There is something magical in black and white photography. There is something truly inspirational and thought-provoking in the absence of color. Maybe because it makes you imagine the same picture in color, maybe because your eye is accustomed to seeing everything in color and thus the absence of it seems so amazing.

One thing is clear: if you want to get inspired, you need to dig into black and white art, and here’s the list of tools and resources to find most inspirational black and white images on the web:

1. Pic Search

Pic Search is a great image search engine that has black and white filter in its advanced search section. Besides that, you can also enjoy other handy options of the tool:

• Search by image type (portrait, landscape, squire, all);
• Search images by size (wallpaper, tiny, medium, large, huge);
• See relevant search suggestions:

Note: thanks a lot to Edward Khoo who shared the tool in his overview of best image search engines.

2. Google Image Search

It is funny that plenty of people search Google without having the slightest idea about all its search options. Black&White image search is just one of such lesser-known possibilities. The option hides behind “Show options” link:

3. Yahoo Image Search

Yahoo! image search deserves a mention here for two reasons: (1) it does support black-and-white search and (2) its main source of images is Flickr, so its like search Flickr but on steroids. The “black-and-white” filter can be found in advanced search along with other cool filters:

• Filter by size (small, medium, large, wallpaper or custom size);
• Restrict by type (search only from Flickr or exclude Flickr images all over);
• Filter by distribution license type:

4. Bing Image Search

Bing has a very lovely image search engine: besides usual filters (like color, size, type, layout, etc), it also offers a really handy interface that allows to see multiple images at a time (details will be displayed on mouseover):

5. Multicolr

Multicolr is a Flickr-based tool that allows to search by color; thus if you want to find only black-and-white photos, all you nee to do is to select colors from white to black:

6. Flickr groups:

• B&W: currently contains over 1, 400K images and more than 80K members. The group has very active discussion boards as well where you will be able to find cool collections like this High Contrast B&W thread for example.
• Black and White: currently includes 2, 120K of images. The group also has a very active forum that has plenty of cool discussions like this one: what’s your best black and white sunset scene
• Black and White Photo Award: currently contains over 76K high-quality black and white photos.
• Black & White with a Touch of Color: one of the best Flickr groups I ever came across: it contains B&W photos with only one color;
• Black and White Artwork: a group containing B&W non-photography illustrations.
• Life in Classic Black and White: the group that helps to see “the life around you from busy city street to a quiet calm landscape, nature, people, etc” in black and white.
• Macro In Black & White: the collection of black and white macro-photography

7. More sources:

• Photobucket Black & White (sorted by popularity)
• Black and White Club at Deviant Art: an awesome group of creative photography and imagery.

Any more? Share your sources of black and white inspiration!

The guest post was provided by Ann Smarty, a search blogger and social media enthusiast. If you love guest posting (like Ann does), join MyBlogGuest, the community of guest bloggers.

Today, especially in a world of web 2.0,  where online presentation of your product is essential,  it is extremely useful to be able to place your logo, product name or a photo on a highly memorable shape, such as… A carton of milk, dvd case, book, or even a front of usb stick. Can you imagine it being easy and possible with just one click in Photoshop? Yes, imagine you need zero skills with Photoshop to be able to create gift boxes, credit card designs, software boxes, CD’s and everything else, including of course –  e-book covers. All this in 3D highest quality, 300 DPI, design? Yep, it’s possible, and just yesterday when I searched for yet another semi decent plug in to make my life easier when presenting screenshots of wordpress themes to clients, I came across photoshopactionscripts.com.

I must admit, that with all my comprehensive knowledge in PS, and after seeing almost all the actions available today on the market, I was truly impressed. I stayed all night playing with them and dozens of creative ideas passed through my thoughts when I browsed their blog. Anyone who is making money off their ebooks, is going to love this set. Not only, upon your purchase, you get plenty of bonus graphics and 40 pre-designed ebook covers, but also it’s a proven fact that high quality graphics sell better, means when you present your product in such a unique and high quality way, you have a good chance of increasing your sales. Isn’t it worth it? Just look at the top selling ebooks, they all have a very clean 3D visualization design to help the sales going.

The example above is just one of the 50 Photoshop actions available in the set. The quality and size of graphics is superb beyond imagination, weather you are looking to have fun, searching Google for ebook software or looking for a way to present your product in the best possible way, in 3D — this set of actions is an absolute must have.

As you can expect, such an incredible set of actions will not come for free but it’s definitely worth every penny, not to mention the valuable bonuses you get with your download absolutely free. There is a 60 days money back guaranteed policy, so you have nothing to lose and there is no risk. Bear in mind that the download link you are redirected to, will only be valid for 72 hours, so download and make a backup right away. Creating product bundles has never been easier, and like I said already, these actions will be perfect for people with no Photoshop skills, as you can avail of their pre-designed graphics and just run the action with your own text in the cover, but it will also be a perfect addition for an advanced graphical designer. Stop paying others to do this kind of work for you when you can earn money making quality graphics and presentation for others. Another way to make money off these actions is to join their affiliate program, which seems to me must be very profitable considering the volume of sales they harvest.  Check them out, you won’t be able to resist them!

Yesterday, I finally decided to subscribe to aWeber. After hearing a lot of positive reviews about them, and after seeing them in use by some of the most popular websites online, I thought they are worth a try, since even though they are not all that cheap, they offer a 30-days money back guarantee so I won’t lose anything by giving them a shot.  What I can say now already is that for the few dozens of dollars a month you can boost your readers count, and get the visitors to return to your website.  Now I see, it is no surprise that web moguls like Copyblogger, ProBlogger and JohnChow use some kind of email newsletters tool, other than the free Feedburner.

It took me about a day to figure how things work, but the generous amount of videos they provide users with were truly handy. What I did not take into account though, is that Feedburner readers would need to opt-in again before aWeber will send them any mails, and once they do, they will get blog broadcasts both from aWeber and Feedburner, which means I lose some of my readers because not everyone is going to re-opt-in (over the past 24 hours, only 1/4 confirmed their email address), and at the same time — I will bomb with same feed those poor souls who did opt in and will now receive updates both through Feedburner and aWeber (don’t worry, I am working on fixing that!). Anyway,  So here my brief overview so far:

Pro’s:

• Very easy to use interface, very detailed statistics and very customizable.
• Ability to customize your regular Feed updates (for those who subscribed to your FeedBurner by email), you can preview example of my last newsletter.
• Reporting the subscribers to Feedburner, which makes your feedburner readers count on the cricklet grow nicely and rapidly (it already jumped to 1000+ readers over night and I expect this number to multiply itself soon.
• Unlimited emails to send. Newsletters, feed updates, follow ups.
• It’s very easy to “persuade” people into subscribing, especially if you offer something in return (such as our upcoming premium Freebies).
• In-Built spam indicator that can alarm you if your email contains something that might get marked as spam by someone’s email client.
• Excellent support. I already tried the live chat and email support out, 100% satisfaction, and I was asking questions that were milled over the in FAQ section yet they politely explained every detail instead of sending me to read the FAQ, like some support services do.

Con’s:

• Expensive. Since aWeber allows users such a convenient and easy way to subscribe, the number of subscribers will grow tremendously and extremely fast, which will soon enough start draining your pocket.
• Unsubscribed readers still count towards the number of readers you are paying for (unless you delete them manually and they do not count any longer). This is a con because, hypothetically speaking,  if you are on a vacation and a great deal of your readers unsubscribed, yet a lot of new readers subscribed, you could be jumping into a new pricing category and your credit card will be charged accordingly unless you pay attention in time and delete the unsubscribed readers from a database.
• Readers need to opt-in, even if they already double opt-in in previous mailing program you used (mailChimp, Feedburner, etc). Needless to explain why is it bad because lazy online readers are not going to opt-in over and over, or simply forgetting to opt-in using the one and only email aWeber sends you can cost you in a reader.
• Losing Traffic and Ad clicks. Just like with any email marketing, when users get the content directly to their email, with no ads, no extra time waiting for the page to load, the user has no real reason to visit the blog. Hence the bigger is your email readership, the smaller are the chances to have your Adsense clicked and traffic raise.
• Comments go down. When user finishes to read and sees the comments form, he is more likely to comment as opposed to situation when he gets the article to his email box, reads and just continues to read another email. He won’t go to your site to read or leave a comment, unless the topic really touched him.
• Unlike Feedburner, you must disclose your physical address when using aWeber (or any other email newsletters tool) and you don’t always want to tell each and everyone one online who clicked on your email subscription — where exactly do you live, as well as your home and cellphone number.

As you can see, at the moment I have picked more con’s than pro’s, but it cold be my beginner’s observation and hope I will be able to post more positive overviews of the service.

Your web business probably gets product inquiries from potential customers around the globe. Inquiries come via e-mail and your web site, and you try to send information to each hot prospect as quickly as you can. You know that you can drastically increase the likelihood of making a sale by satisfying each person’s need for information quickly!

But, after you’ve delivered that first bit of information to your prospect, do you send him any further information?

If you are like most Internet marketers, you don’t.

When you don’t follow that initial message with additional information later on, you let a valuable prospect slip from your grasp! This is a potential customer who may have been very interested in your products, but who lost your contact information, or was too busy to make a purchase when your first message reached him.

Often, a prospect will purposely put off making a purchase, to see if you find him important enough to follow up with later. When he doesn’t receive a follow up message from you, he will take his business elsewhere.

Are you losing profits due to inconsistent and ineffective follow up?

Following up with leads is more than just a process – it’s an art. In order to be effective, you need to design a follow up system, and stick to it, EVERY DAY! If you don’t follow up with your prospects consistently, INDIVIDUALLY, and in a timely fashion, then you might as well forget the whole follow up process.

Consistent follow up gets results!

When I first started marketing and following up with prospects, I used a follow up method that I now call the “List Technique.” I had a large database containing the names and e-mail addresses of people who had specifically requested information about my products and services. These prospects had already received my first letter by the time they requested more information, so I used the company’s latest news as a follow up piece.

I would write follow up newsletters every now and then, and send them, in one mass mailing, to everyone who had previously requested information from me. While this probably did help me win a few additional orders, it wasn’t a very good follow up method. Why isn’t the “List Technique” very effective?

• The List Technique isn’t consistent. Proponents of the List Technique tend to only send out follow up messages when their companies have “big news”.
• List Technique messages don’t give the potential customer any additional information about the product or service in question. He can’t make a more informed buying decision after receiving a newsletter! If someone is wondering whether your company sells the best knick-knacks, what does he care that you’ve just moved your headquarters?
• List Technique messages convey a “big list” mentality to your potential customers. When I used to write follow up messages using the List Technique, I was writing news bulletins to everyone I knew! I should have been sending a personal message to each individual who wanted to know more about my products.

What follow up method really works?

Following up with each lead individually, multiple times, but at set intervals, and with pre-written messages, will dramatically increase sales! Others who use this same technique confirm that they have all at least doubled the sales of various products! In order to set this system up, though, you need to do some planning.

First, you’ll need to develop your follow up messages. If you’ve been marketing on the Internet for any length of time, then you should already have a first informative letter. Your second letter marks the beginning of the follow up process, and should go into more detail than the first letter. Fill this letter with details that you didn’t have the space to add to the first letter. Stress the BENEFITS of your products or services!

Your next 2-3 follow up messages should be rather short. Include lists of the benefits and potential uses of your products and services. Write each letter so that your prospects can skim the contents, and still see the full force of your message.

The next couple of follow up messages should create a sense of urgency in your prospect’s mind. Make a special offer, giving him a reason to order NOW instead of waiting any longer. After reading these follow up messages, your prospect should want to order immediately!

Phrase each of your final 1 or 2 follow up messages in the form of a question. Ask your prospect why he hasn’t yet placed an order? Try to get him to actually respond. Ask if the price is to high, the product isn’t the right color or doesn’t have the right features, or if he is looking for something else entirely. (By this time, it’s unlikely that this person will order from you. However, his feedback can help you modify your follow up letters or products, so that other prospects will order from you.)

The timing of your follow up letters is just as important as their content. You don’t want one prospect to receive a follow up the day after he gets your initial informative letter, while another prospect waits weeks for a follow up!

Always send an initial, informative letter as soon as it is requested, and send the first follow up 24 hours afterwards. You want your hot prospects to have information quickly, so that they can make informed buying decisions!

Send the next 2-3 follow up messages between 1 and 3 days apart. Your prospect is still hot, and is probably still shopping around! Tell him about the benefits of your products and services, as opposed to your competitors’. You will make the sale!

Send the final follow up messages later on. You certainly don’t want to annoy your prospect! Make sure that these last letters are at least 4 days apart.

Following up effectively seems complicated, but it doesn’t have to be! So many potential customers are lost because of poor follow up – don’t you want to be one of the few to get it right?

Posted by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

We all know that sometimes, when we have a PSD design at hand and want to get it coded — speed plays a significant role. No one likes waiting for the coder to get back to you, discussing the details and then waiting for your file to get ready. With RapidPSD the slicing and coding is taken to a whole new level — it’s done automatically. Yes, this is yet another online web 2.0 tool that was meant to save you time, money and a lot, a lot, a lot of human resources.

So how does it work?

Very simple. You create a PSD file and tag it correctly as described on RapidPSD website (if you don’t tag correctly, it will not get coded correctly, so pay attention there!). Create an account at RapidPSD (costs $40 per month or you can try it for 2 days, costs $10 only). Then, simply upload your file and you will get a sliced, coded, automatically generated website from your psd, with coded forms and correctly set CSS file. The entire process is fully automatic, and once the page is generated, it’s sent to your email address. Well, honestly it’s about time that auto psd-to-html tool was invented, we can’t keep hand-coding forever!

Why is it good?

This is ideal for designs who have a big volume of work for clients who wish to give the design a test drive but are yet unsure if this will be the final version of the design. Instead of slicing, coding, spending a whole day making a demo that may eventually go to the trash can, you can simply and quickly generate a coded version online and show to your client. Since the payment is made per month, and not per item, it will suit better those who have plenty of designs to make and little time to code them all. Among other features, RapidPSD can create ImageMaps and buttons for your website, generate drop down lists, and soon they are going to add one more feature — PSD localization, that will allow users to change the language of their website.

The tool is truly powerful, easy to use and very convenient, — for example, if you want the sliced header image to be saved in .jpg format and not .png, you simply add “.jpg”, that layer name, is it! Just like any modern web 2.0 online tool, there is no need to download or install any program, everything is done online using your browser and works with all Operating Systems.

Please also note that it generates a static XHTML webpage, no CMS integration.

Downsides? It’s billed monthly via credit card so paypal users will not be able to avail of their service, yet.

Bottom line is, it’s new innovative, time saving and if you ask me — very cheap. If you are an average design company that produces 20 designs a month, where will you find a coder who will slice the psd into html for $2 per page within an hour and re-code it unlimited number of times if needed?

As unbelievable as it sounds, Google has released its own browser. Hooray! It looks like the big G is trying to dominate the market in every possible way and it is, of course, great to see another product from their inn of wonders, but the question is, how successful can Google Chrome possibly become? After a few good years on the market, the best (in my opinion) browser  — Firefox couldn’t even gain 50% of the users to switch from IE, so how fat is the chance Google Chrome, despite all the great features, will not only put out Firefox’s success but also push IE aside? I reckon Firefox users will not be willing to switch, so maybe about 5% – 15% of IE users will give it a go and stick with a less buggy piece of sortware, but that’s about it. Anyway, judge it yourself!

This post is strictly for Firefox users, and as I’d assume, a self-respecting webmaster will not use any other browser. So I wanted to share with you my new find, which you must have have installed: Webmaster Extension for FireFox.

Remember the SEO tools for visually crawling the website, just so you could see the information on each outgoing link on the web page? Not only such tools normally take forever to run, but they also require a lot of extra effort and cannot be used in real time while browsing. This plug-in, Webmaster2 by 3n9.org, works seamlessly on the background, and whenever you open any website, you will see 2 neat icons added before each link (see example below), giving you all the information you need to know even before clicking the link: Google PageRank, Complete Rank and Trust Rank, that will prevent you from entering potentially malicious websites.

It’s ideal for keeping an eye on outgoing links from your own site, as well as scanning basic info from each link before even clicking. This works, however, only for real outgoing links and will not display info (naturally..) on https, ftp, direct images links and inner links. This means you will not have a flood of mini-indicating icons where they are useless.

Needless to add that this extension is free to download here, and it can be easily deactivated whenever you desire. I believe soon it will become one of the most popular plug ins for Firefox (thanks to its flexibility and smooth work), so don’t forget who introduced you to this one! I have downloaded it yesterday on Firefox 3, installation was easy and it doesn’t seem to slow down my browser at all, plus no bugs detected, (at least yet) so check it out!

So, we are in the era of everything being web 2.0, and I don’t mean only these sleazy glossy buttons and badges. I am talking about the dynamic applications, the ability to make wonders online and make the internet more interactive, so let’s see what great applications you probably have missed..

Interactive Images and Photo Resources

Dumpr.net – While their logo is not particular web 2.0, they offer a great way to play around with photos – just upload and select the effect you want. Many interesting effects to chose from and the site is integrated with flickr.com. Most of the site is free to use but some effects require to have a paid subscription.

Sumopaint.com

Here you can doodle online, it’s somewhere between paintbrush and Photoshop, very interactive and works in external window, no need to download any program.

PhotoViewr.com

If you are a Facebook junkie, you are going to love this one. While everyone uses the standard in-built gallery facility of Facebook, you can stand out with a splendid 3D flash gallery. All you need to do is add their application to your Facebook account and add images.

Flickr Tools – Flickr is good, but we want more. We want to convert images to flash galleries, make puzzles from our photos, search for Creative Commons content and see what we can use, we want to integrate, optimize and pimp our Flickr profile, and the huge collection of tools offered here should keep you busy for a few days days.

AncestryPress

Very cosy and cute application for bringing your family together – create family trees and albumns online, could be an ideal present for a family member. You need to register to create a project, but don’t worry, it’s free (but printing s not).

Bloggers Tools

BlogRolled.com – Make money with your Blogroll. Similar model to Text-Link-Ads only the process is less painful since you add the links manually (if purchased) and need not add any scripts to your server. Why not, better than keep promoting 7 default link pointing to wordpress.org.

FeedJit.com

I am sure you have seen this one on other blogs, but maybe you didn’t know how to add it. This widget built and offered freely by FeedJit, allows you to show live traffic stats, popular post and display a visual map of visitors. You can add the widget to Blogger, TypePad and Wordpress, as well as customize the colours.

Blogged.com – Submit your blog for more exposure on the Blogged.com and find other great blogs that has interesting stories.

RatingBurner.com – There is a huge informal competition over the FeedBurner readers count and here you can see who has the biggest readers community with subcription trends (up/down and percentage). Submitting your blog to the list takes seconds.

RSSHugger.com This is a new website developed to help bloggers promote their blogs, and to help visitors discover new blogs that write about subjects that the readers are interested in. Through the power of the internet and viral marketing, rssHugger looks to bring blog writers and blog readers closer together.

Wigitize.com – Generate your own widget. Show the latest site updates of any RSS/Atom feed, embedded in your Blog with a few lines of code — fully customizable with CSS.

Online Design Tools

BgPatterns.com

Incredible tool for creating backgrounds online, simple choose colour, shape, scale, rotate and experiment. Very useful for designers who seek a nice background but struggle to find — here is a chance to make your own without any software.

Bomomo.com – Create abstract art online – very engaging and interesting tool for doodling. You can create an abstract image and put it as a header for your website.

jQuery.com

Revolution in themes building – the ThemeRoller tool by jQuery.  Simply choose your style and colors, backgrounds image opacity, font and then download a custom theme file to your computer. Incredibly simple to use for outstandingly neat results.

Adobe’s Kuler – If you are struggling to come up with a professional, juicy yet not eye-blinding colors-scheme for your design, you should definitely try this tool, offered to you by the mighty Adobe.

Icons, Icons, Icons…

IconsPedia.com

Submit and choose from an incredible variety of glossy, high quality Icons, devided into categories.

IconLook.com – Search through a big database of glossy and juicy, as well as tiny and neat icons. You can set desired icon size while searching as well. We don’t recomend to use their tagcloud, you will go crazy..

IconBuffet.com

Choose from a big variety of icons, professional, bold, minimalist, fun, standard, for blogs, and so on.. Many styles for different oocasions, but all are very pro looking.

FreeIconsDownload.com – Aggrigate database of various icons, by different designers.

Iconika.com

One of the most well known Icons designers brings you the freebies.  Quite a few high quality and very original icons to chose from.

Frexy.com

Tons of free icons from the designer behind Frexy.com — all of them are unique, very beautiful, and even though they are what you’d call “web 2.0″, they are by no means cheesy and too glossy, they can be used now and in 20 years from now, they will still look good.

web20badges.com – Oh well, some people still hunt the glossy web 2.0 badges, so if you didn’t staff a few badges on your website while the crazy was still on, here is your chance to do it without any knowledge in design, Photoshop or… or anything else.

Just Cool Tools

subyo.com – With this tool you can find, use and create subtitles for YouTube videos. Quick and easy.

Startyourtube.com – Start your own online video sharing website in a few simple steps.

Orgoo.com – Put all your IM addresses, sms, video chatting in one basket.