Have you set yourself any blogging goals?
If you have, great. If you haven’t, I’d suggest you should.
A common blogging goal is to reach the milestone of X number of followers. Aiming for 100 initially, then 1,000, then 5,000 and so on.
Many Twitter users, perhaps even the majority, strive towards achieving a specific ‘followers’ goal.
Yesterday (May 13th 2009) Xavier Lur had 66,988 followers on Twitter! Read more…
Tinyurl.com is a brilliant service. If you’re new to blogging and don’t know anything about it, tinyurl.com allows you to transform really long URLs (Unique Resource Locator – or the web address to you and me) into shorter and user friendly ones.
As an example, the ‘real’ URL of this post is http://bloggingcrew.com/2009/05/short-url/ and by using tinyurl.com the shortened version is http://tinyurl.com/cjbtxo. Reducing it from 42 characters to 25.
In situations where you have a limited space or characters to use, in Twitter for example, where there are only 140 to play with (20 less than a standard text message), it becomes very useful.
A couple of months ago I came across an even better URL shortening service called bit.ly. With bit.ly you can track the stats behind the short link, like how many clicks it got, where the links came from, which country the user was in when he/she clicked and so on. If used with Twitter, the service also tells you if your message has been re-tweeted. It’s all updated in real time too!
If you’re curious, http://bit.ly/psIFY (only 19 characters) is the shortened version of this post! 
Twitter is increasingly being used as a marketing tool and I recently came across a brilliant application for any business wishing to target fellow Twitter users within a specific geographical area.
By entering details such as location, keyword and search radius (measured in miles), Nearby Tweets will present the 50 most recent tweets within the area.
Although still at the Beta stage I would recommend giving the application a try. 
Unless you have been living on another planet you will certainly be aware of Twitter, even if you don’t know a great deal about what it is or does.
Twitter means different things to different people, but in essence it is a “micro blogging” platform which has exploded in the UK over the last few months. To some degree this is due to several high-profile celebrities, including Jonathan Ross, Chris Moyles and Stephen Fry waxing lyrical about Twitter at every given opportunity. Read more…
