I wanted to do this post long time ago, for my first not-a-meme, but Dolmere thought nobody would care. But now that Myg & Alex talk about the ‘Sociable Second Life’ and Dolmere has given into ‘my whining’ about how he should at least attempt to correctly tag his posts - not that I’m doing such a great job at that - I think this would be handy to know for at least some of you. Some things that make blog-life more easy are listed below. Do keep in mind that I use a self-hosted WordPress installation, so I might have a tad more options. But most things are just as doable for Blogger’s and the likes.
Feed(s) : A web feed according to wikipedia.org: ‘A web feed is a data format used for serving users frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it.’ Using a feed reader, subscribe to other blog’s feeds so you don’t need to check their blogs daily, but get automated notification of new blog posts. As for your own feed, you can probably choose what you feed the others: only the titles of the posts, a part of the post or the complete post. The idea behind the first two options is to get more traffic to your site. I assume it works, but those ‘teaser feeds’ don’t stay in my feedreader very long.
FeedBurner : Lots of neat feed optimalisation and publishing options that work great together with WordPress, Blogger and Typepad. They get your feed, read it, change some things to it (you can choose from a lot of options) and then distribute that optimized feed to your subscribers. Currently active on mine: BrowserFriendly, SmartFeed, FeedFlare, FeedImageBurner, Headline Animator on my MySpace account, Email Subscriptions, PingShot, FeedCount, CreativeCommons, NoIndex, …
Co.mments : Let’s you add blog posts and keeps track of new comments in those by scanning them. You can choose to get no notification (just go to co.mments.com/track to check), get e-mail notificiation or use your feedreader to subscribe to the your personal feed at co.comments to get notified when new comments arrive. You can also add a ’subscribe to blogpost by co.comments’ button on your blogpost to safe people some click and copy paste work. Mine is there using FeedBurner’s FeedFlare’s, and I see Veyron has one too, so it must be possible for Bloggers to do that.
Technorati : This must be my all time favorite - until something betters comes along - as it comes to blogging. Tells you about incoming links, lets you tag your posts (technorati tags, not using that, though), lets you ‘claim’ your blog and lets you subscribe to other blogs (not using that either, as by now you should use a feedreader ;). If I search for news that is rather new and I think Google has not indexed it yet, I use Technorati search. So make sure your blog pings Technorati to let it know it’s updated! (FeedBurner can do that for you.)
Google Analytics : As far as I know, this is the best easy to use freeware visitor analytics tool. Get ‘detailed’ information about your visitors like geo location, browser used, top referrers, which content is look at most, … . And with a little bit of extra effort you can even track outgoing clicks. You can share your Analytics data with other persons by giving them access to certain or all reports.
MyBloglog.com : As I’m lazy, I use that one to see my top 10 outgoing links and to have cute pictures to go with people’s comments if they also have an account at MyBloglog. You can also show the last 5 visitors who had a MyBloglog account on your blog. So, beware for those wanting to keep RL and SL seperated: if you’re logged in to MyBloglog and are visiting other people’s blogs, they will see you’ve dropped by. Veyron wrote about using Portable Apps to avoid that.
Del.icio.us : Great for bookmarking webpages and SLurls and tagging them / ordering them into categories. A lot of useful things, besides easily finding them again, you can do with those bookmarks afterwards. I automatically post them to this blog to share and use the DeliHud to later visit bookmarked SLurls in-world. Del.icio.us syndicates a feed for every tag, so if you want to keep updated on new additions tagged ’secondlife’ for instace, that’s easy to do, just use your feedreader.
Linkbacks : Simple Vint-explanation: when you write about someone else’s blogpost and link to that post, a WP or TypePad blog - and probably some other blog platforms too - shall automatically notify the other blog that you’ve linked to it and your link will appear in the targetted blogpost’s comments or trackback listings. That way people reading the blogpost will see that you have written/thought/elaborated about that subject too. This blog accepts pings, but you can disable that for your whole blog or certain blogposts if you use Wordpress. The Blogger people can’t play along with this, though. Move to WP! Move to WP!
Out of curiosity and for the fun of it, what’s your socialmeter.com score?
And, did I forget any?