Breaking insider story:

As YourHub.com staff meeting guests, fellow blogger Barbara Neff and I learned that a competition may be in the works. I'm sure our friendship can withstand it. To enhance the YourHub audience during March newspaper sweeps, submissions reaching 5000 views may or may not win real cash money. I hope it wasn't a secret before the details were ironed out, but someone should have known better than to tell me.

At first, the act of blog self-promotion seemed tantamount to trotting out Chelsea Clinton during the presidential election process and/or reenacting a VH1 D-list celebrity dating show candidate's YouTube campaign. Could shaking my booty for 15 minutes of fame have seismic repercussions, metaphorical or not?

I'm not a blog snob, apparent by non- War and Peace topics like hairballs, anchovy pizza, and what I throw in the trash. After a few days, my mental wheels started grinding like my teeth: could I accomplish seemingly unattainable cyber-attention without Britney Spears histrionics? I've always believed one should stretch as a person, learning new things, especially if it involves wasting lots of time.

Thus began the quest of How to Pimp a Blog. The first thing I discovered is there is a website called PimpMyBlog.com. I'm a member now. Apparently, interconnectivity to every imaginable site is key: Places called Squidoo, Mybloglog, Spicypage and StumbleUpon. Expanding into cyberspace like a noxious cloud, I set up a dedicated mail account, compartmentalizing my web persona. Also, I'd hate to confuse any related correspondence with my bills.

I still have to figure out embedded codes and widgets. Whenever I go to help menus, step-by-step instructions end with a cheery "That's all!" like a Warner Brother's cartoon. Too bad I didn't understand much of the previous text.

There is also something called a "ping." So far I've learned it is not half of a table tennis match. I am more familiar with the "pong" side of that equation, back when I could compete at video games. Nor do pings involve immersing your computer in water for naval sonar. One initiates pings through sites called Pingomatic, Pingoat, and Technorati, where I claimed my YourHub blog. Who knows if I've already violated one of the terms in all the users agreements I've electronically signed without reading?

You can Digg, Furl, and Reddit blogs, too, sobriquets furthering the analogy to Flavor Flav's potential girlfriends' nicknames. I haven't gotten to those sites yet, but I have until March.

I wish I paid attention at a BloggerMeetup about algorithms and search engine listings I attended a year ago. At the time, I only wanted to write and meet a few people, sharing stories and beer. That's still my primary goal, except my right brain doesn't know what my left brain is doing anymore.