A recent Royal Pingdom blog post stated, “[T]he WordPress.com blogging service is growing with an average of about 11,500 blogs per day. So, if we use this 11,500-per-day number as a starting point, how much would WordPress.com grow in a year? The answer is: nearly 4.2 million. (365 x 11,500 = 4,197,500)”

The post then continued, “If WordPress.com hosted a bit over 5 million blogs at the start of 2009, and if we take the increasing growth rate into consideration, it looks quite likely that WordPress.com could pass 10 million hosted blogs by the end of 2009.”

Impressive, eh? The fact that WordPress.com’s got such a huge user base should tell you that the software does a pretty good job of facilitating writing. What’s more, since everybody’s used to it, it should make your readers feel at home on your blog.

Of course, whatever works for you is indeed what works for you, so don’t feel any pressure to change. The software behind your blog probably isn’t the first thing that’ll attract people to your writing.

Hey, work is work. And it prevents Britney Spears from tweeting about how cute it is her kids are playing in old refrigerators. “We’re recycling, y’all!”

According to the New York Times, writers are being hired by the famous to update blogs and social networks for them, too.

But don’t knock it. It may be that Twitter is actually good writing practice. Poetry is the art of packing meaning into a few carefully selected words. On Twitter you’ve got 140 characters to say something that counts. On Facebook, 160. Web 2.0 could produce the next Hemingway.

That’s not so weird. People are already publishing Twitter novels. Stories told 140 characters at a time. Of course, the reader has to follow in real time. Otherwise the story just comes out backwards.

So, tweet on, fellow wordsmiths. Call it an exercise in concision.

For example, someone I know recently won third prize in a contest from WritingRoom.com for submitting a novel. For her prize, she had her book published, and they are helping her market it, and got it in bookstores. Now her book is being sold at big name retailers like Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

She also got a literary agent out of the deal, and is moving right along in her journey to writing for a living. This is only one example though.

Amazon themselves have contests. If you search for “writing contest” on Google, you will get all kinds of results, and all kinds of opportunities to promote your writing.

That’s just the thing though. If you win, that’s fantastic, but even if you don’t, you’re still getting your name out there, and your work is getting read by professionals in the writing field (they still have to judge it right?).

Either way, you’re still getting in some valuable networking, and it can only help your career. That is unless your writing just isn’t good and you build a reputation as a poor author. That’s why you should make sure your work is truly ready to be judged before entering it any contest. It will not only save you embarrassment and keep your reputation in better regards, the judges will appreciate it too.

Key point: The more verbs used, the higher the chance for confusion, the higher the chance your prose is too slow.

Grueling, even.

Adverbs, strings of adjectives in succession, too many verbs all have the same problem. They slow down the prose and worse, they dilute the prose. I call an addiction to modifiers “parts-of-speech abuse.” The more words and commas in your sentence, the more bumps and snags you inflict upon your reader as you drag him along.

There’s a place for complicated style. It’s usually in academic books nobody but academics read. They read them to feel smarter, the same purpose the author had when he wrote the books, both reader and author having a masochistic and self-important approach to literature.

The rest of us like our journeys smooth and painless. I didn’t say simple. I said smooth and painless. Real style isn’t how many words one can cram into a sentence. Real style is how much meaning one can cram into a few words.

So take a look at your prose and count the number of times you use a compound verb, especially compound verbs beginning with had or was. See if you can get around them.

In addition to the pace of your prose, notice also the rhythm and whether it is balanced. The word “had,” for example, is short but dramatic like a cymbal smash in your prose rhythm. It slows down the beat some, and is sometimes a very necessary element if you’re rhythm conscious. In scatting, the sound would be something like had, hadda da, hadda da, badoom badoom badoom. In some instances, the h and a are dropped and it’s more of an “ud” sound, depending on what precedes it. Trim your rhythm accordingly.

Another problem area is the lesser-used future perfect progressive (perfect tenses in general are cumbersome), which almost nobody uses in regular speech. In various forms, it usually comes out something like “will have been traveling.” That’s four verbs to consider in one short phrase. It’s worse if made into a complicated conditional: “If I had been running at the usual time, I would have been being eaten by a mountain lion right now.”

Yick. The grammar is correct, but the sentence is awkward, unpleasant, and unduly complicated, cramming all that time-conscious perfect tense conditional stuff into one long string of confusion. It also creates a weird paradox whereby the sentence is too slow and stumbling (especially for a sentence about running), but it also conveys information too fast to create a nice suspenseful presentation of the action. This denies the full tension and release present within the narrative. “I was ten minutes late, literally running late for my morning jog. Just under the rock eave, a mountain lion’s face fur grew red with the hot blood of a more punctual jogger. Good thing my mother had called.”

Okay, so I’ve embellished that a bit with style and narrative, but my point is clear right? Past perfect tense is slipped in there at the end, when it is needed to indicate the timing of the call, but does not slow down the prose until it is time to slow down and reflect. Some confuse passive voice with past progressive. In this case, “was running,” which isn’t even fully presented, is past progressive showing action while describing idiomatically what was going on. The language serves a dual purpose. This is different, obviously, from “my shoes were pulled on” in contrast with “I pulled on my shoes.”

So go forth, fellow writers, and trim back the hads and the other helping and linking and being verbs. Rearrange those passive voice sentences unless they’re absolutely necessary for some weird artistic reason you’re insisting upon. Keep your prose active, swift, and rhythmically beautiful.

“Self-googling” is a term which means querying one’s self in the Google search engine. It has become quite a trend recently, especially since the use of the internet has become widespread over the recent years. It might sound narcissistic at first, but for web professionals, self-googling should be second nature. Think of it as part of your every day routine. Self-google at least once a day. Don’t take it against yourself if you haven’t done it before, it’s perfectly normal and yes, recommended.

Do you self-google? I do it. You should, too. In fact, I encourage all bloggers to Google themselves and I can see various reasons why you should do it.

1. Know who’s talking about you.

Usually, when people quote you in their blogs, they link to your post. Doing that, you’re instantly given notice that someone’s talking about you. However, not everyone follows the practice. In fact, when I self-googled a few days ago, I found out a web site has posted a rebuttal of one of my articles for another blog. If I didn’t perform a search on my name, I wouldn’t have known about it. It’s always best to know if anyone’s referring to you so you can post your rebuttal of the rebuttal or even just to know in general, what people think about you. You’d be surprised. I’ve seen people talk about top bloggers in big forums without linking back to them. And let’s just say, the comments aren’t always flattering.

2. Know what other people see.

Have you applied for a gig recently? Chances are, the client or employer might do a search on you. Do you know what the client would find? When I first started applying for freelance jobs, unbeknownst to me, a query of my name results in several links to social networking sites, irrelevant forums, personal blogs and the like. Do you really want other people to see all those? What if you have embarrassing personal posts? Or a long-forgotten comment in a forum where you’ve behaved badly? When I first performed a Google search on my own name and found out I had several results from forums and blogs when I was much, MUCH younger, I went to work and deleted blog posts and comments. I was lucky enough I could do so. Some forums don’t allow you to delete anything you’ve written after a particular time.

3. Gauge the Popularity of your Blog

As was said earlier, when people link to you, it’ll be easy to say who talks about you. There are more who won’t link to you and mention you in passing, however. When people mention you in passing, and frequently at that too, you could lump those instances with the number of back links to get a glimpse of your blog’s popularity.

Self-googling has many uses, despite sound a bit narcissistic. Think of it as being a part of the new media where every type of information about you that you put on the web is accessible by a vast number of people. Try it, it might do you good.