November 4th: Krispy Kreme will celebrate National Election Day by offering all retail customers with an “I Voted” sticker a FREE star shaped doughnut with patriotic sprinkles. (Participating Stores Only)

(Hat-Tip, Okie Campaigns)

But wait, there’s more! Come to participating Ben and Jerrry’s scoop shops on November 4th from 5-8pm, and you’ll get a free scoop of ice cream.

(Hat-Tip, Emily)

From Blog Talk Radio’s Socially Speaking:

Laura (“Pistachio” on Twitter) Fitton is one of the first prominent microbloggers,” with roughly 6,500 readers on Twitter. An early beta tester of Seesmic and Qik, she connects people to new ideas and innovations using all the tools of microsharing. Her innovative use of social media has also gotten the attention of the top minds in technology, as profiled by Naked Conversations author Shel Israel for his Global Survey.

Laura has also been quoted in The New York Times Magazine, BusinessWeek, The New York Times, The LA Times, Newsweek.com, Inc.com, CIO Magazine, CNET, ZDNet and many other magazines, publications, web shows and blogs. She speaks at technology conferences, private industry and guest lectures at Bentley College. On this week’s segment of BlogTalkRadio, Laura Fitton will discuss best practices for microblogging and why companies should begin, if they haven’t already, to engage with this online platform.

Click here or on the podcast link below to listen to Sumaya Kazi (“Sumaya” on Twitter) interview Laura.

Last Monday, I was reading an SEOmoz article, and decided to ask FHK’s IT Guy, Ron, if we should have one of those. Mind you, I had no idea what I was talking about, but after reading information like this, this and this, it sounded like something we should try. Basically, a sitemap is an index for your blog that is easily read by search engines.

Ron explained that we had one at one time, but we’d not yet reinstalled it after our most recent upgrad. In the past week, after installing this sitemap, our traffic from search engines has increased an average of 42% daily. I’d say it was a change that has been well worth it. If you’re a self-hosted blogger, you might want to give it a try.

Ron has installed this plug-in for us - Google XML (Sitemaps Generator for Wordpress). (Also, here is another Wordpress Plugin that creates a sitemap. If you’re using Blogger, Google will automatically create a sitemap for you, but you may want to submit the sitemap to the other search engines; Also, here’s some helpful info for Blogger.com users.)

Edgar Acosta e-mailed us the other day to let us know about his new beta site called, Opposing Views:

Opposing Views helps you uncover all sides of the issues you care about most. Here at www.opposingviews.com, experts go head-to-head on real-life concerns, debating news and events, addressing the questions that keep you up at night. We introduce the questions, the experts present their cases (and disagree with each other), and you leave ready to make well-informed decisions and take action.

Each section of www.opposingviews.com is a channel, including politics, society, health, money, and religion. Our point/counter-point format gives each expert a chance to state their information and opinions on an issue. Meanwhile, the other side objects by calling out the flaws in that information, and then states their own side. Opposing Views brings together the information on the issue, the evidence on each side and their counter-points.

The hundreds of known and credible experts, opinion leaders and advocate groups include: the Obama Campaign, the McCain campaign, the National Rifle Association (NRA), People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), The Sierra Club and Amnesty International, as well as individuals who are authorities on issues of current consumer interest. Collectively, these partner organizations already have been cited as authorities on their topics.

There are five sections - politics, society, health, money, and religion - pretty much every controversial issue of our time (”global warming” is in the “society” section). There is a strict “civility’ code, and experts in various fields. There’s some good info there - check it out.