Are you tired of hunting for good domains. Are you on the lookout for a tool that can almost instantly tell you whether a domain is available or not? How about a tool that can generate domain names given a list of words?

Enter…Bust A Name. A simple to use tool that provides all of the above. I’ve been using it actively to identify potential domains that I can register for my projects. Give it a try…

I’m sure there are similar tools available, but this one is a no-nonsense straight forward tool to use. :-)

I came across a very interesting Firefox plugin called Zemanta. The plugin comes into action only when you visit one of the supported platforms, e.g., WordPress, as an author. For instance, when I loaded up this blog’s page to write this article, I noticed Zemanta visible on the right sidebar. It not only claims to provide good suggestions on your article, but pulls up some images from Flickr which might be relevant to what you’re writing. It also suggested some external sites to link to and also tags for the article. Nothing like testing it while writing the article itself, wouldn’t you say? The first round of suggestions that I got is shown in the image below.

I’ll be giving this a shot for a few more articles to see if it helps in improving the quality of posts that I write!

In today’s edition of Speed Linking:

• Two useful posts from BlogWell, titled 100+ Resources for Web Developers, and 100+ Resources for Small Business and Non-Profits, would be of interest to many. It is a treasure trove of useful links. In fact, the resource list gets even better when you read the comments which has a good contribution of links from readers.
• Do you plan your blog posts in advance? If you are not good at planning your articles, read this article to get a good insight on how you can improve your skills in this area.
• Internet Explorer 8 has finally arrived. Rather than opening up a debate on IE8 Vs Firefox 3, what I would like you to do is to see how your blog renders in IE8! There are several changes introduced in IE8, and it would be good for all us bloggers to ensure that nothing is breaking on our blog with the release of a new browser version. Do note that IE8 is still in Beta.

More later…

Image courtesy: Darwin Bell

A picture is worth a thousand words. This is so true, isn’t it? No matter how well we write on our blog, the impact it creates gets magnified the moment we embed some meaningful photographs into the article. Where do these bloggers get such great quality photographs from?

There are several websites that cater to the stock photos segment. Not just that, there are several photo sharing services available, which you can tap into, to get some great photographs. A small list of sites which I personally use for getting some great images are mentioned below.

Flickr

Flickr is at top of my list. You can search not only based on keywords, but based on license as well. The number of photographs available on just about any topic/keyword you can think off, is simply unbelievable. All thanks to the large user base on the website.

iStockPhoto

iStockphoto provides photographs without charging a subscription fee. Pricing is per image, depending on the size of photograph that you are looking for. You can get a XSmall size photographs for as low as $1. Isn’t that cool!

stock.xchng

stock.xchng has over 250,000 stock photographs from over 25,000 photographers.

Corbis

Corbis has a wonderful collection of high-quality photographs. You would need to pay a small fee for many of the photographs, but once again, just like Flickr, you can search based on license type.

HDRwalls

HDRwalls a website that has wallpapers for your PC and for your mobile devices. Nothing stops you from using it for your blog posts! You will find an amazing collection of photographs on this website. A review of HDRwalls was recently carried out at DownloadSquad. There are only about 450+ photographs to choose from, but do expect the database to increase in the coming days, as this is a user run community.

There are several other stock photo websites. What I’ve listed above, are the ones that I typically use. Besides the ones listed here, which ones do you use?

I had written a couple of weeks ago about a report titled Search Engine Myth’s Exposed.

The 49-page report is now available for FREE download. The report by Jonathan Leger discusses the following myths about Google:

• Myth #1: Google Knows All and Sees All
• Myth #2: Google Will Not Rank Duplicate Content
• Myth #3: You Must Get Links From Related Subject Sites to Rank
• Myth #4: Your Site Must Focus On One Subject To Rank
• Myth #5: High PageRank Means Good Rankings
• Myth #6: To Maintain Good Rankings, You Must Add New Content
• Myth #7: THE BIGGEST MYTH: Ranking In Google Is Hard!

Download the FREE report NOW!