a new blogging tool, and I want to use it, because, well, I think it can help drive traffic to my eBay store and would be a fun additional marketing tool too. Not really too sure about blogging in general, actually, but it seems like it'd be cool and goodness knows, my kids have been talking about blogs and blogging for years now!

I've been using SixApart's Typepad blogging system for a few months with good results, and it's now time for me to stop being "something".typepad.com and use my own domain instead. I skimmed some of the tutorials on the Typepad site, but they're baffling. Can you help me out?

Bit of a crisis: I have been dabbling with creating an RSS feed of a private discussion group I'm in, and somehow Feedster has found it and indexed it. The rest of the list members are in an uproar and I really need to remove the data from Feedster, but I don't see how to do that. Help!!

Dave, I've bumped into a new service that claims to pay you for simply adding specific links to your weblog entries, which seems like a darn easy way to make some money as a blogger. The service is called Blogitive and I'm just wondering if it's legit or not?

I have a blog, www.globalcctvhub.com and I have set up tags to link through Technorati.

The problem is none of my tags register on Technorati, I have asked them for help, but many weeks later still have recieved no response.

Should I adjust the blog I write for my company so it appears correctly when accessed via RSS readers? Is there a standard format in which the layout and content is delivered to RSS readers that I can use to ensure that my blog appears the way I want?

I'm a bit baffled, to be honest. I'm getting comments left on my weblog that kinda/sorta seem like they're relevant, but don't entirely make sense and aren't relevant to the actual discussion, though they're more or less on topic. Is it the work of some semi-incoherent blogosphere denizen, or is it actually some sort of subtle comment spam?

I have a blog on blogspot.com (also known as Blogger) and I have noticed that many people have gotten rid of the navigational toolbar at the top of the page when one views their blog. I would like to do the same. How can I get rid of it? You can view the blog but please don't publish the address on your website. Thank a billion! Trevor

I hate to sound like a groupie or something, but I love your site, Dave, and I'd love to be able to include a little box somewhere on my own site that featured your latest entries! Is this doable, and if so, how do I do it?