It was a shorter week for most of us, thanks to the Labour Day long weekend, but it’s still good to come out the other side largely unscathed and happier than ever to approach yet another weekend. To get you ready for the days ahead, sit back and relax with these five great blog posts that talk about social media, social networking, and other online phenomena.

Enkay Blog starts us off with a simple seven-step tutorial to upgrade your blog to WordPress 2.8.4. Some people can find the WordPress upgrade process to be quite intimidating, but this guide really breaks the process down into digestible chunks. Even WordPress novices can handle this!

Dragon Blogger is just as involved with Twitter as everyone else and he finds that TweetDeck is still one of his favorite ways to interact with the microblogging platform. Looking ahead, he has posted a video demonstration of TweetDeck 3 that runs through some of its new features. Perhaps one of the best new features is stopping you from sending tweets longer than 140 characters. This way, you don’t end up with truncated updates.

Shaun Low was working with a client who felt that his target audience would not at all be interested in blogs and social media, but Shaun reminded them that blogs are even for non-blog people. To the target audience of women over the age of 40, a blog post is just like any other webpage. If they use the Internet, they can find value in a blog, even if they don’t read a blog in the same way that a more tech-savvy person would.

Jonathan Bailey offers a different way for you to record your audio podcasts. Rather than relying on just one person to record everything, have you considered using a double-ender instead? This is where both parties in the conversation record their half and then the two components are assembled together after the fact. This makes for a little more work, but the audio quality is typically a lot better.

Jay Piddy is taking a slightly different approach to his apartment hunt. Rather than searching on his own, he turns to the power of his blog to look for a super place to live in Vancouver. There is a good chance that Jay is also posting something similar on sites like Kijiji and Craigslist, but his blog could reach potential landlords that may not see his ads on other websites. Networking is key!

I’ve had the opportunity to attend a few different trade shows, mostly related to technology and consumer electronics. It goes without saying that when you are bombarded with so much information from so many different companies that it can be difficult to keep track of it all. That’s why I always try to grab a press kit from the companies I meet. This way, I can review their products and offerings from the comfort of my hotel room. The press kits are never completely comprehensive, but they can act as good refreshers.

When I go for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I collect a lot of press kits. Some of these are little more than brochures with information, whereas other companies offer digital assets in the form of a CD-ROM. The best companies, however, are the ones that load custom USB flash drives with their press kits. When I get a press kit on a USB drive, I always take it home with me. For the brochures and CDs, I rarely hang on to them after I’ve finished writing the associated articles and news coverage.

If only for this reason, I highly recommend that any company setting up a booth at any trade show or similar kind of event should invest the little bit of extra money in distributing press kits through USB flash drives rather than the regular brochures or CD-ROMs. This adds to an overall sense of professionalism and it serves the secondary purpose of being a promotional product or marketing tool, since the person will take it home, sharing files with friends, family, and colleagues using that drive. This adds even more to the brand presence and helps with brand recognition.

Custom promotional flash drives are very inexpensive these days, giving you the ability to buy branded 1GB USB drives in bulk for only a few dollars each. This is a very small price to pay and a relatively small premium over distributing CD-ROMs or glossy printed documents.

A feed is a format to allow the retrieval of recent content. Feeds are commonly used with blogs, news outlets, etc. If you have ever used a service like Google Reader, than you will know what a feed is. Some people may be more familiar with “RSS Feed”, which is simply one of the types of formats for a feed.

All modern browsers now have an interface for displaying available feeds on the current page to the user. However, you need to add specific markup to your page for browsers to display your available feeds to the user. This is what we will be covering today.

To allow browsers to pick up on our feeds, we’ll need to use the link tag with some special attributes. We’ll need to specify that the feed is alternative content, what type of feed it is (RSS, Atom, etc), the title of the feed and, finally, the URL of the feed. For example, if you have an RSS feed you want to be discovered by browsers, you would add something like this to the head of your document.

[html]<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS Feed" href="http://example.com/rss/" />[/html]

While for an Atom feed, you would need to change the type attribute accordingly:

[html]<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom Feed" href="http://example.com/atom/" />[/html]

You may specify as many feeds as you need to. For UX purposes, you should use a clear and concise title for each feed you specify.

Do you want to have some content persist in your header or footer across themes? Maybe you change your WordPress template from time to time, getting it to suit the season or special event as needed, but you don’t want to bother changing up the code in the theme to put in this special information each time. There is a WordPress plug-in that addresses this very concern.

The oddly yet appropriately named HeFo WordPress plugin allows you to insert HTML snippets in the header or footer of your WordPress blog and these snippets will persist across WordPress themes and templates. What this means is that even when you change to another theme, these HTML snippets will remain in place. Part of the content for your header or footer will then be theme-independent.

For more information, you can check out the official page or you can find the WP-HeFo WordPress plugin listed as part of the plug-in repository on WordPress.org.

You may have heard the news story this morning about how Telus acquired Black’s Photo for $28 million. Company mergers and acquisitions are nothing out of the ordinary in the business world, but there is usually an obvious connection between the two parties involved. For instance, when we heard about T&T Supermarket being acquired by Loblaw’s (Superstore), that made sense since they are both in the supermarket industry.

With Black’s being sold to Telus, the connection isn’t quite as obvious. Black’s is a company that largely caters to the traditional photography market, selling cameras, frames, albums, and other related products. The company has moved into more modern technology by selling digital photo frames and other consumer electronics, but it is still largely perceived as a traditional company. Telus, on the other hand, is inherently known as being more cutting-edge, since it is in the cell phone industry. Further still, what would be the direct connection between cell phones and photography?

Yes, many cell phones come with integrated cameras these days, but the picture quality produced by these camera phones typically pale in comparison to even the cheapest standalone digital cameras. Is there enough of a connection here to make the acquisition worthwhile for Telus? Will there be some convergence and co-branding here with Black’s selling Telus cell phone service too? Or was this strictly a business acquisition with Black’s Photo continuing to operate as it has been for several years?

In considering any new business relationships, mergers, or acquisitions, don’t be afraid to think outside the box to see how these partnerships can be mutually beneficial to all parties involved. If a cell phone company can buy a company best known for developing photo prints, anything is possible.

When Apple first announced the iPhone, many people scoffed at its lack of business-minded functionality. They saw it as a toy for the masses and one that would never be suited for the corporate world. With successive iterations and the introduction of new software, Apple really has transformed the iPhone into a perfectly viable business-minded smartphone.

Interestingly, many other smartphones in this realm use resistive touchscreens that are best designed for use with a stylus. These touchscreens will accept just about any kind of input, so they’re great for gloved fingers and the top tips of writing utensils too. The same can’t be said about the capacitive touchscreen of the iPhone. It needs contact with a human finger, so you can’t be wearing gloves and you can’t use other tools. That’s generally true, but there are specialized products that overcome this little quibble.

One such product is the Touch Pen for iPhone. It works just like a stylus, but it is perfectly compatible with the capacitive touchscreen of the iPhone. It probably won’t be all too useful for multitouch applications, but regular single-touch apps will be just fine. This can be a better tool for handwriting recognition and similar kinds of functionality.

It’s not for everyone, but for people who want a stylus-based interface with the iPhone, the Touch Pen could be just the thing. Find it on Brando for $11.50.