BlogBurst bloggers contribute to the coverage:

20 Second Timeout

Hoops Addict

Reds Army

The Piston Post

Pounding the Rock

Third Quarter Collapse

But wait, you need a place to blog, don’t you? That’s what this post is about: Good, free blog software.

In the world of free blogging software (aka “blogging engines” - vrooom!), two stand above the rest: Blogger and Wordpress. Both are “hosted,” which means you just visit a Web page to blog instead of having to downloading and install anything.

Blogger

Blogger is owned by Google, and you can tell a lot about Blogger by its home page: it’s simple, clear, and friendly.

Signing up is easy — in fact, everything about Blogger is easy. Blogger gives you basic options to customize the look of your blog by picking from some 16 templates, and you can rearrange the basic elements like your archive links around your page.

If you want to see what Blogger blogs look like in action, go to Blogger.com and click on some of the recently updated blogs and those “of note” at the top of the page — this gives a good idea of what you get.

Wordpress

Like Blogger, Wordpress is free and hosted. When you visit the Wordpress home page, you can see that there’s more going on here; and that’s because there’s more going on with Wordpress. This software gives you many more options for customizing, including pages and pages of design templates to choose from.

It also comes with a host of useful add-ons and features like a spam blocker for your comments, easy-to-place tag clouds, search boxes and the like, and notification when other Wordpress blogs link to your posts.

Note that Wordpress also offers a downloadable version of its software. The free blogging engine lives at Wordpress.com while the software lives at Wordpress.org. If you’re like me, you will type the wrong one many, many times in the course of your blogging life.

How To Choose?

Both of these tools are state-of-the-art and include functions like RSS feeds and what-you-see-is-what-you-get text editing.

My first recommendation is to look at blogs hosted on Blogger and Wordpress and see which has a design “feel” that you like (be sure to look at several from each).

Next: do you want simplicity over all (Blogger)? Or do you think you’ll want to fiddle and tweak and have room to grow (Wordpress?)

If you still can’t decide, you can always start with Blogger and then at some later date suck your whole Blogger blog into Wordpress (a nice feature indeed).

If you have opinions about these, or other, blogging tools, please leave your thoughts in the comments!

Happy blogging…

You’re an NBA blogger, aren’t you?

Now is the prime time for NBA bloggers to show us their stuff. Believe me when I say that we have some seriously interesting publishing partners who genuinely want basketball content - now is your chance! If you have an NBA blog, or know someone who does, please consider submitting it to Blogburst. I assure you, we’ll work to get you the widest exposure possible!

My first reaction was: come on, New York Times, is there really a story here?

Any job that requires you to sit in front of the computer for long hours obsessively watching any kind of information leads to high stress and little physical movement. Is blogging different from day trading, online gambling, or even traditional journalism? I bet stress has taken its toll in those professions too. Or is it just that blogging is a hot topic, so you combine blogging with regular work stress, hit “enter” and you’ve got a story with legs? (Not to mention that some blogs aren’t exactly on the stress program, like the once-a-week-if-that-often Becker-Posner Blog, one of my faves.)

Yet the more I mull it over, the more I think the Times is onto something: the blogosphere does seem to pull successful bloggers toward obsessiveness and high-stress behavior.

In our network (and in the blogosphere in general), the most successful blogs are ones that post frequently and also cover the new developments in their fields. And if you want to keep up with the latest developments, you’re signing up for a never-ending barrage of information — Google Alerts, RSS blog updates, instant messages, emails, comments on your posts. And you might as well get a BlackBerry or an iPhone to ensure you can never escape. As your traffic grows so do the inputs, and the information vortex builds upon itself. The more your attention is dominated by the screen, the more you are apt to sit in one place, maybe eat some potato chips (I think I’m going to go get some right now).

I’m certainly not in a position to give health advice, but what the heck — it’s spring, take a minute to get up and walk around. Go outside and smell the air.

Try to maximize your efficiency. Some bloggers collaborate with others to cut down the work, others make sure to include good search engine optimization as a way of getting more for less.

You’ll also find lots of good tips for work-life balance out there on the Web, and the “getting things done” mavens are full of tips for making your workday (and night) more efficient (like checking your email once an hour instead of every 10 seconds).

Of course, you also can just live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful blog.

I’m Writing Sports’ post, “Bracketology 101: Back to the Basics,” has been featured in the March Mania sections of television sites such as Whio.tv, Kansas City TV 5, The Pittsburgh Channel, Click on Detroit, and NBC 5 Chicago, as well as on Cox Ohio’s Dayton Daily News. Other blogs posting on the hoopla include Hoopraker, Conquest Chronicles, Bruins Nation, A Sea of Blue, and The Big Dance Blog.

Have you got some spring love from publishers that are placing your March Madness posts? Let us know in the comment section below.

Aside from March Madness posts, other bloggers are experience some Spring love from publisher placement opportunities.From Newslite.tv:

My blog has been on BlogBurst for just over one week now and in the past seven days I have had over 73,000 headline impressions and my posts have been used on Reuters, USAToday.com and Chicago Sun Times - wow…

I only have good things to say about BlogBurst and the visibility it have a given my blog. In terms of headline impressions, post placement and click through rate it has exceeded all of my expectations.

Ecommerce Sites are Boring! Add Personality and Passion with a Blog!
From Better Blogging with Michael Martine

Blogging is Easy? Um, No. Here’s the Cold Hard Truth…
From Better Blogging with Michael Martine

Journalists who learn to blog help their online sites grow beyond shovelware
From howardowens.com

How to install WordPress on your computer?
From Createlf

Plugins By The Bucketload
From My Radical Blogs

5 Easy Wordpress Tweaks For SEO and VEO
From Social marketing, Web 2.0 News, & Blog Promotion

Top Bloggers Essential Research Tools - How Amy Gahran Maintains Info-Provocateur Status
From B.L. Oschman’s weblog

The A-List, Part 2: Be The Source
From Everybody Go To

Is embedding better than quoting?
From Matthew Ingram

7 Tools For Blogging On Your Phone
From Mashable!

How to fight trackback spam in your WordPress blog?
From Jammed: Full into Capacity

How to Unlame Your Business Blog: 10 New Tricks for Old Dogs
From Business BlogWire

Ten Tactics That Could Save Your Online Reputation
From Mashable!

Blogging Ethics 101b - Commenting
From Better Blogging with Michael Martine

The initial report  analyzed the box office performance of 400 recent films, finding that titles grossing at least $100 million in sales are likely to have received elevated levels of attention on blogs.  More details, here.

Some of my favorite film bloggers are:

/Film - Blogging the Reel World

The IFC Blog

Film School Rejects

It was major news across all mediums, with BlogBurst publishing partners USA Today and Reuters both incorporating bloggers’ perspectives into the story.

Here’s but a few of the BlogBurst bloggers who weighed-in:

Hypocrisy- They name is Spitzer (jobsanger)

Political Perceptions: The Spitzer Effect (WSJ.com: Washington Wire)

Eliot’s Mess: Spitzer scandal details emerge (The Carpetbagger Report)

The BlogBurst editorial team is excited to announce that BlogBurst blogs have been selected by The Wall Street Journal to fuel a new site featuring content surrounding the retirement debate.

Retirementdebate.com, which launched on Monday, March 3rd, features news, business, finance, and political posts with a narrowed focus on retirement, social security, Medicare, baby boomer, and senior living issues.

Here are just a few examples of posts by BlogBurst network members that were placed on new WSJ Retirement Debate site:

Still Clickin: You Bet Your Life…Insurance

The New Business World: Declining Dollar, Pension Funds and Downward Business

Senior Housing Daily: Housing Market Decline Affecting Senior Housing?

Net News Publisher: Social Security Union Endorses Obama