Another year is upon us and we are all looking to upgrade and update our blogs. So when it comes to wordpress, what plugins will make your blog stand out and which are best?After blogging for over 2 years, and writing a few plugins myself, here is my list of the best of the best wordpress plugins. 15 Top notchwordpress plugins, guaranteed to make your blog if anything, a little nicer than it was before.

Show Top Commenters - A great way to get your readers more enthusiastic and develop more discussions, by displaying their name & number of comments they have left recently to your sidebar.

Akismet - Intelligently blocks spam comments. Checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not.

Bad Behavior - prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots.

Google XML Sitemaps Generator - creates a sitemap of all articles on your WordPress blog. Helps Google and other search engines index every article you write.

SEO Title Tag - Optimize your wordpress title tags for search engines. Enabling you to edit the title tags of posts, pages, category pages, tag pages etc.

Related Posts - Will show a list of posts related to keywords of your choosing in current posts. A nifty plugin to bring back older posts.

WP-Notable - displays a series of icons below each post allowing your readers to easily submit you to many different social bookmarking (Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, Facebook, Youtube, etc.) and networking sites.

WordPress.com Stats - Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.

AdSense-Deluxe - is a WordPress plugin offering advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts.

Global Translator - Translate your blog into multiple languages in a search engine friendly way.

Feedburner Feedsmith - Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from.

InstantUpgrade - A plugin that will upgrade your version of Wordpress to the most recent version (or any other version) with a click of the mouse! If you hate upgrading Wordpress, this plugin is for you.

Gregarious- A social bookmarking plugin that integrates the Share This plugin, the Digg API, and a slick AJAX interface. Gregarious is so easy to setup, it requires no template edits!

404 Notifier - This plugin allows you to see how much of your traffic is getting 404′d and what page(s) they are trying to access. You can retrieve this data via an RSS feed or email.

Manage Multiple Blogs - Otherwise known as MMB, this plugin allows you to manage all your wordpress blogs from one session, eliminating the need for 500 tabs and logging in to each admin panel repetitively. A definite must for any blog owner who is trying to administer more than 5 blogs.

So I was bored in between websites and school work today and came across meez.com, a unique website that allows you, the user, to create a virtual 3d replication of yourself, for your own and others amusement. Viral media anyone? Not too sure yet, they launched back in March 07 and were in beta up until late October, so anything is possible really. Considering this is the first ive heard of it, it doesn’t look like it took off with a bang… however it must be starting to circulate.

Meez allows its users to create their own animated avatars, or “3D I.D.” graphics, for the Web. They partnered with photobucket which allows for easy hosting of your 3d ID graphic as well as smooth exports.

So after some fooling around, here is my end result:

Well its a new year, and that means that I should probably get off my ass and get down to business as usual. So for 2008 I figured I would give some insight as to the best ways in which to garner traffic to your website for the new year.

Social Networks

With the booming explosion of facebook and myspace, marketers should once again look to utilize these resources in order to drive substantial traffic to their websites. Numerous web developers have seen great success using facebook ads to publicize their sites or push conversions on their affiliate offers, and either way you will see improvements.

Blogs

Blogs are going to continue to be utilized in 2008, with networks like blogrush and mybloglog you can expect to drive traffic to your sites using the traffic and social systems of these sites. The best thing about blogrush is that it is totally free and the traffic you drive can be targetted for your specific niche. The best thing about blogs is the fact that if your writing unique content you can get other webmasters to help build your traffic flow simply by linking to your articles. Content will always be king.

Social Networking & Bookmarks

We will continue to use social networks such as Digg, Sphinn, Delicious, Stumbleupon, reddit and the long list of up and comers to drive traffic and build backlinks to our sites. While getting your stories dugg or stumbled isnt the easiest thing to do, as long as you keep submitting viral stories sooner or later you will start to see traffic flowing. While the majority of the users are going to be ad blind, it will still be one of the best ways to drive traffic and backlinks for your sites.

Google

Still the powerhouse of the internet, valued at $66.5 Billion US Dollars, and not something that looks to change anytime soon. Getting your websites and articles ranked high in the SERPS will ALWAYS drive you targetted traffic and tons of it depending on the relevance and search popularity of your terms. While backlinks and SEO are the most important things to consider when trying to rank for google, once you struggle with rankings for awhile and work on building high quality niche relevant links to your pages, you will start to see significant traffic from the search engine leader.

Article Writing

Well content is still king in 2008… Not much has changed there. The only thing that has changed is who is writing your content. With guest blog writers and some very inexpensive article writing services available on the various webmaster forums around the net, you can keep a steady stream of articles flowing for less than $50 a month if you know where to look. However if you have garnered a reputable name for yourself in the industry you can even find yourself writing articles for others and making a pretty penny.

Overall in 2008 you should look to continue to utilize the booming social media networks and social platforms to drive traffic that is targeted for your niches, these are the top performers right now in terms of my traffic generation and I suspect that these methods shall remain prevalent for the rest of the year.