Blogging is one of the most popular activities people do on the
Internet today. According to Technorati, there currently are
seventy-five thousand (75,000) new blogs everyday and about 1.2
million new blog updates everyday. As the activity of blogging
gets more popular, there will be more and more tools that will
be created to specifically address the needs of the blogging
population of the Internet users. This article will attempt to
catalog some of the best ever blogging tools created for users.
To help users find the tools that they need, these blog tools
are classified here into four main categories – blog
publishing, blog reading, blog searching and the blog toolbox –
a collection of tools important to the serious blogger.
Blog publishing
Blog publishing tools can be further categorized into three
sub-categories: Online blogging services, do-it-yourself blog
publishing platforms, and accessory blog-publishing tools.
Blogging services provide the blog engine that you need to get
yourself started in blogging as well as the hosting. Though
most of the services offer this for free, some of them require
that you become paying members in order to fully enjoy all the
benefits.
Blogger – Google’s Blogger is one of the earliest blogging
services and it helped popularize blogging. It is one of the
easiest ways to get started blogging because of the focus on
usability and easy blog creation. The Blog this feature, which
is integrated in many Google tools, makes posting to Blogger
possible in many different situations. It is also integrated
with Google’s Adsense advertising program that makes
monetization of your blog quick and easy.
TypePad – Typepad is the largest paid-blogging service around.
As mentioned, a paid subscription is required to create a blog
using the service. It uses the Movable Type blogging technology
but it caters more to the non-technical users.
Wordpress.com – one of the newcomers in the online blogging
services, Wordpress gets its credibility from the success and
popularity of the blogging engine that it uses –Wordpress.
Xanga – Xanga is one of the largest blog-networks, boasting a
user base of 27 million users worldwide. It edges over its
competitors by offering excellent community features such as
blog rings, metros, and a social networking profile system.
MSN Spaces – Although it is relatively a newcomer in the
blogging services space, MSN Spaces boasts of a huge user base,
because of the ease at which existing MSN services users were
able to start blogging. The integration with the rest of MSN’s
services (hotmail, messenger) makes Spaces a very good blogging
option for the existing users.
Do-it-yourself blogging platforms on the other hand, only
provide the blogging engine. Although you have to find your own
hosting service, DIY blogging platforms give you more control in
configuring your blog. Below are some of the best DIY Blogging
platforms.
Movable Type – Movable Type powers TypePad and it adds the
usual advantages of a server-side blogging platform:
flexibility, more advanced configuration, and total control
over your blog.
Wordpress – Wordpress is an increasingly popular open-source
blogging platform that is written in PHP and backed by a MySQL
database.
Radio Userland – Radio Userland, one of the earliest content
management systems used by the pioneering bloggers, is still a
good blogging platform choice. It has solid RSS features that
include a built-in aggregator. Configuration is done in a
desktop web server then it is upstreamed or sync to the web
server. This gives the blogger a cached copy of the whole blog.
Blog posting tools are third-party applications that are used
to compose and publish blog posts. These tools usually support
multiple blogging services and are ideal for those without a
persistent Internet connection.
W. Bloggar and BlogJet – these are two of the best blog-posting
tools in the market, and both are available for free. They
support almost all of the blogging platforms. They do what most
web-based posting apps does, including rich text editing, with
the added feature of being able to save your drafts offline.
Performancing for Firefox – a Mozilla Firefox extension that
allows you to immediately compose a blog post while using the
Firefox browser. It is Ideal for active bloggers who use
Firefox as their web browser. It automatically saves your
unpublished posts.
Blog Reading
RSS/Atom aggregators and other RSS tools belong to this
category.
My Yahoo – My Yahoo tried to bring the concept of RSS
subscription to the Internet masses. Though it lacks the more
advanced features, it serves well as a good aggregator.
Google Reader – Google’s web-based RSS aggregator that features
an AJAX-driven user interface. It has a good support for tags or
labels, and features a very nice reading interface. One of its
best features is its labels-sharing feature that allows you to
put aggregated content to your blog.
Bloglines – Bloglines is one of the most widely-used web-based
RSS Reader. It uses the traditional two-frame reading
interface, and subscriptions are grouped into folders. It has a
good blog-suggest feature, that uses linking analysis to suggest
which blogs might be of interest to you based on your existing
subscription set. You can also share your subscriptions using
Bloglines.
Blog Search
Tools used to search information and blogs, and to watch the
blogosphere for topics or issues being actively discussed.
Technorati - Technorati is one of the best blog search engine,
feature wise, and is indexing over 49.4 million web blogs. It
serves as a one-stop shop for those who want to know the
current happenings in the blogosphere, including features such
as blog ranking based on linking, personal aggregator (for
those who login) and many other nifty tools.
Sphere – one of the newcomers in blog search that came even
after many other engines have folded down already. It promised
to deliver more relevant blog search results, and it rightfully
did so, as attested by its early beta testers. It features a
“sphere it” feature that allows you automatically query
http://sphere.com to see topics that might be related to what
you’re currently reading.
Blogger’s Toolbox
A collection of other tools essential to the serious blogger
Mint / Measure Map /Google Analytics – these are three
different tools used to analyze your blog statistics. Mint
specializes in giving you a big-picture snapshot of your
traffic, somewhat lacking in the providing specific details,
something that Google Analytics is good at. Analytics can
provide detailed information on what’s happening on your blog,
which contents are popular, what keywords used in searches that
bring you readers, and many others. It features a calendar to
specify the time range of the analysis that you want to see.
Measure Map, like Analytics is a fresh acquisition of Google,
but still in early stages. It somewhat sits in the middle of
Mint and Google Map in terms of what information is provided.
Akismet – Akismet is a highly-acclaimed anti-comment spam
plugin for Wordpress blogs. It is free for personal use.
Feedburner – Feedburner is a tool that “burns” your RSS feeds
in order to add tracking and analysis features. This way you
can see statistics regarding your RSS subscribers.
The tools listed above are just a few of the many others that
can help users; from those who are just starting to blog to
those who want to become even better bloggers. It also includes
some tools for searching and aggregating blogs, because a good
blogger must learn to watch the blogosphere closely if it wants
to be able to make more effective blog contents.
Copyright © 2006, Danny Wirken
About The Author: www.theinternetone.net.
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