Armen Thomassian has just launched a new blog, iffect.net and although it has only 5 posts in it so far, they are all worth reading, most notably 1 stupidly simple tip that will boost PR & SEO. Titles like that always grab my attention, and the tip is well worth reading, especially as you can practice it on Blog-Op as all of my blogs use DoFollow.

I found Armens blog as a result of a Stumble sent by Andy Beard. Andy is currently running a poll where he is looking for your votes for the best Wordpress plugins (April 2007). Andy will generously donate $100 to the winning plugin’s author, so if you’re using one of them, give them a vote. I voted for Bad Behavior, quite simply because it works and has cut down the amount of comment spam my blogs receive by around 95%.

If you like Andys blog (and you should), in addition to grabbing his RSS feed, why not add him as a friend on StumbleUpon because he finds some great stuff – adding new friends on SU is both a great way to receive and promote new reading material for bloggers. I covered the benefits of Stumbling in more detail here: Be a good stumbler.

Lyndoman at CornwallSEO announces the death of directories (well, not quite) and praises the rise of social voting sites, providing a list of these that actually send traffic, along with giving you their PR & Alexa ratings. He makes the very valid point that getting listed in one of these sites will be of far more benefit to your PR than many of the directories that are around.

Finally, Matt Coddington at Net Business Blog sings the praises of more Bumpzee upgrades, and makes the bold statement that “If you haven’t checked out BUMPzee, you really need to. Stop wasting your time with MyBlogLog. It’s rotting. BUMPzee is blooming.” I must admit that although I was aware of Bumpzee, it was no more than that-I know Andy uses it, and there’s plenty of familiar faces in Matts visitor cloud, so I think it’s time I got on board this one. Expect a post in the near future.

What’s this all about?