I have to admit that over the years that I’ve been blogging I have become a big fan of CommentLuv and have had it on this blog since the very first day, yes folks I love it that much.

Recently Andy Bailey came up with CommentLuv Premium, so I jumped at the chance of getting my blogging hands on the latest incarnation of what has become one of the most popular plugins for any WordPress powered blog in the blogosphere.

So if you are a regular visitor here on Blazing Minds, then you will have seen the plugin in action, with several new gadgets for those commenting here to see, such as sharing the post and getting the chance to have dofollow links and up to 10 choices of their previous posts listed in with their comments.

Also the superb Keyword Name, giving the commentator the chance to add their website after their name in the name field when commenting.
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The latest version of the web standard markup, HTML 5, was been greeted with a mixed reaction on it’s launch, but has gained grudging acceptance in the past year or so despite being an unfinished project. It’s aim to integrate multimedia functions is gaining traction, mainly due to people’s dislike of Flash. Apple has done its part to help this along through its ongoing fallout with Adobe, making sure that Flash is not supported in any of its new products.

What HTML5 has undoubtedly done is to provide some amazing browser based experiments, to show what’s really possible without flash. What practical use they have is yet to be seen, but it puts it out there for people to explore and play around with. There are already some amazing canvas experiments, here are some of the best and other interesting HTML5 sites:

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Social media, mobile browsing and smartphone applications have all seen a phenomenal rise in popularity and usage over the last decade; in fact they’re now so prevalent that business can no longer afford to ignore them as a marketing avenue, and restaurants are no different. The following infographic, produced by Restaurant App Engines, highlights why more and more restaurants are moving towards social media, mobile browsing and mobile apps:

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FourSquare is one of those sites that people to love or hate and even though some may think it’s a complete waste of time, think again!

I first started using FourSquare when I saw some fellow friends on twitter mentioning where they were, so I stopped by, signed up and didn’t do much about it after that.

Some time later when I got my BlackBerry Curve I started delving in to FourSquare a bit more often and even though the Curve 8520 doesn’t have GPS, FourSquare still tries to find locations via cell towers.

Grabbing A Special Via FourSquare

One thing that I did start noticing after a while were there seemed to be a lot more “specials” appearing at some of the places that I was visiting, some for being the mayor and others for the amount of times you have visited.

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Following his announcement last week that he was resigning as CEO of Apple and passing along the duties to right-hand man Tim Cook, Steve Jobs may have hoped he’d be able to become an afterthought in the minds of many observers. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Jobs, who went public a while back that he had been battling pancreatic cancer, showed up on the celebrity Web site TMZ in two photos looking gaunt, pale and sickly.

So, the big question is whether or not the photos are authentic or if they were doctored?

According to TMZ officials, the picture was snapped last Friday by Pacific Coast News (who reportedly sold it exclusively to the celebrity site), some 48 hours after Jobs announced he was stepping down at Apple, stating he had reached that point and time where he could no longer give 100 percent to his position.

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Image via CrunchBase

Putting your website at the top of Google’s results is the Holy Grail for anyone in internet marketing and search engine optimisation. Of course it depends on the quality of your content on the website you’re trying to optimise, your link building activities, reviews, social media presence and all the things we know we have to do to create a White Hat campaign which doesn’t get penalised by Panda Farmers or have a bad reaction to Caffeine.

But of course there is a way of guaranteeing you get to the top of Google’s results pages which requires little more than intelligence, wit, an idea for a story and a video camera or phone.

People forget that Google will put videos which match your search terms at the top of the SERPs as they’re usually rather blinkered by the notion that you need content and lots of back links to really be doing SEO. While that’s true enough, if you can produce a good video to go onto your site which brings richness and authority you’ll find that you’re getting more traffic than you ever had before.

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Image via CrunchBase

While all advice is telling them the opposite, Britons looking for work, either because they need a new job or want to get out of their current position are failing to embrace social media as a part of their jobseeking activities.

A survey carried out by recruitment agency Kelly surveyed around 97,000 people in 30 countries and found that Britain is in the 25 place for people exploiting resources such as LinkedIn and Facebook to look for jobs. Indonesia came at the top of the table with 49% of the survey respondents saying they searched for jobs using social media. That was only 20% in the UK.

What does that mean? Well, only 1% of people in the UK have found their current employment by using their contacts on social media. The reason people are reluctant to search and engage with social media is that that are afraid of the negative effects that this activity would have on their career, according to 26% of those surveyed while one third admitted to deliberately ‘self censoring’ themselves online.

Katie Ivie, HR director with Kelly Services UK points out that: “Now is the point that candidates should be developing a stronger on-line presence on professional networks to take advantage of the opportunities they have to offer and stand out from the crowd.”

Lets hope these figures improve as the use of web version 2.0 is only going to become more important as a resource driving the recruitment industry.

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